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From the Editor: New Financial Times
Lawrence Hanley
"Follow the money." That is the memorable advice offered by the shadowy Nixon administration insider to reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as they struggle to unravel the mysteries of Watergate in the film All the President's Men. Indeed, following the money in higher education offers one important way to grasp the current transformations under way in American universities and colleges.
Several key themes emerge in the handful of articles devoted to financing and funding in this issue of Academe. Most fundamentally, perhaps, state funding for public higher education is waning. This decline, as all of our authors agree, has been profound. Across the nation, Ronald Ehrenberg and Michael Rizzo note, state contributions to higher education have shrunk by more than one-third over the past quarter century. States have been simply unable or unwilling to shoulder the burden of higher education financing. Instead, they have been shifting costs to students. From the demand side of higher education financing, the past several decades have witnessed, for example, a massive shift in student aid from need-based to merit-based financial assistance, and from grants to loans.
These are not temporary fixes to the perennial problem of funding. As Mark Smith warns, the days of riding out "boom-and-bust" funding cycles are over. A new system of higher education financing is taking permanent hold from Washington, D.C., to the nation's statehouses.
This reorganization of higher education funding has affected all aspects of academic life—from student access to faculty research and the academic labor market. For example, as Donald Heller documents, when universities favor merit- over need-based student aid, "merit grants are awarded disproportionately to students who would have attended college even without public assistance." Educational haves are succeeding at the expense of educational have-nots. For Adolph Reed and Sharon Szymanski, this change represents a radical break with an earlier social compact that envisioned higher education as a democratic leveler in American society.
As the government offloads the costs of higher education, American universities and colleges are being privatized in subtle but far-reaching ways. The whole system is becoming much more competitive: colleges and universities use merit aid to grab the best students; institutions chase after private endowment monies; faculty engaged in research must compete for thinner institutional and grant resources. Increased competition strengthens and deepens inequalities—among institutions, faculty, and students. In this context, the proposal by Reed and Szymanski to establish universal free tuition expresses a radical ambition to neutralize some of the more corrosive effects of heightened competition within American higher education.
Decisions about funding and higher education are often rooted in exigency and anecdote. In his article, Ralph Kuncl argues that we need better knowledge about higher education. The federal government must, Kuncl says, take research into higher education much more seriously.
Finally, educator Clark Kerr was one of the great architects of a higher education system now in dire straits. His death has been much eulogized. Jeff Lustig, however, provides a more critical and, ultimately, more comprehensive assessment of Kerr's legacy for today's university and faculty. Lustig's essay offers suggestive contexts for understanding the tensions and changes charted by our other contributors.
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