Fiercely Dependent

This is the first paragraph of a story appearing on the front page of the Burnington Free Press of 9 September 2008.  The writer is Erin Kelly; the copyright is theirs.

The University of Vermont and other public universities feel intense pressure to raise their tuition as they struggle to increase student aid with less government support, university President Daniel Fogel told congressional leaders Monday.

Can you imagine?  Dr. Fogel wants to raise tuition fees so more student aid might be available.  He wants the university to take more money from students so he can give it back to them.  What are tuition fees?  It is money taken from students.  What is student aid?  It is money given to students. Universities feel pressure to take more money from students so they can give more money to students?

Apart from the a priori goofiness inherent in that, there are two or three other points I’d like to make.  First, there exists bureaucratic inefficiency.  Someone has to collect the additional tuition fees, and someone has to dole it out as student aid.  Those someones make a salary; they have to be paid.  That means that for each additional tuition dollar collected, less than a dollar is available as student aid.  The student population suffers a net loss, the university acquires a net gain.

Then there’s the overwhelming hubris apparent here.  Pursuing Dr. Fogel’s argument just a step or two, he suggests that employees of the university know better how to allocate student money than do the student, the student’s parents, or anyone other than university employees.  The money represented by additional tuition fees can’t be left among the student population or their sponsors, but must be relinquished to the university so the university can see that it is used properly.  Such arrogance is not unique to the academic world; think about where else you have heard this reasoning.

Money is to be taken from (less deserving) students and given to other (more deserving) students, and the choice is made by university bureaucrats.  This may sound like Marx, but it ain’t Groucho.  If the university was concerned at all about the actual ability of students to afford their studies, ways would be found to reduce tuition (and other) fees, not raise them.

Does UVM President Fogel believe this nonsense himself?  I don’t know, but I hope not.  I’m not even sure he expects us to believe it.  I suspect he just hopes that we’re not paying enough attention to notice.  Lots of public wrong is done because no one notices, you know.

The university, it’s faculty, administration, and staff, have an interest in collecting additional tuition money:  it not only lines their pockets, but it inflates their egos, collectively and individually.  Congressional leaders can’t be seen to be against student aid or anti education in any way; here they are being harangued by those who stand to gain from it, to allocate more tax money for student aid under the threat of higher tuition costs.

This surely has a flavor of Orwellian doublespeak.  Both tuition and aid have a noble ring to them.  Nothing could sound more honorable than tuition, mere money paid to improve oneself, or student aid, money supplied to students to help them along their educational path.  But in the paragraph quoted, these apparently noble words add up to nonsense.

There is a tuition crisis.  It is that large numbers of people need to be tutored in analytical thought.  It ain’t hard, folks!

(Photo of UVM’s Williams Hall © Jared C. Benedict)

Tags: UVM

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.