Blog: Confessions of a Community College DeanThe New York Times reports that instructional spending at research universities has risen much more quickly over the last decade than at community colleges.
In 2009, community colleges ...
Blog: Confessions of a Community College DeanThe New York Times reports that instructional spending at research universities has risen much more quickly over the last decade than at community colleges.
In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent.
Community colleges often receive substantially less money per student than elementary or high schools, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin professor who served on the 22-member committee that wrote the report.
By an absolutely astonishing coincidence, the more expensive settings are just about as white as they ever were, and more affluent than they’ve been. Meanwhile, community colleges are far more diverse, and their students more economically downscale, than ever.
Between 1994 and 2006, the white share of the community college population plummeted from 73 percent to 58 percent, while black and Hispanic representation grew from 21 percent to 33 percent, in part reflecting growing diversity in the population as a whole. By contrast, the change was much less dramatic at the most selective four-year colleges during this time period, when the white share dipped just three percentage points (from 78 percent to 75 percent) and the black and Hispanic shares barely moved (from 11 percent to 12 percent).
Funny how that happens.
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A few months ago, Tressie McMillan Cottom did a post about the sorting function of different tiers of American higher education, in which she quoted some students at a fairly elite place saying that for-profits were “not for people like them.” (I did a response piece here.)
It reminded me of a piece I read in the late, lamented Ann Arbor News in the summer of 1990. The Detroit Pistons were in their glory at that point, but tickets to games were expensive and hard to come by. So the Pistons broadcast their away games to their home arena and sold tickets to those, well, screenings, for three bucks. The idea was to give fans from Detroit (as opposed to its suburbs) a chance to have the experience of rooting for the team in a crowd.
The article quoted a vendor at the arena who wasn’t happy about the broadcast attracting the wrong element. The line has stayed with me since then. “When you sell three dollar tickets,” he sniffed, “you get three dollar people.”
And the three dollar people could see their team, but only when the team wasn’t there.
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Technology has changed since 1990, with paradoxical effects on cost. Now the very wealthiest institutions are tripping over each other to give away their teaching for free. As with the 1990 Pistons, the great unwashed finally get to see the stars, except that the stars aren’t actually there. If you want presence, you go to your local community college.
America has a long history of valuing institutions or programs based on the people they serve. That’s how we could “end welfare as we knew it” in 1996, and yet have transfer payments occupy an ever-larger share of the federal budget; in the American mind, transfers to “deserving” people don’t count as welfare. Section 8 rent subsidies are politically suspect, but the mortgage interest tax deduction is sacred. Food stamps are questionable, but farm subsidies are beyond dispute. Flagship research universities -- and their football teams and alumni associations -- get respect in its most concrete form. Community colleges are told to keep doing ever more with ever less.
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This isn’t a new story, of course. But it isn’t inevitable, either. We’ve had periods in American history in which the economic classes got clo
