When it comes to paying for college, retired NBA player Matt Barnes is like any other Gen X dad in America. With his twins Carter and Isaiah in high school, Barnes — a member of the Golden State Warriors 2017 championship team — is looking at the rising cost of higher education with wary eyes.
“Do you need college now to be successful in society today? I’d say no,” he told me recently. “When we grew up, and I was born in 1980, college was the road to success whether you were an athlete or an entrepreneur. Currently, I would never say, ‘Don’t get an education,’ but I would say if you have a business idea, pour into it and go.”
The cost-benefit analysis has definitely changed. When I started college at Western Michigan University in the fall of 1990, the national average for in-state tuition, room and board at a public college totaled less than $5,000 a year. I had a scholarship but still needed student loans to attend. This year the average at Western is more than $28,000 per year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 150% increase, outpacing the soaring cost of buying a home or a new car.
Don’t get me wrong: The degree enabled me to walk into rooms I didn’t know existed before college, so as far as I’m concerned, my higher education was worth every penny. But for Gen Z and beyond, the return on investment is less clear — or at a minimum, takes longer — because the investment is so much bigger.
Barnes himself spent four years as a player at UCLA before his 15-year NBA career. Today, he and fellow NBA champion Stephen Jackson host the popular “All the Smoke” podcast, and in February Barnes became chief executive of All the Smoke Productions. When I asked him if he thought he could have made the transition from the court to the boardroom without his time as a Bruin, he said no and added: “College was … one of the best times of my life.
“It’s a tie between my NBA career and how much fun I had at UCLA and how many lifelong friends and contacts and opportunities still rise from that.”
That kind of lived experience is hard to quantify — and therein lies the rub.
I got to talking about the tradeoffs with Barnes’ colleague Brian Dailey, a sports executive and co-founder of All the Smoke. He has fond memories of his days at Ithaca College and would like for his kids, who are all 10 and younger, to have similar experiences — but he isn’t sure if that will be smart financially. Unlike Barnes, Dailey never collected an NBA paycheck, so the future price tag to pay for his kids has him doing more than a double take.
“I think there’s a lot of ways that have come about to make money over the last five or 10 years that don’t require a college education,” he said. “If you have a child who’s excelling and knows what they want to do and they’re on a path that doesn’t necessarily require college to do it, I think as parents we gotta ask ourselves what is it really worth?”
The specter of taking on debilitating student loan debt is not just something parents are discussing.
Music executive Craig King said he left Howard University at 19 with his professors’ blessings after Ray Charles asked him to play in his band. Today, he helps young artists — like country act the Boykinz — find their footing in the music industry without pursuing a degree. Still King, like Barnes, said his campus experience was invaluable to his career because of the relationships that came from it: “I wouldn’t tell anyone not to go to college, but I would tell them, ‘Make sure you don’t waste your money on college if you don’t have to.’ ”
In 2020, Chi Ossé was a student at New York University when the murder of George Floyd led him away from campus and to a life of activism and politics. In 2021, at the age of 23, Osse was elected to the New York City Council as its youngest member and sole Gen Z voice. He represents District 36, one of the poorest historically in the city. He said the question “Is college still worth the cost?” is one he hears often from young people, and he encourages taking time off after high school to decide.
“I wouldn’t recommend just going to college just to go and maybe figure it out,” he said. “If you’re going to take on a lot of debt I would recommend that someone has a clear vision of why they want to go to college, what they want to study and where they want to go from getting a college degree.”
So … why is college so expensive now?
According to Adam Kissel, visiting fellow for higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, “when you subsidize something you make it easier for a seller to raise prices”: “It’s a situation of unintended negative consequences that in the name of access, subsidizing college education through easy money for student loans have caused tuition to skyrocket.”
Kissel is referring to the Bennett hypothesis, named after President Reagan’s second secretary of education. In 1987 William J. Bennett wrote an op-ed in the New York Times explaining “higher education clearly provides benefits to society in general … but the chief beneficiaries of a college education are the students.” Bennett also said this about the college cost paradox: “Increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”
The secretary didn’t spend a great deal of time opining about how Reagan’s cuts had forced the nation’s governors to pull back funding for higher education. Or how the funding gaps those cuts created were later passed on to students by way of tuition increases.
“The only responsible solution is to reduce the subsidizing,” Kissel told me.
I don’t agree with that assessment and neither does U.S. history.
Beginning in 1779 — during the middle of the American Revolution, years before the 13 colonies cobbled together our Constitution to form this imperfect union — Virginia Gov. Thomas Jefferson looked around at his constituents and wrote “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.” It was a piece of legislation arguing that the best way for the people to be self-governed — and root out tyranny — was for government to invest in expanding access to education.
In 1862, with the nation again on the brink of economic collapse, President Lincoln signed the second-most-significant legislation of his presidency: the Morrill Act, providing for land-grant universities. That law gave states the means to expand colleges beyond the Ivy League and give more people access to higher education.
In 1890, as part of the recovery process following the Civil War, President Harrison signed the second Morrill Act into law to provide the same opportunities for Black people, giving rise to many historically Black colleges and universities.
Fast-forward a half-century and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in the G.I. Bill in the shadow of World War II. By 1947, nearly half of all college students were veterans.
When the Russians were the first to get a satellite into space, in 1957, Congress’s response was to send a huge higher education bill to President Eisenhower’s desk.
Time and time again, whenever this country faced economic uncertainty or geopolitical threat, the government’s response was to subsidize education — particularly college. Even before there was a United States, forefathers like Jefferson believed democracy’s longevity and the people’s sovereignty were contingent upon government investing in education.
This was true all the way up until the 1980s. That is when Washington began legislating as if higher education were more of an individual benefit than a public good. That is when — for the first time in our nation’s history — the rate of college tuition began outpacing inflation.
One organization that tracks funding for colleges, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Assn., said the nation’s schools never returned to pre-1980 funding levels. The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that funding cuts sharply increased again following the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.
It was these cuts, not any subsidies, that created the crisis of affordability we have today. They are the result of a switch in the 1980s when Americans began to blame government spending for their financial hardship and came to see education as a luxury item as opposed to being, as Jefferson often wrote, essential to our democracy.
Higher education was always expensive, which is why the government supplemented it from the very beginning. The founders understood the cost of being uneducated was always going to be a greater burden on the nation.
There may be no community in the country better equipped to answer the question of higher education’s worth than the quaint, midsize college town of Kalamazoo, Mich.
A group of deep-pocketed citizens believed as Jefferson did and gambled that if they could remove the financial barrier to college, more people would go and the community as a whole benefit.
In November 2005, they made a promise to every child in the area: graduate in Kalamazoo and get up to 100% of in-state public college tuition paid for. That’s more than 60 institutions, from trade school to graduate school. When it started, tuition averaged around $7,500 a year per student. Last year, that figure passed $13,000. At the 20-year mark, nearly 9,000 area students have been awarded more than $230 million, and the program’s chief executive, Von Washington Jr., said the data support keeping the promise going.
“If salaries can continue to rise,” he said, “then the return on investment is great because at the end of the day, research will show you are definitely in a better situation financially possessing a degree in most situations than not.”
That is a truism so undeniable that Bennett acknowledged it in his 1987 op-ed and experts from the Heritage Foundation and New America recently told me the same. Since the inception of the Kalamazoo Promise program, more than 200 municipalities have followed suit including in blue states such as California and New York as well as in red states such as Tennessee and Arkansas. The private sector is filling in some of the gaps caused by decades of decline in state funding.
However, Western Michigan University’s new president, Russ Kavalhuna —a native of Kalamazoo, and a Western graduate himself — believes the constant emphasis on money and salaries has taken focus away from the main reason Jefferson pushed to expand access to education.
“Personally, I really like to learn about things, and I really like to be confronted by things that I don’t understand,” said Kavalhuna. He is my alma mater’s 10th president and may be facing the most challenging environment politically, culturally and economically since its founding in 1903.
“I like to tell students this,” he said about his approach to higher ed. “Your job is to learn a skill about being curious about people and things that are different than yourself.
“That doesn’t mean you have to like it,” Kavalhuna said, but it does mean defying the messages of social media and culture that tell us to reject anything different. “The biggest and brightest of our generation are the people who are just generally well equipped to be curious about things they don’t understand or generally disagree with.”
College was never cheap. What has changed over the decades is who pays the bill. When things got tight in the 1980s, government should have shouldered more of the burden for the good of all — as we’d always done before. Now, much of the cost falls on families, eroding the very system that helped America rebound economically from past downturns. If we want higher education to be affordable again, the answer isn’t for the government to cut subsidies but for it to invest in people like it’s 1979.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
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