The US Senate is considering increasing the Department of Education appropriation to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $250. On the surface, $250 doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you look deeper, $250 still isn’t a lot of money. It’s a very small drop in a very large bucket, and it isn’t nearly enough to make a meaningful difference in paying for higher education.
The only strategy that will reduce the cost of higher education is … well… reducing the cost of higher education. And that’s on no one but the institutions themselves. I’m looking at a bill for the Fall semester at EMU that includes $770 in fees alone. Following the fees will be the tuition; the parking pass; the textbooks; and the random required software subscriptions that the professors don’t mention until sometime during the first month of class.
Throwing more money at higher education institutions in the form of student financial aid is not the way to reduce the cost of higher education. At this point, I would argue that providing less aid and lower appropriations is pretty much the only way to get The Machine’s attention.
Raising tuition isn’t working for the average student and/or family. Gen Z is highly debt-averse, so asking them to sign on to endless student loans is not a solution either. Asking the state to provide additional appropriations doesn’t gain a lot of traction in the state legislatures, and the best the Senate can do is possibly throw a couple dozen sawbucks to eligible students. (That’s only if they can get the House to play along, and right now, the House isn’t playing.)
Public higher education has stewardship responsibility
Nowhere in any of this is the notion that higher education institutions have a stone-cold obligation to reduce their expenses and keep them low. Before any funding authority (like the Department of Education or a state legislature) agrees to increase higher education funding, they should require institutions to provide a detailed demonstration of where and how the institutions have reduced their costs.
For years, WCC has led all community colleges in Michigan in per-square-foot energy costs. And when I say that it led, Boy Howdy, did it ever! WCC spent more than two-and-a-half times more on energy per square foot than the average per-square-foot expenditure of any and all other Michigan community colleges. That amounted to millions of dollars per year in excess (and unnecessary) spending.
WCC made no concerted effort to reduce its spending on energy or anything else. Reducing expenses was simply not a priority. All those costs were transferred to students in the form of tuition increases, or absorbed by increases in the annual property tax collections. Instead of spending the increase in property tax collections on improving instruction, developing new programs, fixing the campus infrastructure and facilities, or just reducing student attendance costs, the Administration used that money to hide wasteful spending and pay for construction loans on a quasi-private business venture that will never “pay for itself.”
There’s more than one way to improve the bottom line. Instead of raising tuition or running to the legislature for a hand-out, maybe it’s time for higher education institutions to consider better stewardship of the money they *do* get.
Photo Credit: Matteo Vaccari , via Flickr
