Revenue burden shifts to students

There has been discussion of student debt stemming from rising college tuition, and colleges and universities have been criticized for raising tuition.

Between 1988 and 2013, average tuition at four-year public colleges, which about 80 percent of students attend, has more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation. About 80 percent age of college students attend public institutions.

Against this backdrop, it is surprising to learn that, after adjusting for inflation, the amount of revenue collected per student per academic year essentially has not changed in the last 25 years.

As explained in a recent New York Times article by Susan Dynarski, economist at the University of Michigan, in 1988, revenue per full-time equivalent student at public colleges was $11,300. In 2013 this figure was $11,500 - less than a 2 percent increase.

How can this be? The two main sources of revenue for public colleges are state appropriations and tuition. In 1988 state legislatures contributed an average of $8,600 per student, and students contributed an additional $2,700 in tuition, for a total of $11,300. By 2013, the average state appropriation per student had dropped to $6,100, while students were paying an average of $5,400. These two figures add up to the $11,500 per student college revenue.

Costs are the same, but legislators have shifted more of those costs to students. This is part of the general shift away from communitarianism and in the direction of extreme individualism.

Until the 1970s, it was acknowledged that education was a social good. Most people endorsed the idea that society benefited from public education and that state governments should support it. The ideology changed with the shift to individualism; the idea the beneficiary of public education was just the student and therefore he or she should pay for it. The older communitarian idea that education benefits society as a whole has faded.

This was a political (ideological) shift and it has a major impact in other areas. Extreme individualism is the basis for much of right-wing political theory and practice. In my opinion, this has not been a healthy change.

' Frank Schmidt is an industrial psychologist and professor emeritus of the Department of Management in the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. Comments: frank-schmidt@uiowa.edu.