If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special
discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our
toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

This contents of this article, published in The Nation Online, will be no news to colleagues in the US, but it nevertheless provides some useful background information on the privatization-by-stealth of once 'public' universities.  Lawrence Berg

   The Increasingly Private Public School 
   by Nicholas von Hoffman


They call it a public institution and it sounds like one from its name,
but 92 percent of the money to run the University of Virginia comes
from private sources. At the University of Michigan the figure is 82
percent; at the University of Illinois a mere 75 percent. The
privatization of the nation's greatest, once-public institutions of
higher learning is well under way.

"America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities,
whose mission used to be to serve the public good," Katharine
Lyall, president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, told the New
York Times. "Public control is slipping away." Graham Spanier,
president of Pennsylvania State University, blames never-ending tuition
increases on "public higher education's slow slide toward
privatization." (Eighty-seven percent of his budget now comes from
private sources.)

Educators, getting less money per student every year from their state
legislatures, say they have no choice but to privatize. Christopher
Edley Jr., dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, wants to go
private because "in the sharply competitive world of top law schools,
leadership requires continuing investments that the State of California
has been unwilling to make.... Everyone is just praying for the
legislature to come to its senses, but 'faith-based fundraising' isn't
working."

Edley's school might as well be private already. Tuition at Boalt for
an in-state student is a staggering $24,341 a year and a
super-staggering $36,586 for out-of-staters.

America was once a country offering a free college education to its
youth. As recently as the mid-1960s, tuition for in-state students was
virtually free at places like the University of Illinois. But free
college education, which began under the Lincoln Administration in
1862, has been killed off. In its place, privatization has made public
schools copy the private schools' high-cost-you-borrow business plan.

Brand-name public universities can successfully go private. The
lesser-known public colleges and universities cannot because they don't
have the prestige. They are being left to shrivel from lack of
appropriations resulting from taxpayer resentment and the lobbying
machinations of rich and powerful private schools.

Private schools oppose direct appropriations and tuition-free education
because it would leave them out of the money. They would truly have to
be private, so they have lobbied for the present system of tuition
scholarships, grants and loans for tuition that cut them in on the
money stream. The strategy has worked for them but not for college
students from middle- and lower-income backgrounds.

Four years at a public college now costs about $50,000, and the bite is
two and a half times higher at a private institution. Costs are so
large that some financial advisers are telling their clients that they
have to choose between paying for their children's college or having
enough to retire on. Families don't make enough to save for both, and
advisers reason that if the children borrow to get through school they
have enough years in front of them to pay back their loans and also
have the time to save for their retirement. Their parents don't.

For countless middle-class couples the costs of bringing up a child are
an incentive to have either one or none. Since these ultra-responsible
types make the ultra-responsible parents, Republicans, Democrats,
ethicists and soothsayers, lay and clerical, prize their failure to
reproduce themselves is an irreplaceable loss to the nation.

Poorer young people fated to attend second-rate high schools are
bucking up against recent changes in scholarship policies that work
against their getting the minimum financial help they need. College
once again is becoming something that the children of unskilled parents
will attend only through special gifts and heroic application.

For those middle-class youths who do get themselves born, college costs
and debt can rob them of some of the best years of their lives. It is
estimated that a quarter of college students are financing their
educations in part through credit cards.

Last year students and their families borrowed almost $14 billion.
Graduating with a $15,000 to $20,000 debt limits a young person's
possibilities. No time for experimenting and/or marching on Washington
or helping to make a better world. For debt-burdened college graduates,
it's get a job as fast as you can, keep your mouth shut and hustle as
hard as you can.

For masters of the universe, this system not only yields interest on
their borrowing but is an effective method of social control. If
today's youth aren't as they were in Martin Luther King's time, you
know why.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051107/vonhoffman



Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/