low-grade resistance to their ambitions that sometimes flares into outright hostility. I recall a Black student from my first-year writing course a few years ago; she had been valedictorian of her midlands South Carolina high school and she wanted to be a doctor. But she struggled on her first biology exam, an entirely common occurrence for first-year college students who are adjusting to the demands of higher education. When she sought out extra help, however, the message she received was discouraging instead of empowering. Not everyone should major in science, she was told. What about social work?
Teaching a diverse array of students over the last twenty-plus years has revealed to me how the narrative of higher education I once believed to be true—and the one I fulfilled for myself—came at the expense of people like that student.
Our most popular narratives about college haven’t progressed much beyond 1978’s Animal House, a movie that was set in 1962. Neighbors, the 2014 film starring Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, is practically a remake of the John Landis film. Cinematic college is so fun that even middle-aged men (Old School, 2003) and women (Life of the Party, 2018) will do whatever it takes to recreate the experience of it. College—or so the Hollywood story goes—is a place to party, a time in life where you can be casually and colossally irresponsible but still come out ok on the other side.
Times have changed.
The average GPA for the over 50,000 students who applied to medical school in 2018 was 3.57. For those who ultimately enrolled, the average was 3.72.3 The median GPA for students who were accepted to a top ten law school was 3.865; for other ranked law schools it was 3.4.4 When I graduated from college in 1992, with my 3.1 GPA and no particular sense of direction, I told myself that I could always go to law school if things didn’t work out. And it wasn’t a lie. I’m not sure what I would be thinking now.
Students today aren’t having quite the same amount of fun at college either. For many of them, it is the exact opposite. According to a 2018 study by Harvard Medical School researchers,5 one in four students had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder the prior year; one-fifth of all students had considered suicide; one-fifth reported self-injury; and 9 percent reported having attempted suicide. For many students, rather than being a happy-go-lucky interregnum before joining the “real world,” as our popular and enduring fictional narratives might suggest, college is now a gauntlet to be survived.
Costs have also skyrocketed. The University of California system was tuition-free until 1968; in 1985, annual resident tuition and fees were $1,296.6 Adjusted for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $3,105 today. Resident tuition and fees at the University of California for the 2019–2020 academic year instead totaled $14,000.7 In 1985, it would have taken less than ten weeks of minimum wage work—not even a full summer break of labor—to fund a year’s tuition and fees.8 In 2020, even as California has the highest minimum wage of any state in the country, it would take thirty weeks.
In states with higher tuitions and lower minimum wages, things are considerably worse. At my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tuition and fees range from $16,000 to nearly $22,000 a year, and the state minimum wage is $10 an hour. It could take up to a year’s worth of minimum-wage work to fund one year of school. When I attended between 1988 and 1992, fifteen weeks of minimum-wage work—otherwise known as a “summer job”—would have covered the $2,200 I needed for annual tuition and fees.
According to a study by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, which they conducted during the spring 2020 disruption from the coronavirus pandemic, 44 percent of two-year college students and 38 percent of four-year college students experienced food insecurity. Eleven percent of two-year students and 15 percent of four-year students lacked a stable place to live.9 Significant numbers of students are struggling with basic necessities. How can we possibly expect them to fund tuition costs that have risen many times faster than inflation?
As the broad narrative of college being “worth it” has started to crumble, other related narratives have emerged: College is worth it if you choose the right major. College is worth it if you do the first two years at a community college. You need an education and a credential, but it doesn’t have to be through college.
Each of these narratives sets aside the notion that college is the pathway to success, that it’s the best time of your life, or that you can even work your way through to a degree. Rather, college is framed as an entry pass, a credential not for a prosperous and interesting life, but for an initial job after graduation. And if you don’t choose wisely, you can’t even expect to achieve that.
In every one of these new narratives, the benefits (or detriments) of college accrue entirely to the individual. It is a private good—even a consumer good—whose worth is literally calculated according to one’s earning potential.
Colleges are about much more than this, of course. Colleges are places. They are employers and cultural hubs, institutions that serve as a locus of economic and social activity. And by allowing the narrative about higher education to become so constrained around a single goal—to get that first job—we have lost sight of this much larger role colleges play.
As I outline in the following chapters, the challenge of reorienting our public colleges and universities around a more expansive vision—one that fulfills the original mission ascribed to our public universities in things like the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862—is not a problem of money and resources. The sums necessary to enact change may seem rather large initially, but relative to other, far less vital goods our taxpayer dollars go toward, they are a relative pittance. And when those costs are weighed against the massive societal benefits that may accrue from them, it will seem foolish that we haven’t acted already. Rather, it is a problem of imagination. We have allowed this narrative that frames a college degree as a private good to become so enshrined that we cannot imagine it any other way. And when you throw in a global pandemic, which has upended so many of the stories we once believed to be immutably true, it’s become clearer than ever that some changes, which previously seemed too radical, are just common sense.
This is, by intention, a short book. It does not include everything I would like to say. It also does not include a step-by-step plan for how we will fund public higher education with public money (though I do spend some time showing how that is very doable). The specifics and logistics of implementation will be complicated, even fraught, but before we get there, we need to better understand why tackling those details is something worth doing. This book likewise focuses only on public higher education because it is our public colleges and universities that once served as public goods but that have steadily degraded over time as they have become increasingly privatized.
If we want these institutions to survive, we don’t have much choice other than to turn the page from the failures of the past and look to the possibilities of the future. If we renew these schools, the institutions where the vast majority of Americans who go to college are educated, they can play a crucial and unique role in a renewed American compact. We can write a new narrative about public higher education in America, one that actually fulfills the aspirations we claim for our colleges and universities.
PART I
DIAGNOSIS
CHAPTER 1
An Existential Crisis
The coronavirus pandemic poses an existential threat to public higher education.
And yet, I am hopeful.
While the pandemic’s economic shock has exacerbated the conditions
