“Education should be a right, not a privilege,” said Joshua Humphreys, director of the Center for Social Philanthropy at Tellus Institute, at a conference discussing how the system of higher education is in “crisis,” on Saturday.
On Friday and Saturday about 150 people from 36 international colleges and universities attended The Future of Labor Organizing in Higher Education at University of Massachusetts, Boston.
“School workers are just cogs in the wheel and students are customers,” said Gillian Mason, higher education organizer for Mass. Jobs with Justice. “We want to make sure that colleges are using money for the right things.”
The “crisis” includes the corporate domination in academic institutions, escalating tuition, excessive executive compensation and the disempowerment of faculty, staff and students, speakers said.
The trend in costs of colleges and universities over the last two decades has been an annual rate increase of five to eight percent, Humphreys said.
“So if you project that out on trend, what I’ll need to scroll away is just a little over 800,000 to a million dollars to put my daughter through a high-quality education,” he added.
Private universities and for-profit colleges receive money from the federal government through scholarships and grants, but these schools do not pay taxes back to the federal government.
“People saying we have a fiscal crisis is a lie,” said Marilyn Frankenstein, professor of quantitative reasoning at UMass Boston. “There’s no lack of resources. It’s a social justice crisis.”
Humphreys said that universities need visions, commitments, ways to be monitored, incentives and sanctions.
The most effective way to do this now, he said, would be to have report cards for schools in each category. This is currently being conducted through the College Sustainability Report Card , which ranks the sustainability of campus operations and endowment practices.
Humphreys propositioned a plan for a new social contract for higher education that would require schools to have social responsibility, sustainability, transparency, access and affordability.
“People don’t want to be getting F’s in sustainability,” Humphreys said, “It’s an interesting model. It started out as grading and rating endowments and sustainability of higher up schools. Suddenly people started talking about it.”
The peer pressure created by the report cards and the established transparency of schools would allow for stakeholders to protest what schools are using money for, he said.
“This conference was an attempt to resolve those differences and develop a common platform that would form the basis for a coordinated change strategy,” said Wayne Langley, a conference organizer and higher education division director for the SEIU Local 615, a service-worker union.
To institute change in schools, Langley said there is a need for more active involvement from all stakeholders in shaping educational policy.
Unions and workers are trying to do things as individual groups to get the school systems to change, such as the group that created the sustainable report card. Humphreys said that all of the groups must aggregate to improve higher education.
“We need to step back and think seriously about what the future should look like,” Humphreys said. “That doesn’t mean the next year, the next contract signing. It’s in twenty years, fifty years.”
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