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logo    Justifying Tuition Hikes


Oh Billy boy, what hast thou done? When I studied composition in the long gone Golden Age of America, I was emphatically taught not to write about what I didn't know. Apparently that is not taught to aspiring journalists anymore. (Next week, I'll reach the 77 anniversary of my birth, I spent more than 20 years teaching in American universities, and about 20 years working in the commercial world.)

So schools must now "justify their tuition hikes." Big deal. Prevaricating justifications are not rare; people in politics utter them all the time. In how many different ways has the President justified the war in Iraq? University presidents know how to lie, too.

"Texans footing the bills are the winners because the schools they pay to educate their children must display a stronger sense of mission." Displaying a sense of mission is easy; effectively carrying out the mission is something else. I believe that our troops in Iraq display a strong and unequivocal sense of their mission, but they have not been able to carry it to fruition and there are no winners. A university's strong sense of mission does not automatically result in the graduation of well-educated students. 

But your real howlers are displayed in your comments on student-professor ratios and the money to be generated for student aid.

First, student-professor rations are meaningless. I have taught in universities with ratios lower than 19 to 1. Yet those universities offered introductory courses in popular subjects in auditoriums which held hundreds of students whose examinations were graded by and who were tutored by graduate assistants. The number of professors at a university has nothing whatsoever to do with class sizes. A good third of the professors at major universities teach few if any classes, especially to undergraduates. This third of professors consists of department heads, assistant deans, deans, councilors, other administrative officers, and above all, professors hired to fill prestigious research chairs such as the two you mention. Do some arithmetic.

Suppose a university has 25,000 students and 500 professors. Its student-professor ratio is fifty to one. Now suppose it hires 50 prestigious professors to fill research positions. Now the ratio is forty-five to one, but not a single class has had its size lowered. Happens all the time. Universities know how to maximize the divisor and minimize the ratio. It's an easy number to calculate, to fudge, and it's sure to fool most people, even the journalists at U.S. News and World Report.

Then there's the tuition thing and the money to be raised for student aid. Say tuition is $5,000 and 25,000 students are enrolled. Now suppose enrollment is held constant and tuition is raised 3%. People pay $3,750,000 more to send their children to this university. The 20% take for student aid is $750,000. So the people pay $3,750,000 more so that a mere 145 students can attend free, 290 can attend at half-tuition, 580 can attend at quarter-tuition. And one hundred forty-five is approximately one-half of one percent of 25,000. Now that's what I would call a great deal for people! If a retailer advertised a sale at which prices would be reduced one-half of one percent, I'm certain the retailer would have to hire a small army to keep people from breaking down the walls to get in, aren't you?

I don't know what's happened to America's journalists, who seem to happily print the propaganda they are told by officials and have abandoned analysis and investigative journalism almost entirely. And if you keep up with polling, you must surely know that people have little faith in journalists any more. Aren't you ashamed to be a major player in such a profession? Not being ashamed of it can be likened to a Cosa Nostra hit-man's pride in being a member of the Mafia.

Shame Billy boy. Shame, shame, shame! Your readers deserve much, much better.

Once again, the Texas legislature has screwed the people of Texas, and you're patting those lawmakers on the back. Sure tuition deregulation works, just as electricity deregulation works, and tort law reform works, and insurance reform works. All of these work for someone, but not for the people of Texas.

Perhaps your paper ought to change its motto to, "Reader, screw you!" (Dallas Morning News 5/19/2008)