I remember a time when providing a good, reasonably priced education for all was an ideal that everyone believed in; it wasn’t particularly left or right wing. Thus, we got terrific public universities like the CUNY system here in New York, which, when I went was free – yes, free, except for a $65/semester fee to cover some processing costs.
Slowly but surely, however, conservative forces in government began slashing funding for public higher education, making it impossible for those colleges to function without having to impose fees and tuition.
Private universities also began to ratchet up tuition and fees, slowly.
Within the last ten years or so, the price of a college education has skyrocketed. It’s become just another price point in the marketplace, with really scary numbers. The College Board reports that a “moderate” college budget for an in-state public college for the 2014–2015 academic year averaged $23,410. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $46,272.
What this means, for most folks, is that we’re sending our young people into a form of indentured servitude, where they will be paying off their college loans for, quite literally, the rest of their lives. And it means that the bottom line is now more important than the quality of the education itself, since the price you pay for college seems to have no relationship to its cost. As a matter of fact, it seems that a lot of the money that’s paid for tuition goes to bloated college administrative functions and salaries, but not to professors or academic endeavors.
This was really brought home to us here at LCG because we work with a group of NYU professors who are trying to stop the university from spending billions on an unwanted and useless expansion in Greenwich Village (NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan) while NYU students pay one of the highest tuitions in the nation – $71,000 per academic year.
NYUFASP and other faculty recently issued a truly jaw dropping report on how NYU bilks millions from its students to finance real estate and pay for its top executives.
The blistering 14,000 word report on how NYU has been gouging its own students (and their families) to raise billions for gratuitous real estate transactions and lavish compensation packages for NYU’s own top executives.
Concerned about their students’ ever worsening financial plight and wild spending by NYU’s Board of Trustees, the professors spent this past academic year researching NYU’s financial practices. Interviewing scores of students, both undergraduate and graduate, and studying the fine print in NYU’s own documents, the professors “followed the money” to reveal: students going hungry regularly, becoming homeless, and signing up for “dating services” to pay tuition, fees and insurance; out of control real estate acquisition; millions of dollars in compensation and personal loans for top NYU execs, but tiny raises for faculty.
Here’s Part I of the full report. It’s in three parts, and the other parts can be found through that link as well. It’s not short, but well worth the read.
The report is also mentioned in an article in the June 9th edition of Salon. The article, “Massive endowments, massive tuition, massive debt: Our colleges are out of control and crushing students,” gives an even broader and more frightening view about the college crisis in America.
The NYU professors who penned the report are demanding more transparency and accountability from NYU’s administration. That needs to happen at colleges all across the country, and we need to demand it right now.