Education experts defend price of college degree

After days of news about spiraling tuition, increasing student loan debt, and worsening income inequality, higher-education experts met at a selective private college during the weekend to defend their costs—and argue that a degree is still worth the price.

“There is no crisis in college costs,” said Robert Archibald, professor of economics at the College of William and Mary and co-author of the book Why Does College Cost So Much?, who said price patterns for higher education were almost exactly the same as those of other service labor-intensive industries.

The symposium—held at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where tuition, room, board, and other expenses this year total $55,300, and co-sponsored by Brown ($56,150) and Northeastern ($51,362) universities—was attended by representatives of other public and private colleges and universities.

“We are the anti-catastrophists,” said Archibald’s coauthor and fellow William and Mary economics professor David Feldman. “We don’t tend to think that higher education is coming to a cliff and we are about to fall off of it.”

But he said public anger over costs could provoke accountability measures such as those imposed on primary and secondary schools, including standardized testing. To preempt this, he said, higher education needs to do a better job of providing data that show its value.

“Colleges and universities have to get beyond the old strategy of telling people how good they are,” Feldman said. “We need to shape the accountability movement rather than be shaped by it.”

Archibald said price patterns in higher education have been almost exactly the same as those of other service industries, using dental services as an example and plotting increases in the cost of each on nearly identical graphs.

Universities, he said, also rely on highly educated labor, which has become more expensive. “The success of colleges [in] producing graduates who can do well in the labor market is part of the reason their costs have gone up,” he said.

Higher costs are also driven by the need to add advanced technology, Archibald said, “because not to do that would mean a second-rate education.”

The usual reasons critics assume for increasing tuition—including administrative bloat and the cost of research—don’t pan out, he said. As proof, he said the rate of increase at research universities has been about the same as that at two-year colleges, which don’t do research, and that the number of secretaries and typists in higher education have declined at the same rate as in the general economy, while the number of computer, business, and finance specialists has increased at the same rate.

“I don’t think you’re talking about something that’s just happening at colleges and universities,” Archibald said.

“We’re not arguing that colleges are efficient,” he said. “We’re just saying they’re no more inefficient than they used to be. We don’t see any evidence that they’re getting worse.”

Moderator Jamie Merisotis, president of Lumina Foundation for Education and a Bates alumnus, said he remembered arriving at the college in 1982 when costs there passed the then unheard-of level of $10,000 a year.

But he said that, at a time when significantly more jobs require university degrees, and degree-holders make more money and suffer lower levels of unemployment, a university education is still worth it.

“Of course it is,” said Merisotis, whose foundation pushes for increased enrollment and graduation rates. “The question is, how will we afford these enormous benefits?”

Lumina Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.

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