I am painfully aware that I have not published much here over the last several months.
That said, I want to a make a brief departure from the Environmental Humanities to think about the state of higher education and higher education funding more broadly. If you live in the Seattle area (or are married to someone who does), you likely saw this headline story from the Seattle Times. If you have had the dubious honor of discussing higher education with me over the past couple years, much of this will sound familiar to you, including:
- The infuriating truth that even though complaints about how “no one can write anymore” are increasingly widespread, they are accompanied by an erosion of required writing practice and instruction at the college level AND a wholesale refusal to hire private-sector professionals to teach and improve writing,
- The way humanities departments subsidize the more expensive majors on campus,
- The flawed belief that a college degree should be pre-professional training.
Two things the article didn’t really focus on, however, remain stuck in my head.
UW as a “STEM school”
I think the article drastically under-sells the extent to which UW has both internally and externally pushed itself as a “STEM place,” and I think the University’s reasons for doing so may differ drastically from those of parents and guidance counselors. I’d argue much of the STEM focus at UW can be explained by public rankings and grant money. The UW has a few historically-prestigious science, medical, and engineering programs, and keeping those top notch/in the news/well-regarded does a lot for the University’s reputation, and by extension, its wallet. This emphasis appears in the signs draped all over campus about the ranking of UW’s hospital or UW’s status as a top recipient of grant money, as well as in updates from its daily newsletter. Right or not, the UW seems to believe that STEM sells (sorry, couldn’t help it), either for students or for donors.
But what about the data suggesting these departments are expensive to run? The answer may lie in grant funding. This report is, admittedly, a bit dated, but note how much of the UW operating budget comes from research grants. As my colleagues in the sciences were quick to point out, every time a researcher gets a grant to keep doing their work, hire grad students, etc., the University takes a pretty hefty haircut off the top, perhaps 50 percent or more. Now, as the article notes, professors in these departments are also quite expensive, but I think there may be something interesting happening in between these two levels of financial data that explains why these departments are touted in spite of their expense.
This leads me to a crowd-sourced budget question: does the money UW takes from faculty grants make it onto departmental ledgers first, or does it never appear on the books of the departments? If the latter is true, the story of the Seattle Times article becomes much more complex, as research-heavy departments that are “losing money” for themselves are also subsidizing the University as a whole. If UW ever manages to create a differential tuition program, whereby students in “more expensive” majors pay more, the influence of these programs on the University would become even more prominent.
Obviously, I am making lots of conjectures based on incomplete data. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of the point. It’s hard to get a “complete picture” of something as multi-faceted and complex as a major public university, and even harder to figure out what the long-term effects of individual policies.
Is funding education with general taxes unjust?
The less-developed of my two thoughts is the more important (hence this post’s title) and the more troubling. Lurking beneath the Seattle Times article (and stated explicitly in the report I linked above) is the fact that government support for Washington’s higher education system has cratered over the past twenty years, meaning that an increasing burden for that education is met by tuition. That shift underlies a stereotypical argument between baby-boomers and millennials, wherein boomers talk about how they “worked to put themselves through college, and ate ramen, and didn’t have an iPhone, etc.” while the younger generation reminds boomers how much faster the cost of college has risen relative to both wages and inflation.
But consider this: about a third of Americans have a college degree. When the boomers were in college, more like 15-20% of Americans did. Yet when the boomers were in college, a much higher percentage of each college degree was funded by the state. In Washington (and in most states, I believe) public universities receive money from the General Fund, funded by the taxes paid by all a state’s residents.
In those stereotypical arguments, I use this fact to argue that conservative boomers who received public educations effectively used a “handout” from the government and then complained about handouts until they were slashed and eliminated. But given the number of Washingtonians who pay into the tax system versus the number who receive subsidized education, might it be more just if less public money went to the University? This would hold especially true in a state with a regressive tax code like Washington, where the state’s poorer residents are even more burdened with the cost of an education they are not as likely to have access to.
The common response to this argument is that robust public universities are good for the state and its economy as a whole, and while I agree with this to some extent, there is also a lurking “trickle-down economics” argument here. Certainly, the people for whom it is best are those receiving the cheaper education. Is the monetary benefit of a more-educated (and thus higher-earning) tax base worth the public cost? Does it remain worth it if, as many argue, a college degree has less effect on earning potential as more people obtain them?
One argument I have’t heard is that since there are more first-generation college students now than there used to be, less public support for education will disproportionately hurt those who have not yet been reaping the benefits of the system they and their families have been paying into.
I expect that another response to this would be “college should be free,” which actually means, “college should be paid for entirely by tax dollars.” I admit that I am skeptical of a plan like this, both because I don’t think everyone should go to college (it is neither necessary for a functioning society nor is it something that many Americans have interest in), and because I have not seen the latest math arguing whether such a thing is financially viable. Presumably, a program like this would also provide for “free” trade-schools etc. for those who cannot or do not want to attend college. That said, I’d love to see some data on this if people have it.
CAVEAT: These thoughts are fresh, and they cause me great ambivalence. I would love to hear about all the ways I am wrong, or that I am mis-analyzing the situation. As an educator, I think it’s important to think about these kinds of things. My first love may be forcing students to read Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Indra Sinha, but I can’t do that in a vaccum, so thinking about the context in which I do my work matters.
A Carbon Tax Side-Project
Finally, a request. I am still planning to do some deeper analysis of the Carbon Tax results in WA state, but I have been slower than anticipated in teaching myself how to use Tableau. I am also looking for the most granular dataset that deals with demographic data including household income. Does anyone know of/have access to demographic data by voter precinct? I have found census tract-level data, and that is okay, but it paints far broader brushes than I would like. Anyway, holler at me if you have thoughts on this front.