[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 86 (Thursday, June 19, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6009-S6010]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  RISING COSTS OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

 Mr. CLELAND. Mr. President, I rise today to share with you and 
all of our colleagues a disturbing report released Tuesday. According 
to this report, produced by a panel of public and private university 
officials and corporate executives, the cost of a college education is 
rising dramatically. This figure must be contained or an increasing 
number of low-income students will be shut out from the opportunity to 
earn a degree.
  According to this report, tuition is expected to double by 2015, 
effectively shutting off higher education to half of those who would 
want to pursue it. We cannot allow this door to close on these low-
income students. We should be opening these doors for our young people, 
not closing them.
  These rising tuition costs must be addressed. An investment in 
education is an investment in the future of this country. Adequate 
governmental support for higher education is essential in order to arm 
our children with the proper resources so that they are able to live 
and compete in a global market. I firmly believe in providing all 
feasible financial support for students receiving a higher education. 
That's why I am a cosponsor of S. 12, the Education for the 21st 
Century Act, which would help to increase the educational opportunities 
for America's youth.
  Mr. President, I ask that the text of the article detailing these 
report findings, which appeared in the New York Times, June 18, 1997, 
be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the New York Times, June 18, 1997]

          Rising Cost of College Imperils Nation, Report Says

                          (By Peter Applebome)

       The nation's colleges an universities need to cut costs 
     dramatically or face a shortfall of funds that will 
     increasingly shut out the poor from higher education and from 
     economic opportunity as well, according to a blunt and far-
     ranging assessment of American higher education that was made 
     public on Tuesday.
       The report, by a panel of public and private university 
     officials and corporate executives, says that rising costs, 
     falling public spending and a coming surge in demand are 
     making the economics of American higher education 
     increasingly unsupportable.
       If current enrollment, spending and financing trends 
     continue, the report said, higher education will fall $38 
     billion short of what it needs to serve the expected student 
     population in 2015. To sustain current spending, it said, 
     tuition would have to double by 2015, effectively shutting 
     off higher education to half of those who would want to 
     pursue it.
       The report focuses on one of the great unspoken dilemmas in 
     President Clinton's push to make a college diploma as common 
     as a high school one: higher education is expensive, students 
     pay only a small share of their costs and, while bringing 
     increasing numbers of low-income students into higher 
     education will have long-term economic benefits, it will also 
     have enormous short-term economic costs.
       On the other hand, the report said, with education 
     increasingly crucial to economic advancement, cutting off 
     access to education--particularly to the poor and to 
     immigrant groups who increasingly dominate the student 
     population of states like California, Florida, New York and 
     Texas--would have enormous consequences for the nation's 
     social fabric.
       The report, ``Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal 
     Crisis in Higher Education,'' calls for a radical 
     restructuring of universities, including an effort to 
     overhaul university governance to limit the power of 
     individual departments, redefining and often reducing the 
     ambitions of different institutions and a sharing of 
     resources between institutions.
       The report also calls for more public financing, but it 
     stresses that changes in the system should be prerequisites 
     to any increases.
       ``The facts are irrefutable,'' said Thomas Kean, the former 
     New Jersey governor who is now president of Drew University 
     and is a co-chairman of the panel that wrote the report. ``We 
     are heading for a crisis at the very time we can least afford 
     one.''
       The panel, the Commission on National Investment in Higher 
     Education, is made up of academic and business leaders 
     convened by the Council for Aid to Education, an independent 
     subsidiary of the Rand Corp.
       Experts say that higher education is already being reshaped 
     by such forces as technology or competition from for-profit 
     institutions, so that a straight-line extrapolation from 
     current economic figures is difficult. And higher education 
     is such a varied enterprise in the United States that a 
     crisis for a public college in California does not 
     necessarily mean a crisis for Harvard or Princeton.
       Still, Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to 
     Education, notes that even rich universities like Yale and 
     Stanford have faced deficits and retrenchment in recent 
     years.
       And officials in state systems, which educate the majority 
     of Americans, say the gap between resources and costs in 
     higher education is becoming ever more daunting.
       Charles Reed, chancellor of the State University System of 
     Florida, said that over the next 10 years Florida will face a 
     50 percent increase in students at its public four-year 
     institutions, from 210,000 to 300,000.
       Barry Munitz, chancellor of the California State University 
     System, said California was midway through a half-century of 
     population growth and demographic change that would see the 
     number of schoolchildren in kindergarten through the 12th 
     grade almost double, to about eight million, and go from 
     about 75 percent white in 1970 to about 75 percent minority 
     in 2020.
       Population growth will only accelerate the financial 
     problems facing higher education, the report said. It noted 
     that the index measuring the increases in the price paid by 
     colleges and universities for goods and services, like 
     faculty salaries, rose more than sixfold from 1961 to 1995. 
     The annual rate of growth in the cost of providing higher 
     education exceeded the Consumer Price Index by more than a 
     percentage point from 1980 to 1995, the report said.

[[Page S6010]]

       And, while costs have gone up, public support has not. 
     Since 1976, public support per student has just kept up with 
     inflation, while real costs per student have grown by about 
     40 percent, the report said.
       To make up the difference, tuition has risen dramatically, 
     with tuition and fees doubling from 1976 to 1994. But the 
     report said that a similar doubling between now and 2015 
     would have a catastrophic effect on access, pricing as many 
     as 6.7 million students out of higher education.
       ``If you were to announce that, given fiscal pressures, the 
     door to social mobility that was good enough for the old 
     generation is really no longer needed by the new one, you 
     might as well stick a ticking bomb inside the social 
     fabric of this country,'' Munitz said.
       While calling for more public support, the report says that 
     a solution to the fiscal imbalance has to start with colleges 
     and universities themselves.
       ``Given the magnitude of the deficit facing American 
     colleges and universities, it is surprising that these 
     institutions have not taken more serious steps to increase 
     productivity without sacrificing quality,'' the report said.
       The report's recommendations for restructuring--from 
     sharing a library with other institutions to eliminating weak 
     programs--are not new, but there are enormous political and 
     institutional barriers in the way of a major economic 
     overhaul of higher education. Still, some experts say 
     institutions have no option but to find ways to operate more 
     efficiently.
       ``The ability to maximize revenue, given the competitive 
     pressures for state dollars on the one hand and the 
     resistance to future increases in tuition on the other, has 
     about run its course,'' said Stanley Ikenberry, president of 
     the American Council on Education, a leading advocacy group 
     that was not involved in the report. ``All of that's putting 
     more and more pressure on the operating side of the 
     budget.''

                          ____________________