The
National Conference of Black Political Scientists has become the
first academic professional organization to sign on to a Labor Party-led
campaign for free higher public education. In March, Adolph Reed
Jr., a prominent political scientist and a member of the LP's Interim
National Council, introduced the proposal at the organization's
annual meeting in Atlanta. It calls for free tuition and fees for
anyone meeting the admissions criteria at any public, post-secondary
educational institution.
"It went over very well," reports Willie Legette, who
teaches political science at South Carolina State University.
Legette and other academic activists, together with campaign co-chairs
Reed and Mark Dudzic of PACE, is helping to lay the groundwork
for a national campaign for free public tuition, built on a resolution
the Labor Party passed at its 1998 convention. The campaign is
under the auspices of the Labor Party's educational and cultural
arm, the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute.
The campaign's statement of academics in support of free higher
education is circulating among leading academics around the country.
The call is also going out to unions and organizations in resolution
form. In march, the New Jersey Industrial Union Council and the
California Nurses Association signed on. In February, Reed, who
teaches at the New School in New York City, traveled to South
Carolina to present the proposal to groups there - including the
South Carolina State AFL-CIO, the Progressive Network, and ILA
Local 1422, the home local of the "Charleston Five."
The resolution and campaign are now under consideration by all
three entities.
Legette says the high cost of tuition is a daily issue for him
and his students at South Carolina State, the only public, historically
black university in South Carolina. "Many of my students
work to support themselves through school," says Legette.
"They may work 25 or 30 hours a week. They have problems
devoting sufficient time to study. Sometimes they leave school
for a semester or two to generate funds." When a colleague
of Legette's at a private college told his students about the
Labor Party's campaign for free higher education, he says "the
students broke out into applause."
Stealthily
Rising Tuition
Most people believe that a college education is a key to a good
job for themselves and their children. But paying for it is getting
harder and harder. Tuition and fees increased nearly tenfold (in
inflation-adjusted dollars) between 1969 and 1999. Average tuition
and fees at public four-year institutions rose from $338 to $3,243
during that time. Private four-year college tuition now averages
over $14,000 a year.
Joan Greenbaum, a professor at the City University of New York's
LaGuardia College and at the CUNY Grad Center, says that tuition
at CUNY stabilized in the early 1990s following militant student
protests against rising costs. Now, though, CUNY, once famous
for providing free high-quality education for all New Yorkers,
is increasing costs in "stealth wars." For instance, she says,
tuition has just doubled for non-documented immigrants. Serving
immigrants, she notes, is part of CUNY's original mission. And
yet these hard-hit students face huge tuition increases just because,
as Greenbaum says, "somewhere at the INS, the paperwork's not
finished."
CUNY has also been steadily piling up new fees for students to
pay. "There's a technology use fee, a lab fee, a student affairs
fee. And now textbook manufacturers are ‘bundling' textbooks,
often putting more than you need in a bundle, but then you have
to buy the whole thing. It adds up to between $60 and $100 worth
of textbooks per course. If you've got five classes, it could
be $500."
Legette says that tuition at South Carolina State has been creeping
up. "They're under a lot of pressure because now funding is based
on an index created by the state legislature, and it's going to
progressively decrease over the years. Institutions are increasing
tuition throughout the state, because the legislature isn't keeping
up with the costs, and no one wants to talk about increasing taxes.
So the only option is to make students pay more."
Too
Much Work, Too Little Education
To cover the
rising costs, students go to work - and that causes another set
of problems. Greenbaum estimates that about 90 percent of her
students are working their way through school. "Of those,
a majority work up to 40 hours a week. And these are full-time
students - so it's insane. We tell them that it's very hard to
get an education and work full-time." (Greenbaum, health
and safety officer of the Professional Staff Congress, the union
representing over 20,000 faculty and staff at the City University
of New York, has been helping to organize the free public education
campaign.)
Greenbaum's students take the only jobs usually available to them
- low-paying ones with demanding bosses. "They work in places
like department stores, and in the busy season, they're asked
to work extra. And somehow the busy season always seems to correspond
with exam time. It's a horror story every year. Many of our students
work in warehouse jobs or at the airport. They might be scheduled
to work 20 hours a week, but they end up working longer. The employer
says, ‘You've got to work extra hours tonight,' and they
say, ‘I can't - I've got a test tomorrow' - and then the
employer says, ‘You want the job, you work extra hours.'
All this really affects their ability to plan their lives, take
classes, prepare for their courses. They don't have the time for
the kind of reflective thought that higher education demands."
Other students are forced to "stop out," says Greenbaum.
"They're not dropping out. They just have to stop for a semester
or two until they get the money together." All education
ceases until full tuition is paid. "Every semester, we never
know until the last minute how many students are actually going
to attend, because they can't be fully registered until they're
fully paid. Sometimes I get attendance lists where half the people
are missing because somebody hasn't come through with their piece
of paperwork."
Education
Gaps Widen
Although college
enrollment has grown dramatically, there is evidence that rising
tuition costs are preventing some people from attending at all:
The total number of high school graduates headed for college rose
only slightly if at all during the 1980s and 1990s, according
to a recent study by the Lumina Foundation (www.luminafoundation.org).
The growth in enrollment during that time is largely due to dramatic
increases in part-time student populations.
The cost of higher education only serves to widen the education
gap that exists in this country. Teens whose parents have degrees
start out thinking they'll go to college (86 percent say they
plan to get a bachelor's degree). But less than half of the kids
whose parents have a high school diploma or less expect to get
a college degree. Later, those expectations are often fulfilled:
65 percent of young people from more educated families enroll
in four-year institutions - compared to just 21 percent of young
people from families with less formal education. (Information
from Economic Policy Institute based on U.S. Department of Education
data; www.epinet.org).
The racial divide is also great. In 1998, 41 percent of white
non-Hispanic 18- to 24-year olds were enrolled in college, compared
to 30 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos, according
to the Digest of Education Statistics.
Debt-Ridden
Grads
Financial
aid could help close these gaps. But in the past decade or so,
outright grants have increasingly been supplanted by loans as
the primary way to help lower-income students finance their education.
The Lumina Foundation study found that in most states low-income
students simply can't afford to go to public four-year colleges
without borrowing significant amounts of money. This is wreaking
havoc on students' lives.
A new report by the State Public Interest Research Groups bolsters
the Lumina study: It found that two out of three students now
have to borrow money to attend college, and four out of ten face
unmanageable debts once they graduate. According to the report,
which is based on information from the Census Bureau and the Labor
Department, 42 percent of students had to borrow to pay for college
in 1992. Four short years later, in 1996, 59 percent had to take
out loans. The average debt of graduates rose from $9,188 in 1992
to almost $17,000 in 2000.
Legette says his students typically "wind up with a tremendous
amount of debt when they graduate. One student of mine who graduated
last year just found a job. And now she has to immediately pay
back her loan. But the job she has doesn't pay that much, and
she doesn't get any benefits. She gets Medicaid, actually."
None of this makes a good deal of economic sense. The GI Bill,
in which the federal government provided a generation of World
War II veterans with full tuition and support and stipends (up
to $12,000 in 1994 dollars), was one of the best investments the
country ever made. By 1952, the federal government had spent nearly
$39 billion, in 1994 dollars, to send the vets to school - about
1.3 percent of total federal expenditures during that period.
But a 1988 report on the GI Bill by a congressional subcommittee
found that every dollar spent produced a $6.90 return. Those educated
vets paid back their debt six times over by increasing national
output and through taxes.
But beyond that, the GI Bill lifted the sights and expanded the
minds of millions of Americans. By renewing and broadening that
commitment to higher education for all, we could, in the words
of Adolph Reed Jr., "expand the foundation of American democracy."
