Seventeen-year-olds are not given many legal rights: They cannot vote, drink alcohol, run for elected office or serve on a jury. Why, then, is it that American youth, most often at the excitable and impressionable age of 17, apply for acceptance at colleges that in total cost us more than a mortgage we cannot obtain, and begin a lending process that will take us into our 30s? No student should face the public relations and advertising blitz that somehow has brainwashed a nation of high schoolers, parents, senators and guidance counselors into believing $50,000 spent every year for four years, often for only the beginning of an academic career, is a fair price to pay for college quality.
The word “quality” surfaces again and again when reporting on what students are looking for from the “college experience” — yet another phrase that has permeated the social psyche as to what a young person needs to become educated and able to sustain herself in the changing, globalized world. When I leave Boston University as a first-generation college graduate, I will have a sheet of paper, emblazoned with the university seal — reserved for only the “most formal occasions,” as per BU Brand Identity Standards — to signify that I am, if I take on the character of this quality institution, “modern, urban, confident, diverse and dynamic.” Mostly, I hope I become a whole lot more skeptical than when I entered Warren Towers as a freshman eager for the experience of surreptitious parties with the nation’s best and brightest in cinder-block rooms. I must not mistake expensive imagery for enrichment.
There are many things that make life at BU pretty darn nice. Any alumnus will be quick to point out the dark ages of eating at the pre-gourmet dining halls and exercising . . . wherever it was students exercised before the advent of the glass-and-glamour fitness center. These assets are touted on the official tour, from which I best remember the admissions office on brownstone-lined Bay State, a street I hardly ever traverse now. I didn’t see the single-room classical studies library in which I have taken my most useful classes nor the dirty office that will probably land me my first professional gig. These places don’t look good and aren’t the quality that tuition hikes fund. The dog-and-pony show, however, must make a good impression on the paying customer, as must the unfortunate annual announcement.
When BU Today, the daily email newsletter sent from the Office of Marketing and Communications, heralded next year’s tuition rates, it did so in the most palatable way possible – with a cute play on words. As the last eye on headlines at The Daily Free Press, I love advertising a story about a professor’s research area or a new website with a pun. There is nothing funny, however, about paying $1,610 more next year for an experience that may not be worth more than what’s going on at the JFK/UMass T stop, and that’s certainly less affordable than what’s happening at Harvard University with its progressive financial aid programs. “The higher cost of higher education” demands higher accountability, not lessened security after years of loan repayment as a young professional and years more of refinancing as a parent.
The imperative debate on college pricing is only beginning to receive the recognition it deserves on the local, state and national levels.
For too long, the media reported the idiosyncrasy and actual idiocy wrapped up in the process of colleges one-upping each other for the best students, the best dorms “like palaces,” as The Princeton Review says, and the best image. This obsession about trends and status, however, has neglected the mission of education: molding students into individuals in a democratic society marked by personal responsibility, rather than one fixated on ranking and comparison.
I fear the individual is often lost in the process that results in BU’s $1.5 billion annual budget, that the individual is lost to the university trustees who OK the annual increases in tuition, housing and fees. In the statistics, graphs and PR-friendly justifications for the astronomical and ultimately unacceptable cost of education, the names and faces that bear the brunt of this pricing nightmare are unknown. As Sen. Ted Kennedy hears testimony about college affordability today in Boston, I hope the students’ names and stories are what he recalls when legislating. The shadowy figures who call the shots for college pricing, business barons in offices around the Northeast and administrators behind locked doors at 1 Sherborn St., must also be identified, and their actions, at the very least, explained.
As the Free Press delves into the many aspects of higher education that make it cost what it does — something entrenched in everything from nonprofit status to oft-cited rising energy and operating costs — the student will not be lost in a sea of abstract figures and competing views on what constitutes educational quality. Institutional complexity and the image of higher education must be reduced, even if the costs are not.
Stephanie Perry, a junior in the College of Communication and the College of Arts and Sciences, is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Free Press.
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