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BROOKLYN, N.Y. – Dr. Nicholas B. Dirks, president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences, held a conversation earlier this week with two higher education experts about the current crises facing postsecondary institutions: rising tuition costs and student debt, decreased state and federal funding, an increased criticism of a humanities-centered education, and the value proposition of higher education.
“Getting into college is harder and harder,” said Dirks. “Even though there are wonderful colleges and universities across the states and country, they can’t find enough students to enroll, and every year there are headlines about colleges folding or being acquired.”
Dirks was joined by Dr. Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which funds research and visual art preservation, and Dr. Josef Sorett, dean of Columbia College at Columbia University and vice president for undergraduate education.
“Public universities and private universities all have very different kinds of funding allocations,” said Dirks. “But they’re all getting more expensive. All kinds of compromises are being made around what people would like to see, which is lower costs of tuition.”
But lowering tuition isn’t a simple task. As former provost, Fleming spoke at length about how tuition is the grease that spins the wheels of higher education.
“Most people don’t realize that financial aid is a line item in a budget, and it, like everything else, is funded by the same source: tuition,” said Fleming. “One of the only mechanisms you have to increase financial aid is to increase tuition. It’s a completely diabolical, upward spiral. I am prepared to call elite higher education a ‘luxury good,’ and we’re in this world where we want it to be accessible.”
Fleming added that, despite New York University’s $4 billion endowment, NYU’s annual budget is $6 billion for its downtown campus.
“The university could function for about eight months with no revenue source. Princeton could exist for over 30 years if all it did was live off its endowment,” said Fleming. “There are hundreds of universities that operate on a different model and don’t have the kinds of privilege and problems [of elite] higher education institutions.”
Increasing the funds in a university budget requires development, which Fleming said can include partnerships or deals with “people you’d prefer not to be in bed with.” Institutions can, of course, grow their budgets by increasing tuition, she said, or by seeking more state or federal funding, but this puts universities “in a major bind,” as those funds are steadily decreasing.
When Dirks first arrived at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012, where he served as chancellor, the state’s allocations amounted to 12% of the university budget. Dirks said that percentage shrunk to 10% by the time he left in 2017, which resulted in increased tuition. As tuition continues to rise, so does the question of return on investment for students and their parents, which inevitably targets less lucrative fields of study like the humanities.
“The humanities do great things for the way people think, and their ability to empathize and imagine worlds they are not a part of,” said Fleming. “When parents pay $100,000 a year, they want to feel they get more out of [postsecondary education] than that their kid has an appreciation of a different, distant world — they want something with a decent paying job at the back end.”
Institutions have a responsibility to communicate to parents and students how the humanities can overlap and benefit other fields of study, Fleming said.
At Columbia University, undergraduate students are required to take a core curriculum of classes that include humanities. Sorett said the core curriculum’s relevancy has been criticized many times, as more student preferences are trending toward specialization credentials and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs and careers. But one of the intrinsic values of the required humanities courses at Columbia is that it connects students with alumni and, importantly, potential donors, said Sorett.
“It’s the opportunity to be engaged with one another that unites students within a community that has grown increasingly diverse over time,” said Sorett. “The notion of shared experience brings a student body together, but also connects them to preceding generations. That holds together the tension between tradition and innovation.”
Overall, the experts agreed that, far too often, university presidents and leaders take the hit for the flaws of a challenged system. Dirks said presidents need more protection from their boards, and added that they must do more to connect with the communities they serve.
“The university doesn’t exist alone,” he said. “It’s not a bubble.”