Ivory Tower Page #2

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better professors,

better credentials, better students.

As Harvard passed that DNA

down to everybody else,

it created a race.

When the colonial colleges

started to become universities,

and when brand-new institutions

were founded as universities,

you begin to see a tension developing

between the mission

to educate young people,

and the competition for prestige,

to out-build your rivals.

American colleges are driven

by the pursuit of prestige.

And the way you get prestige

is that you get the highest ranking,

which expands your market,

and allows you to charge more.

So, in order to go up the ladder,

everybody has to keep adding more

programs and more facilities

at a faster rate than the competitors.

This really was the most

sort of grandiose vision

of what a university could be,

that it was a place of higher learning,

it was a place of research.

It covered every single discipline

under the sun,

and there really

was no end to its expansion.

And that became the model,

you had to integrate doing research.

You needed to provide the housing,

the classrooms,

all the food that they needed,

and the facilities that are required

in order to play in the game.

And that's a tough game to keep playing.

The system

of elite residential higher education

that Americans assembled

over the course of the last centuries,

is extraordinarily effective.

Nobody disputes that.

But it's also extraordinarily inefficient

in terms of the resources

that are expended

to produce these spectacular places.

Higher education in America

has been very successful for centuries.

But now things are changing,

because the scale

and the cost is enormous.

We have a product that is so expensive

that a lot of people can't pay for it

and they have to go into debt,

and it just isn't viable.

The rise

in student tuition is unsustainable.

We cannot continue

to charge significantly

more year after year after year

without running into

some kind of a brick wall.

College tuition has increased more

than any other good or service

in the entire US economy since 1978.

We're in an environment

where we're cutting spending

for higher education.

The states have

essentially walked away.

They have this great thing in colleges

and universities called tuition,

and it's been a great release valve.

As appropriations

have gone down in the states,

tuition at public colleges has gone up.

We've lost $100 million in funding,

and the board has replaced

one out of every four

of those dollars with tuition.

Far more of the cost of education

is now borne by the student.

Student loans are certainly a really

important part of this equation, too.

The availability

of student loans to pay for college

makes families

less sensitive to the price,

makes colleges less likely

to compete on the price.

All of the competition has been,

"We are better than we used to be,

and we're better than you."

Universities are

driven by perks wars.

One offers an amenity,

and they all have to offer the amenity.

They're adding the climbing wails,

and they're adding

the plasma screen TVs.

We're getting to the point

where we're gonna have

a swimming pool in every room.

They have pools with

tanning ledges, they have tanning beds.

The student tells us,

"I can take a five-hour bubble bath,

"and no one will complain."

RICHARD ARUM:

There's a massive construction boom

on US colleges and universities today.

It's an arms race,

if you will, in higher education.

it's a feeding frenzy

to have a better student center,

a bigger football stadium.

Sometimes it can be grotesque.

What we've really seen is,

I think,

colleges have kind of lost their way

about who they are and what they are,

and they've turned into

these large businesses

that have structures around them.

They're mini cities.

Families do desire a lot of the amenities

that colleges have provided.

The proverbial rock wall.

To sustain those, colleges have to

borrow more money,

they have to charge more tuition.

To pay $60,000 for a college tuition...

You give momentum to this notion

of the student as customer

when you charge them

so much money for their education.

We tend to focus a tot

on student debt,

but over this last decade,

institutions themselves,

college and universities,

doubled the amount of debt

that they took on.

And in fact we've seen

more people be hired

that never step foot in a classroom,

and that's where a lot of the rising

cost of college has come.

Administrations seem

often to be the tail wagging the dog.

Some of our leading presidents

can be quite shameless

in the size of their compensation.

We're now starting

to question what we're buying.

Are you really buying a better,

higher-quality education?

It used to be,

you'd get to a public university,

it wouldn't cost very much to go there.

The University of California

used to have no tuition.

The tuition costs here in Arizona

used to be near zero.

And we need to get back to the point

where it's not a huge economic barrier

that you have to get over to gain access

to a world-class university education.

As a public university, our responsibility

is to take a broad cross-section

of talent from around our society,

move it forward with world-class

learning experiences

at the lowest possible cost.

A lot of people would say

that's not possible.

We say it needs to be possible.

ASU was ranked

as one of the top

public research universities,

but it also has another ranking

that many people think...

Party school.

It's funny, so we laugh about

this party school thing.

I mean, we literally laugh about it.

Our model for learning is the robed don

at Cambridge or Oxford

or the kid on the East Coast in

Boston or New York City or something

who's huddled around their lamp light

in the dark winter night.

When you live in a place

with bright sunshine

and palm trees and beautiful weather,

people think you can't be too serious,

but the whole party school thing

is just bogus.

It's the party school!

Come on, what are we doing right now?

It's paradise, baby! What's not to love?

ASU is a big school,

and of course people party and drink

and get crazy and all that stuff. Um...

But you don't have to.

They say that ASU is, like,

"one of the top party schools"

according to Playboy or whatever.

The average ASU student

comes to get drunk out of their minds

and be in this sort of, like,

vapid, hedonistic area.

Woo!

In 2004 we started looking

at the party scene at large,

mid-tier state universities,

and how it didn't fit in

what the majority of students

actually need to get out of college.

The fact that

college-age kids are having some fun,

that's not really the problem.

The problem is institutions are creating

these party pathways through college

and take their money,

but don't ask anything

of them academically.

In fact, just give them beer and circuses.

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