by Mark Franke
Lately, Cornell University has been getting a lot of press of the kind it really doesn’t want. What may have been missed in all these headlines is a news article several weeks ago about Cornell’s releasing a faculty report about the very real challenges facing that university and higher education as a whole.
The report, entitled “The Future of the American University,” is a result of self-reflection about what Cornell has become and what it now must become if it is to remain financially and intellectually viable in the future. The threats are clear, at least to this faculty committee.
AI is a biggie, of course. If someone is not worried about the potential for AI to fundamentally change humanity in more ways than we can conceive, they should receive a lifetime membership in the Utopian club. I know; there are those who see tremendous opportunity for good coming from AI but I am much too risk averse to sign on to that belief.
Then there is a funding crisis blamed in part on Donald Trump, de rigueur for elitist institutions like Ivy League universities. To their credit, however, the report writers don’t blame everything on Trump. There is an introspective admission that they, Cornell and the rest of higher education, have lost much of the public’ s trust. For a university like Cornell that depends on large donors to keep the endowment sufficiently funded, this is serious indeed.
Then there is the elephant in the room, an elephant that higher ed has ignored for far too long. The cost of college is just not achievable for most Americans. Cornell’s annual cost is nearly $100,000, which is more than the median family income for Americans. Cornell is not alone at that tuition level.
Cornell is not the only elite institution to finally do this long overdue navel gazing. Yale issued a report of its own, even more self-condemnatory than Cornell’s. Yale admitted to what it called “perceived” ideological bias within the faculty. Describing this bias as perceived is a rhetorical fig leaf since the report states that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 36:1 in Yale’s top schools.
At least these two Ivy League universities may finally be ready to address this bias, perceived or real. Yale intends to scrutinize the “diversity of perspectives” in its curricular offerings, the first time I have heard the term diversity used in this sense by a college hierarchy.
Still, the major problem facing all higher education is the steady rise in tuition and other costs. The cost of college tuition has advanced at rates well above general inflation. This has been a problem for decades and I am pleasantly surprised that higher ed is finally willing to address it realistically. By realistically I mean doing something other than blaming the federal government for not providing more student financial aid.
In the interest of full disclosure, I spent my professional career in higher education finance and enrollment. My job was to bring in enough students, read: tuition revenue, to pay for the budget increases my institution wanted. Fortunately my university was a lower cost one and benefited from tuition increases at the more expensive campuses. This was a two-edged sword, however. There were less expensive options than my institution and they were profiting from our tuition increases.
I would like to say that I predicted all this 15-20 years ago when I was still gainfully employed, but I didn’t. I did warn my boss, the chancellor, that the higher ed financial model was unworkable in the long run and that it was only a matter of time before it would hit us hard. That time would not come until after his and my tenure but that doesn’t give me any comfort.
A quick internet search found that in excess of 100 colleges have either closed or merged since 2020. Most of these were small, under-endowed private schools, the most vulnerable to downward enrollment pressures. The so-called enrollment cliff, a drastic reduction in U.S. high school graduates, is real and can be devastating to schools whose enrollment model is based exclusively on this demographic.
Higher ed has too many points of failure to survive all these challenges without fundamental changes to its business model. It can’t continue to rely on increasing federal student aid and almost unlimited willingness on behalf of students to keep borrowing to fund increasingly expensive operations. Now that federal research funding has become more volatile than usual and schools have lost a large percentage of the international student population, they just don’t have a silver bullet to hand.
Except cost control, something higher ed has never been good at. That skill is likely to be a newly learned one in administration buildings across America, sooner rather than later.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
