Dive Brief:
- Mike Konczal argues in Rolling Stone that higher education dollars are increasingly going to only two places: for profit school investors or vanity projects at private schools and elite publics.
- He points to Stephen A. Schwarzman’s $150 million donation to Yale for a state-of-the-art campus center as an example of education waste doing nothing to improve the quality of education yet increasing the cost all around as other schools pay to compete.
- As elite institutions have held enrollment relatively flat, the growing national higher education student body is turning to for-profits. Konczal points out that they operate with 20% profit margins, on average, and are, a "cesspool."
Dive Insight:
Nonprofit schools make up the difference with grants and other revenue-raising strategies. That model has generally worked, except now, the cost of educating students includes paying for state-of-the-art everything — dorms, student centers, landscaping. That’s how schools compete for students who are most likely to pay full tuition. But that’s not how they better educate students.
While the vast majority of states are not cutting higher education spending this year, Konczal makes a fair argument about the dismantling of affordable higher education. And it’s reflected in proposed legislation for free community college and debt-free higher education more generally.