NY Times Op-Ed Uses Coronavirus Crisis to Push for Free College
“We urgently need to change how we pay for college, and that starts with removing the burden of tuition from working families.”
Some people in higher education clearly don’t understand the tsunami aimed directly at the industry right now. Claire Bond Potter is a professor of history.
She writes at the New York Times:
The Only Way to Save Higher Education Is to Make It Free
In January 2020, while I was in New Hampshire canvassing for Elizabeth Warren, a campaign organizer urged me to tell voters why I supported her. For me, that was easy. “As a college teacher,” I said when someone answered the door, “I believe that higher education is a house of cards because Americans won’t tax ourselves to support it.”
I didn’t know how right I was, or how quickly my words would bear out.
Two months later, Covid-19 closed American colleges and universities, and the cards came tumbling down. Millions of dollars in refunded housing and dining fees created yawning budget gaps. And the crisis isn’t over, especially if students don’t return in the fall. In the United States, tuition payments represent, on average, about a quarter of a public college’s budget, and about 35 percent of a private college’s. For many, it is far more.
The crisis highlights the unjust, unsustainable fact that higher education is surviving on ever higher tuition payments — and, going forward, will most likely lean even harder on students and their families to make ends meet. The frank conversation that Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren started during the primary season has now become a crisis. We urgently need to change how we pay for college, and that starts with removing the burden of tuition from working families.
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Comments
“In January 2020, while I was in New Hampshire canvassing for Elizabeth Warren …”
In the first sentence she’s lost all credibility. Why even bother to write the rest of this idiocy?
Claire Bond Potter is a professor of history.
I wouldn’t have mistaken her for a math professor.
As a Missouri voter, its clearly time for the legislators to impose further subsidy and budget cuts on the University of Missouri.
Like a 100 percent cut….
The universities are pushing this, the NYT are just their shills. Tuition prices are just about the only thing restraining university salaries & benefits and administrative bloat. There is nothing so expensive as something that somebody else pays for.
Tell them after all schools and colleges eliminate 100% of all their administrative staff, which has been outmoded and irrelevant technologically for 25 years now.
They live on student loans that anyone who can fog a mirror can get. This should be rationalized, to help students avoid unpayable debt, by underwriting at least part of the loans privately. Those private lenders will make mean decisions like lending to engineering students in good standing and not lending to grievance studies majors at non-elite colleges. Somebody’s got to.
The article presents an interesting chicken-and-egg dilemma. If there were fewer Warren supporter types on the faculty, the public would have greater willingness to tax itself to support the universities.
Guess they haven’t realized the money went to yhe stimulus. Taxpayers are fed up. You think they are willingly going to pay more?
College Professors aren’t what they used to be. Lots of them appear to be complete morons these days.
You get what you pay for. If you pay nothing …
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We read articles every day that universities are facing budget crisis and her solution is to offer free college?
Who wants to save colleges in their current condition?
One place for the universities to start is to cut the bulk of administrators who add nothing of value–I’m talking disciplinary deans, and touchy feely administrators, along with various other bureaucrats.