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Faculty members and administrators know on some level that their students are being saddled with lifelong student debt, but little is being done collectively across academe to deal with that embarrassing fact.
This fall ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer aired a report stating that 6 million Americans owe $950 billion in student loans, a sum greater than the entire credit card debt in this country. The report included interviews with graduates forced to live with their parents because of student loan debt.
To understand why, research your discipline’s starting salary vs. the average student debt at your institution. Then imagine yourself as one of your graduates paying monthly bills that vary according to state/city averages for student loans, apartment rent, car payment, fuel/transportation, utilities, and food and health-related expenses. You can use search engines for average data for your region as well as calculators for adjusted gross salary and student loan repayment.
After viewing the ABC News report, I did this exercise and found that journalism students from Iowa State on average will pay between $2,500-$3,000 per month for living expenses (assuming their employers cover medical insurance). That requires an income after taxes and Social Security of $26,000-$36,000 per year. Unfortunately, the average salary for a journalist in Iowa is $26,466, with a starting salary of $21,796. This explains in part why many graduates lessen expenses by living with parents (or move out of state for higher-paying jobs) and why those parents are irate about high tuition rates.
This is a national crisis. Fully two-thirds of college seniors who graduated in 2010 had student loan debt, an increase of 5 percent from the previous year, according to the latest report just released by the Project on Student Debt.
That report shows that my state of Iowa ranks third in the nation with an average student debt of $29,598. Some 72 percent of Iowa graduates have debt, ranking us fourth in the nation in this category. Worse, my land-grant institution — Iowa State University — is listed as one of the top high-debt public universities, with an average debt of $30,062 for the 69 percent of students graduating with debt.
This article is not about my institution. It is about yours. It doesn't matter if you work in a high- or low-debt state or university. You can do something now to ease the burden on students and make education more affordable rather than rely increasingly on higher tuition or annual appeals for more allocations from regents, trustees and legislatures.
Here are recommendations sorted top-down by rank:
Regents and Trustees: Understand the inner workings of your universities (including the status-quo disclosures below) but above all keep watch for "mission creep," especially by administrators of regional or lower-reputation institutions. They may have been founded originally for specialized purposes — such as teaching, nursing, agriculture, engineering, liberal arts, etc. — but aspire to be more comprehensive, competing with existing colleges. Mission creep also concerns how many employees are doing something other than teaching. A New York Times piece analyzed higher-education advertisements and found postings for "vice president for student success, residential communications coordinator, credential specialist, dietetic internship director, director of active and collaborative engagement, and coordinator of learning immersion experiences." Do an inventory of such positions at your institutions and evaluate whether these positions are more important than faculty members in classrooms.
Presidents: Leaders of institutions earn ever higher salaries in part by concentrating on fund-raising while allowing provosts to run the institution based on the added administrative title of "provost and executive vice president." When raising funds, presidents should focus more on student scholarships than on new buildings or programs that often fall outside the traditional mission of their institutions. They also should revisit organizational structures to see if their current configuration is financially viable. In the past, vice presidents for finance exercised budgetary oversight with authority over provosts who were the titular heads of the professoriate and often argued on their behalf, a task now largely left to unions and faculty senates. At the least presidents should take a more active role in overseeing how provosts allocate funds to academic units to ensure that priorities help ease student debt.
Provosts: In many states and institutions, provosts control how the increase in higher tuition is allocated. For instance, if tuition is raised by 3 percent, that extra money (often in the millions) might be dedicated to scholarships, student services, and special initiatives. The era of special digital initiatives, in particular, has ended after a decade of proliferation. See my 2008 IHE article about that. Rather, provosts should focus new money on scholarships to ease debt and maintain faculty salaries in as much as new searches drain the institution of funds and expertise. Also, if appropriate, they should modify budget models to reward units for graduation rates of 4-4.5 years. They can use timely rates to generate higher enrollment, especially in difficult economic times.
Chief Information Officers: Require technological assessment, reining in expenditures by academic units and teaching centers that waste student fees on gimmicky digital and virtual initiatives. What departments need now more than ever are IT specialists dedicated to maintaining systems, creating programming and repairing equipment. Find out which academic units or centers are spending student technology fees for gaming and role-playing applications, questionable clickers, pricey statistical analysis applications and other non-priority software. End funding for any non-educational item, and demand assessments with empirical data to support existing educational items to prove that indeed they are enhancing learning and/or research. See my 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education article for assessment specifics.
Deans: Reorganize academic units. Too many service departments with few actual majors may generate high student credit hours. But that is no reason why those programs also should be offering degrees requiring phalanx of adjuncts and graduate assistants teaching service courses while continuing professors handle small-section courses for minuscule cohorts. By reducing the number of small-major degrees, your colleges can dedicate tuition funds to high-priority programs with strong enrollment. See my 2011 IHE article on specific actions you can take to cut college expenditures.
Faculty Senate Officers: Some faculty senates realize that curricular glut increases workload. Other senates are oblivious to that basic fact, approving new courses each year without removing others that are antiquated, too narrow, or otherwise duplicative. Every faculty senate should have a curriculum council that oversees duplication and requires departments to justify not only the pedagogical arguments for the new course but also whether other units with similar courses have signed off on the proposal. Curriculum councils should ask how the unit will underwrite new courses without increasing workload for colleagues. See my 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education article for details.
Department Chairs: Raise external money. Do not use supplemental teaching funds for professor travel or development, because that reduces the number of courses you can staff, delaying degree progress for your students. Instead, get a donor to finance travel and development. Do not spend departmental funds for guest speakers but invite alumni or create an endowment for that. Make scholarships a priority to reduce debt. See my 2008 IHE article for fund-raising recommendations.
Faculty: Do not request course releases for vita-building activities such as journal editing or academic association appointments. Get a grant and buy yourself out or do the extra work without expectation of teaching less. Do not create courses associated with your research that few majors want. Do not insist on teaching small-section classes. If you publish textbooks, dedicate royalties for one book to be deposited directly to a scholarship fund in your name. (One of my textbooks has raised thousands of dollars for scholarships.) If you blog in your spare time, as I do, and have hundreds of followers, do not accept advertisements. Instead, ask your viewers as I will in 2012 to donate funds to your institution for scholarships.
Staff: Support personnel (budget and purchasing officers, IT specialists and secretaries) know perhaps more than anyone how to eliminate waste of public and private funds. Unfortunately, these employees are usually not empowered to make complaints to their immediate supervisors or have their budget-saving ideas considered regularly by upper administration. Advocate to your administration, employee councils and/or unions for the creation of a hotline to report abuses and of a digital suggestion box that rewards budget-saving ideas, especially those that can lessen student debt.
Everyone: Stop justifying the status quo concerning student debt by identifying weaknesses in the statistics of the Project on Student Debt. This is not U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, but documentation of actual problems verified by news organizations and government loan default data. Stop thinking this is not your job, especially if you are faculty or staff. Leadership is not a top-down phenomenon. Be courageous and prepared for pushback or worse by the very nature of addressing this issue. There are federal and state whistleblower statutes associated with reprisals for disclosures of mismanagement and waste of public funds.
At the start of the new year, let’s resolve to do what we can to lower tuition and ease student debt. Collectively, we can address these issues by making a commitment without excuses, justifications or finger-pointing. Many institutions have made such a commitment to sustainability initiatives, which also indirectly reduce debt through cost-savings. However, the biggest sustainability concern in our time just might be access to education and the value thereof after graduation.
