Free Tuition Is A Bad Idea, Insists President Of Expensive Private College

I’m not sure why the president of Vassar College — Catherine “Cappy” Bond Hill, an individual easily dismissed as an ambassador of the status quo — thought it would be useful for her to share her opinion on the increasingly intractable twin problems of rising tuition and crippling student debt burdens. Does she have anything insightful to say? Some new solution to offer? A surprising, thought-provoking take on the situation?

No. No, she does not. But she doesn’t let that stop her.

free tuition means fewer resources to teach students. Unintended consequences could include reductions in need-based financial aid, which would harm the low- and middle-income students free tuition is meant to help. …

Between 60 and 75 percent of students at four-year public and private nonprofit institutions receive grant aid that meets need and reduces their net price. Many private, nonprofit colleges and universities with large endowments allocate significant amounts to need-based aid. At Vassar, where I am the president, families with incomes below $30,000 are asked to pay $4,456 a year (on average) for tuition, fees, room and board (which costs $63,280). For families earning $48,001 to $75,000, the average net price is $11,817.

$4,500 a year for families making “below $30,000” comes out to 15–20% of their income. Just for one kid’s college! These are already the people who have the least and who struggle the most. There’s no way anyone making $28,000 a year can set aside 15–20% of that every year for four years so their kid can spend four years smoking cigarettes and reading Foucault.

Any 17-year-old whose family gets by on $28K or less and who has, regardless, managed to prepare themselves academically for one of the most elite educational experiences in the world should 100% get to go to college for free. Especially when that college has an endowment of $974,200,000.

Instead, what happens is that the most ill-equipped students have to take out loans that will plague them for years, if not decades, while college administrators get paid six figure salaries. A president like Cappy, in a good year, could make almost a million dollars.

When it comes to Vassar College, all of the administrators listed in the 2012–13 IRS 990 earned more than $100,000 in base pay. President Hill has by far the highest base pay, exceeding $400,000. Vassar’s administrators also receive additional earnings through deferred compensation, benefits and other gains that, in President Hill’s case, tops out over $800,000 for that particular year. These earnings do fluctuate depending on each administrator’s specific financial relationship with the College.

Some college presidents, like David Roselle at the (public!) University of Delaware, were making nearly a million dollars in base pay ten years ago, according to CNN. Jeffrey Lehman of Cornell University and E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt were both making over a million annually then.

But by all means, let’s keep tuition high and going higher. As for those students forced to go into debt, well, Cappy doesn’t really see the problem. Though she acknowledges that “some students who attended public colleges and private nonprofits are also having trouble paying back their loans,” for the most part, she’s cool with how things are.

At first it seems like the increased borrowing per student and the number of student loan defaults prove that these programs are overextended and misguided. But for those students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2013–14 from public and private nonprofit four-year institutions, the average amount of debt was $26,900. This is more than justified by the increased average earnings resulting from a bachelor’s degree.

I’m thrilled she thinks it’s justified, and that she took to the pages of the New York Times to tell us so. But maybe, going forward, she should consider that the lambs would do better not to take advice from the wolves.

Wake up America! Private college elites built this crappy college finance system & don’t want u 2 have a better one. https://t.co/gTwuOYTPJp

— Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) November 30, 2015

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