At UA system (and Auburn), the price is wrong

BY John Archibald
Birmingham News
22 June 2012
Back in 1992, when Jay Barker was big man on the UA campus and a twitter was what you felt in your gut, you could buy a dozen eggs for 93 cents.

Eight cents an egg.

Now you'd pay $1.69. Or 82 percent more.

Back then, you could buy a Toyota Camry LE for $15,495. Now, because inflation comes as sure as death and with just as foul a stench, you'd pay $22,600. Or 46 percent more.

For the most part, in Alabama, income has stayed within shouting distance of the cost of living.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that it takes $1.62 today to buy the same stuff you'd get in 1992 for a dollar. On the other hand, for every dollar earned in 1992, the average Alabamian now brings in $1.59.

The buck has slipped more, though, if what you want to buy is an education.

At the University of Alabama, the cost of college tuition has risen 122 percent since 1992.

More than the rate of inflation. More than cars or eggs or milk.

The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees this month voted to increase tuition, making it harder for the unschooled to claw their way to prosperity, and making it harder for the educated to turn their privilege to profit.
At a time of budget cuts, belt-tightening, widespread student loan default, pre-paid tuition disappointment and all-around penny pinching, the trustees voted again to pass the burden on to students. Tuition will rise at all campuses, but the Tuscaloosa campus will see a 7 percent increase. Tuition and fees will rise from $4,300 to $4,600 a semester.

I would be remiss if I did not say here that I went to Alabama, that I now have a son at UAB. But I feel the same about similar increases at Auburn University (8 percent this year) and other schools.

What is galling, alma mater or not, is that this is a taxpayer-funded system of learning where the stated mission is "to advance the intellectual and social condition of the people of the state through quality programs of teaching, research, and service."

There should be an addendum to that UA mission. It should say:

If the price is right.

Because the rubber-stamp tuition hikes come every year. Since 1999 they have come like this: 7 percent; 4.9 percent; 9.2 percent; 8 percent; 16.3 percent; 12 percent; 5.1 percent; 8.5 percent; 8 percent; 12.3 percent; 9.4 percent; 12.9 percent; 8.9 percent; and now another 7 percent. On and on and on.

There are reasons for the increases. State funding of higher education has fallen sharply. Between 2006 and 2011, for instance, it fell 15.9 percent. Tuition, conversely, rose 16.8 percent in that time.
State support for higher education has waned. And rather than cut their budgets (full professors' salaries rose 33 percent in that five-year period, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education), they passed the buck and the bill to students.

It was a message, from the state and the universities. It said the stated mission, that stuff about the social condition, is bunk.

And tuition isn't even the half of it. The College Board estimates that tuition and fees at typical public universities come to about 36 percent of the overall cost. Room and board makes up about 43 percent, and books and other expenses 21 percent.

So the average cost of a four-year degree, including mandated meal plans and other expenses, comes to more than $104,000 at a school such as Alabama.

Which is three times the starting salary of an elementary school teacher.

It's not that the universities don't need money. Everybody needs money these days. It is merely that the university system has the power to build its empire on the backs of those it is supposed to serve.

And it cannot last.

The wedge is too wide, and for students the cost and the debt too high. It is a threat to the state, to its hope for a more educated future, and to its social condition.

The price is wrong.