TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102990/1029120.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 92

Hard Times on the Old Quad


Battered by a sagging economy and a birth dearth, colleges are
struggling hard to live within their means

By SUSAN TIFFT


    These are trying days on American campuses. Faced with the
double dilemma of a shrinking student population and rising
costs, colleges and universities across the country are
simultaneously rattling tin cups and wielding budget axes. One
result: sharp cutbacks in programs and services. "The 1990s,"
says Cornell University President Frank H.T. Rhodes, "are going
to be very tough."

    He should know. Last week Cornell announced plans to seek
$1.25  billion in private donations by 1995 -- the largest
fund-raising target in the history of American higher
education. Cornell's drive is but the latest in a series of
efforts to acquire huge sums for colleges and universities.
Last month Columbia set a new five-year goal of $1.15 billion.
Yale will embark on a $1 billion-plus campaign sometime in the
next 18 months, and Harvard is said to be considering a target
as high as $2 billion.

    As they dun alumni and other donors for funds, schools are
also pinching pennies, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Bryn Mawr
is phasing out five graduate departments, including Spanish and
anthropology. Lehigh has eliminated its classics department,
while Northwestern has cut its nursing and dental hygiene
programs. Columbia, which earlier abandoned its linguistics and
geography departments, announced in June that it would follow
the University of Chicago's lead and shut down its library
science school. Dartmouth has cut 55 staffers and eliminated
seven junior varsity sports, including men's tennis, lacrosse,
soccer and golf.

    Some colleges are hiring strategic planners; others are
contracting out janitorial services. Stanford recently decided
to form a new management company, complete with a nonacademic
CEO, to handle its finances and investments. Harvard, Duke and
Princeton already have similar organizations. Last spring
Franklin & Marshall College sold its bookstore to a private
company, netting the school $900,000 and saving it the burden
of carrying unsold inventory. "This is not a onetime
adjustment," says Lehigh President Peter Likins. "It's going to
be a way of life."

    Post-secondary institutions are feeling both an economic and
a demographic squeeze. As the stock and bond markets continue
to wilt, schools can no longer expect robust returns on their
endowments, so they are struggling to refurbish their capital.
Meantime, the days of bulging classrooms are long gone. The
1965-75 baby bust led to a 10% dip in the number of college-age
students in the 1980s; the head count will plummet a further
25% by the mid-1990s. The ability of institutions to simply
crank up tuition and fees has also hit a ceiling. Last spring
Princeton scaled back a projected 6.9% hike in tuition, room
and board to 6.7%, leaving a still daunting annual bill per
student of $20,498. "We used to view tuition as a tithe paid by
grateful parishioners," says Northwestern President Arnold
Weber. "Now there clearly is price resistance."

    Traditionally, colleges have buffered the sticker shock of
tuition with assistance programs that were heavily subsidized
by Washington. But over the past decade the Federal
Government's commitment to that aid has failed to keep pace
with inflation, and universities have been forced to take up
the slack. "It's ironic," says Eamon Kelly, president of
Tulane. "The Reagan Administration criticized us for high
tuitions, yet a substantial part of that was caused by their
cutbacks in aid, which we then had to replace." At Cornell, the
sum earmarked for student grants and loans -- $28.2 million --
is almost four times what it was in 1980.

    Five-figure price tags and deep budget cuts at some private
colleges may drive students to the less expensive public
sector, where the annual bill for an undergraduate education
averages just $6,991 this year. But that bargain is unlikely
to last. State legislatures across the country are slashing
their subsidies to higher education, forcing the same belt
tightening and search for donations that afflict the private
sector. The City University of New York has canceled 2,000
classes this year and hired 670 fewer adjunct teachers. "We're
all facing a revenue diet," says Gilbert Whitaker, provost at
the University of Michigan, where the state appropriation has
fallen from 59% of total revenue to 44% over the past decade.

    If there is good news in all the slashing, it may be that
colleges are starting to take a more focused look at their
priorities and discard the notion that they must offer a full
panoply of academic disciplines. "Universities cannot be all
things to all people," says William Danforth, chancellor of
Washington University, which in the past year dumped both its
sociology department and its dentistry school. The likelihood
is that most colleges will weather the storms of
reorganization; some may even emerge stronger than before.

    But if the rough going lasts indefinitely, as it appears it
might, high tuitions and stagnant sources of aid could turn
America's pluralistic system of higher education -- the pride
of the postwar era -- back into a preserve of the well-heeled.
"We have some real social tinder  here," warns Columbia
President Michael Sovern. Already Smith College has announced
that it will end its five-year practice of admitting students
without regard to financial need, starting with next fall's
freshman class. That could be an unpleasant harbinger of further
strictures to come.