Higher Education Should Be Free -- And We Need a Movement to Make It So

By Liza Featherstone, The Nation. Posted June 16, 2009.

While there could, in most places, be much closer cooperation between faculty unions and student groups, they do seem to embrace each other's concerns. "There's a myth that students only care about cost and faculty only care about pay, job security," says Ferd Wulkan of the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), a coalition of academic unions (who fund the network) and student groups. "But it's not true. Faculty care about tuition because they care about their students." Students, he says, know that faculty issues affect their education. City University of New York's faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress, has been one of the most vocal champions of affordable tuition. In Tennessee, students have been protesting budget-cutting practices and faculty furloughs (forced time off for professors). At UDC, says Selmore, students are worried about a similar proposal. "Most of my biology professors are [grad students] at the doctorate level," she says. "Are they the ones who will be downsized?"

Many activists direct their protests toward college administrations, as students often do instinctively: during the walkout at City College, protesters marched to the administration building to demand a meeting with the president. But in New Jersey, students from all over the state rallied at the Capitol against cuts to higher education, in alliance with administrators. This makes sense: their interests are the same.

Private colleges and universities, too, have seen tuition rise as endowments shrink. In May students at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, held a hunger strike to protest large tuition hikes and faculty layoffs; Vassar students used the same dramatic tactic to protest the elimination of a summer jobs program for students in need. But most private campuses have been quiet. At Sarah Lawrence College in bucolic Bronxville, just outside New York City, many students' parents work in the finance industry and have lost jobs; although the tuition has increased only slightly, some formerly wealthy students are struggling to stay in school. But there have been no protests. In part, the recession inclines people to resignation and a sense that collective sacrifice is inevitable. "I think most of us feel bad for Sarah Lawrence," says student Maggie Murphy. "We want it to survive." Students at Sarah Lawrence -- which, at $53,000 a year, is the most expensive school in the country -- say their costs are so high already that the increases seem small by comparison, and that many who can't afford it stay away altogether, an analysis echoed by students at other private colleges.

Even at public schools, protesters are frustrated that more students are not joining the cause. Part of the problem may be that organizing tends to focus on the tuition hikes -- which don't immediately affect everyone -- rather than broader issues of access. Activists at City College and UDC say many of their friends are indifferent to the tuition increase because they receive so much financial aid that they are insulated from those costs. "It is kind of disappointing that there are not more minority students here," says Fayola Powell, a quiet, bookish-looking City College junior (who is black), as she gestures toward the lounge of the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center, where an organizing meeting is taking place. "If people get financial aid, they come here free. So they are just not worried about it." In reality, however, at many schools the prevalence of financial aid artificially inflates tuition, undermining the aid sources in the long run. And in the short run, the financial aid programs also create the illusion that middle-class and low-income students have divergent interests.

Another obstacle activists face is America's widespread shame over money. Although a college degree is increasingly needed in order to land a job better than one at, say, Home Depot, people regard the high tuition and consequent debt as an individual problem: "We knew what we were getting into, coming here," says one Sarah Lawrence student. Even at City College, a young woman points out at the organizing meeting that students are defensive about their economic status: "People feel the need to say, 'This isn't me; it doesn't affect me.'"

Though tuition increases usually result from shortfalls in state budgets, the problem of college affordability demands national solutions. After all, it's easy to see why, to administrators, a tuition hike often seems like the only reasonable way to fill a hole in the budget; only the federal government can make the large-scale investment of resources needed to avert such measures. The United States Students Association lobbied throughout the spring for more financial aid, and it was successful: on April 29 Congress passed a budget that increased aid, along with modest reforms of the student loan system, ending some of the costly subsidies to private student loan companies. Student advocates will be lobbying throughout the summer for President Obama's proposal to increase Pell Grants substantially so students won't graduate with so much burdensome debt.

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Liza Featherstone is a New York City-based journalist. She is the author, most recently, of "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights At Wal-Mart" (Basic).

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