Retired Professor: College Expense May Not Benefit Every Graduate

Professor Newell Wright is a retired archaeologist. He received his doctorate from Tulane University in 1976; did almost all of his teaching at institutions of higher learning in the Deep South; followed his 20-year teaching career with a stint as an archaeologist for the U.S. Air Force, and never was part of any higher education institution in New Jersey. 
Normally that would make him an unlikely subject for an article in the Herald.
Wright has a family connection to the Herald, but the newspaper is not in the habit of doing family profiles that have no bearing on issues in Cape May County. This interview was done because of its timeliness to issues of importance in public policy.
Wright is someone who is out of the game. His specialty involved him in matters such as the excavation of a pre-Revolutionary War ship in what were then colonial waters.
Yet, his years in academia make his comments about the status of the county’s higher education system worth some consideration, especially when many in politics are calling for free post-secondary education.
Who is Newell Wright?
Receiving both his undergraduate and graduate education in Louisiana, Wright eventually gained his doctorate from Tulane in 1976. He went on to faculty assignments at a public institution in South Carolina and also taught briefly at the University of Alabama, and in summer stints at the University of Madrid, Spain.
The largest segment of his university career was spent at an institution on the border of Georgia and the Florida panhandle, Valdosta State University (VSU).
VSU is a moderately-sized state institution, largely undergraduate but with graduate programs through to the awarding of doctorates. Unlike the elite institutions whose names may come readily to mind or the large flagship state universities that are the size of small cities, VSU is the type of institution that assumes the burden of education for a large segment of the country’s enrolled students, the mid-level, comprehensive, state institution.
Wright’s desire to share his concerns stems from his worry that the nation is allowing what he termed “the public purse” to pay for misguided activities in higher education.
He separated the public institutions from the privates when he expressed his concern for the use of taxpayer money, but one almost does not need that distinction. The growth of the federal aid system in higher education means that large amounts of taxpayer money are involved in any institution, public or private.
Wright’s chief worry is that the nation is pushing young people into college who do not belong there. Public funds are used, he claims, to have inherently expensive institutions “teach basic reading and writing” for a few years until, for many, the experiment fails. 
Creating the sense that college is the only road to the middle-class life, much rhetoric about the post-secondary degree has helped push many students who do not belong in college into the post-secondary system. 
Wright’s concern is with the 40 percent of students at four-year institutions who do not gain a degree even in five years after they first enroll.
It is also with the 50 percent of community college students who end up in remedial education programs because they use an open-admission system to enroll in programs for which they were not adequately prepared in high school.
He doesn’t challenge their right to try, but he pointed to the detrimental effects of having so many students who need such basic instruction. Providing that level of instruction in the most expensive educational environment, a college or university, is also Wright’s concern.
The problem Wright points to is that college has become a very expensive place with expenditures and tuition rising faster than inflation over a long period.
That means the experiment with increasing access for many students ill-prepared for college work comes at a high public cost.
Enrollments in higher education have skyrocketed as the rhetoric has grown about the modern economy’s need for a college-educated workforce.
In 1980, 12 million students were enrolled in degree-granting institutions, by 2009 20.5 million. Participation rates for 20 to 21-year olds in that same period grew from less than a third to over a half.
The emergence of the federal government as the third-party payer facilitating much of this growth through grants and loans enabled the dramatic growth rates.
One catch is that a good portion of the federal government support for higher education is the student loan system which does not eliminate those costs.
It pushes students into the future with student debt burdening many for decades after a successful or unsuccessful college experience. Current levels of outstanding debt sit at more than $1.2 trillion, a greater balance than either credit card or auto loan debt outstanding.
Wright’s worry is that the system pours ever more public funds into higher education with no mechanism to control or lower the actual costs.
He claims that administrative expense in higher education has bloated precisely because it was allowed to do so. He talks of whole cadres of administrators built up around various college functions. Is his anecdotal sense of the trend true?
Federal statistics for all Title IV approved degree programs suggest there is some truth here. The most recent years for which we have data show a five-year period in which instruction expense, those expenditures directly related to teaching, grew more slowly than general administrative costs or even academic-related administrative costs. 
Wright also feels that the faculty has abrogated roles it long played in the out-of-the-classroom support of the student. “Now,” he says, “there are whole teams of administrators doing the mentoring and advising that faculty used to do.” 
The faculty, he adds, are increasingly free “to do research at the public’s expense.” One can get into the argument about the importance of the continuing contribution to knowledge that arises from faculty research, but it is not the core of his argument.
When Wright is talking about the misguided use of student loans, or changing faculty roles, or growing administrative costs, he is essentially making an argument that someone needs to be looking out for the public purse.
Wright is a believer in higher education and in public support for it. His concern is that before the nation continues to spread the costs of higher education to taxpayers in general, it needs to have mechanisms to monitor the use of public monies.
Expenditures per enrollment unit costs, in higher education nationally have gone up even when adjusted for inflation, perhaps for good reason and perhaps not. We don’t really know.
Robert Reich, a past secretary of Labor and an economist of note, suggests that many in college would benefit from a “world class system of vocational-technical education.” He claims that federal data shows that 46 percent of those recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Even the much-discussed economic benefit of a college degree is worthy of some further consideration. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about 25 percent of earners with a college degree do not make more than the average high school graduate.  
We consider our system of higher education the best in the world, but that view is largely derived from our most prestigious elite institutions.
Perhaps we should consider Wright’s perspective as a caution, a caution to seriously consider how we account for and in some manner manage the spiraling costs associated with post-secondary education before we adopt policies that spread more of those costs to that public purse Wright is concerned about.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.