Editor’s note: This commentary is by Louis Meyers, of South Burlington, who is a physician at Rutland Regional Medical Center, and a Democratic candidate for the state Senate in Chittenden County.
As everyone knows, college tuition and associated costs have far exceeded the general inflation rate over the past 30 years.
A number of Democratic presidential candidates are calling for government-funded free tuition, but with no real attention to controlling costs. Here are some suggestions on how we can bend the cost curve:
1) Stop building gargantuan new football stadiums and arenas, with varsity locker rooms and training facilities more opulent than an exclusive country club. Wealthy alumni donors should be encouraged to donate instead to academic buildings, research programs, or academic scholarships.
2) Stop paying football coaches and basketball coaches millions of dollars in annual salaries, and their assistants hundreds of thousands of dollars. They should most definitely not be making more than the president of the school (who is probably also overpaid). Let’s redistribute some of that money to provide a living wage for the teaching assistants and junior professors who do much of the actual research and most of the classroom teaching.
3) With the advent of Title IX in the early 1970s mandating parity in men and women’s intercollegiate sports, many colleges and universities in Division I and II now give hundreds of athletic scholarships each year. Many of the smaller schools would benefit by changing to Division III and using that scholarship money for academically gifted and/or financially needy applicants.
4) Stop building new dorms and cafeterias which look like five-star hotels. This is done simply to compete with other colleges. Clean and safe dorms and reasonably healthy food is adequate. The best memories most students will take from their college years are about the friendships — and not the facilities.
5) Establish core curriculums for a defined number of major fields of study and jettison the extraneous “fluff” courses. These add to overall costs by taking up class space and professorial time, and students can pursue them on their own time.
6) These core course credits should be more readily accepted at other colleges when students need or choose to transfer. Currently, colleges are playing a shell game by not accepting these credits and making students repeat the courses.
7) Nearly a third of each calendar academic year is taken up by vacations. Eliminate a good portion of this unnecessary downtime and a typical college diploma could easily be completed in three years instead of four. This is typical of European colleges, and would automatically reduce tuition by 25%.
8) Finally, states need to decide if higher education is truly important to our society and its citizens — and if so, legislatures must begin to fund state colleges and universities at a more sustainable level.
This is the future we are building.