In doing research on whether GM should involve itself in this lawsuit, we have been impressed with a growing body of research that concludes that college students who experience the most racial and ethnic diversity in classrooms and during interactions on campus become better learners and more effective citizens. Those are exactly the types of persons we want running our global business—better learners and more effective citizens.

 

 

Michigan’s argument for diversity was based, in no small part, on our conception of liberal education. It is striking that GM’s argument closely mirrors our own. The logic of our case for affirmative action derives from a definition of liberal education in which difference—and openness to difference and the willingness to engage with difference—is vital to learning.

It is no surprise to experienced schoolteachers that difference is essential to learning and to productive activity. More surprising, the public debate over affirmative action was a battle that divided the front and editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. It cares about profit on the front page; if you read between the lines, you see that corporate America has come to the correct conclusion that diversity and liberal learning are good for the bottom line.

We don’t know what the next problem is going to be. Dan Klionsky, a member of the biology faculty at the University of Michigan, recently suggested that this argument applies to basic research. I’ll go one step further and assert that it’s the best one-line justification for both basic research and liberal education. If you don’t know what the next problem is going to be, but you do know that it will be important, at least the following two capacities will be valuable: First is the capacity to make sense of the unfamiliar—a capacity that is at the heart of liberal learning. Second is the social capacity that derives from there being someone out there who knows at least something about the newly emerging problem. Basic research increases this likelihood, and without the habits of mind that come from liberal learning, who would take the time and energy to engage in something so impractical—except when it is vital?

Liberal learning is the best way to construct interesting and fulfilling lives. There is nothing like puzzling through an issue; understanding it; or “getting” a literary passage, painting, differential equation, folding of a protein, or the exquisite dissonance and consonance of a musical passage. The text, symbol, or sustained argument transports the problem solver.

Liberal learning is good for the old because it keeps us young; the young are wired to learn. As we get older, we reacquire the taste if we are lucky—or if we are liberally educated, something that allows us to make our own luck. The continued joy of learning is a value not well measured in dollars, although I can say as a parent that I would pay a lot to assure that my children have it.

This value was well expressed in an editorial published in the Ohio State Journal of 1870, at the time that The Ohio State University was founded: “The lawyer who knows nothing but law, the physician who knows nothing but medicine, and the farmer who knows nothing but farming are on a par with each other. They are all alike, starved and indigent in the requirements of true culture.”

Speaking of accountability, I claim that colleges and universities should be held accountable for providing a liberal education and an environment that supports it. In the words of Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “If colleges and universities are to be held ‘accountable’ to anyone or anything, it should be to ... academic values—dedicated and responsible teaching, rigorous and honest research.” Although the practical and vocational arguments matter, and the economic value of innovations that derive from university-based research are of great social value, it is essential not to stake all of the arguments for liberal education on practical economics. If we sell ourselves as being only practical, we risk being pushed into accountability for only the measurable. We could lose the ability to pursue the life of the mind or even research and teaching in domains that do not have an easily foreseeable payoff.

Why Does College Cost So Much?

Anything of value—and I trust that I have made the case that liberal education is of great value—will be even more valuable if it can be provided at lower cost. So why is liberal education so costly, and what can we do about it?

There is no doubt that college is expensive. The stated tuition at America’s best private colleges and universities generally exceeds $25,000 per academic year. At Swarthmore, tuition this year is $28,500—and with room, board, books, supplies, and other expenses, the College estimates the total “cost of attendance” at $39,616. That’s approaching the national median household income, which was $42,409 per year in 2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But does this mean that every student wishing to attend college must pay this price? According to U.S. News & World Report, only 6 percent of U.S. undergraduates pay more than $24,000 in tuition and fees, four out of five college students attend public institutions, and about 40 percent of undergraduates pay less than $4,000 in tuition annually.

At many high-priced institutions, merit scholarships and need-based financial aid close the affordability gap. Swarthmore, which continues to admit talented students regardless of their need for aid, provides about half of its students with a “discount” on the published price based entirely on family circumstances and ability to pay. The average aid package last year, including scholarships, loans, and work-study income, was $26,013. Yet even full-paying students received another sort of discount because the real cost of educating a Swarthmore student (excluding financial aid) was $67,028. This hidden subsidy exists at all of the best schools—in fact, it is what makes them the best because their endowments and other sources of income (largely resulting from philanthropy) provide more courses, smaller classes, better faculty, superior facilities and technology, and enough financial aid to admit the best possible student body.

On the surface, however, critics of higher education have a point. Tuition at Swarthmore is six times what it was in 1979-1980. During the same period, consumer prices rose by a factor of almost 2.5, and disposable personal income today is about 4.2 times what it was 24 years ago. Disposable personal income is a better norm than consumer prices for evaluating the cost of higher education (or anything else), in that the ability of households to pay for goods and services is largely determined by the available income. Even so, had Swarthmore tuition risen at the same rate as disposable income since 1979, it would be approximately $19,740—30 percent lower than it is today.

Swarthmore is not alone. Its rate of growth of tuition over the period is about average for four-year institutions. At the University of Michigan, tuition is lower but has risen somewhat faster; it is now 6.6 times what it was in 1979-1980. In summary, college is expensive and becoming ever more so. And remember, tuition does not fully cover costs.

Two fundamental reasons drive this bad news. The first is something that economists call Baumol’s disease, after William Baumol, who first identified it in work he did (with William Bowen) on the economics of theater.

The essential mechanism that produces rising standards of living is growth in productivity. When intellectual and technical advances allow us to produce more goods and services per hour of work, wages can and do rise faster than prices—with the positive outcome that an hour of work buys more goods and services and the general standard of living rises. Competition in the labor market requires that workers with a given set of skills and abilities be paid about the same for anything that they do that requires the same amount of effort. (Discrimination, monopoly, and other phenomena temper the general applicability of this, sometimes with great significance, but the basic principle still holds.) Thus, as wages rise in general, so too will the wages paid to actors and schoolteachers, roughly preserving their position in the income hierarchy unless great social change occurs.

But the technical advances that lead to productivity increases don’t actually do much for theater or higher education. You still need two actors—one to play Romeo and one to play Juliet—just as you did 400 years ago. Their wages grow at the rate of growth of wages in general, but their productivity hardly grows at all; the result is that the cost of putting on the play, when compared with goods and services on average, rises year after year.

The same applies to college teaching. Higher education uses extensive modern technology, but—except in the payroll office and other business operations—we cannot use it to increase productivity because it does not change the essential process of intellectual engagement. The ratio of students to teachers at Swarthmore hasn’t changed much since I was a student, but the wages of the faculty and staff have risen with wages for highly skilled labor in the economy as a whole.

The work of engaging with others around ideas and knowledge has been little changed by the Internet or, for that matter, by movable type. Both inventions changed the particular ways in which ideas and objects are studied, but they do not make either learning or teaching any more efficient. Good liberal education can and does soak up all of the energy that we can give it—and that, happily, is unlikely to change.

The other reason that the cost of a college education keeps increasing is that the scope of the enterprise grows without bounds. At Michigan, I often assert with only slight hyperbole, we are responsible for understanding—or at least chronicling and making accessible—the total of human knowledge and creative expression throughout all of history. As knowledge and interpretation change and grow, we in higher education are responsible for both the new and old. GM does not need to keep the tools for 1957 Chevys and would have a difficult time making one today. But at Michigan and Swarthmore, we study Latin and Greek as well as historical and current thought. We are—and must be—museums as well as laboratories, conservators as well as innovators. We can do some compacting, but our mission grows every year. There is more to know today than there was yesterday, and there will be yet more to know tomorrow.

What Can We Do?

Thus far, American higher education has survived in the face of great economic and political pressure because we have persuaded parents and legislatures, boards and foundations, and alumni and other friends to keep supporting this expensive set of activities. We must continue to provide that support—and even increase it as the need arises.

State support as a share of the cost of public colleges and universities has dropped steadily for decades and more sharply during the past several years, forcing tuition increases. At Michigan, state appropriation has fallen by more than $1,400 per student in the last two years. As state support falls, we hear increasing calls to privatize public institutions. A fundamental shift in values is needed to reverse this trend.

Private schools such as Swarthmore, which receive little direct government funding, will continue to rely on philanthropic support from individuals and foundations to maintain the quality of their programs. The smaller the alumni base (Swarthmore has just 18,000 living alumni), the more important it is that individuals take responsibility for the future of these precious institutions.

We must not compromise on the mission; we must not do less than what is required to give our students—and our world—the best chance of creating values, solving new and surprising problems, and living fulfilling lives. We owe it to benefactors and taxpayers alike to be as prudent with resources and as businesslike as possible, but we should recognize and vigorously articulate that some of the time it’s not possible to run an institution of higher learning as one would a business.

The analogy to theater is instructive and cautionary. Over time, as the performing arts have become more expensive, they have become less accessible to the general public. Like theater and opera, liberal education requires resources well in excess of tuition (or ticket sales) to cover costs. I can think of no ethical basis for limiting access to a superb liberal education to those who happen to be blessed with families who are willing and able to cover much of its cost. And I can think of no ethical basis for diluting the quality of the education we provide. We are a rich society. We have developed a set of institutions of higher education that are unparalleled in quality. We must articulate that quality and its value, manage our resources wisely, and continue to make accessible—as Swarthmore always has—outstanding education independent of students’ economic resources.

None of this is easy. But then, neither is liberal education.