Ivory Tower Page #3

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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,

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