Crisis in the Colleges: Can They Pay Their Way?

For a few days each June, U.S. higher education can afford the celebrating mood. It puts on its gayest trappings, forms its great processions, fills the air with the sound of tolling bells and ringing phrases on the meaning of learning and life. At no time of year do the nation's 1,700 colleges and universities seem to bloom more brightly than at Commencement.

This June, the bloom also has some of the surface aspects of a boom. One after another, each campus has announced the total of gifts and bequests received during the year, and the figures are impressive. Harvard has received another $16 million; Yale, another $6,500,000; Princeton, more than $3,000,000; CalTech, $1,926,000. Among the smaller colleges, Bowdoin has $1,918,275; Emory University, almost $2,000,000; Smith college, $7,000,000.

Each June since the end of the war the reports have been just as encouraging.* To a leading group of 51 colleges and universities went $65 million in 1947, more than $70 million in 1948, and $93 million in 1949--the biggest gift year since 1920. This year, philanthropy dollars are coming faster than ever. If this total were all that mattered in the economic life of the university, presidents and chancellors across the U.S. should have been feeling more prosperous than ever before.

Rising Costs

Actually, most of them are feeling just the opposite. Reason: while gifts are at an unprecedented level, so are expenses--and expenses have outrun income. Out of 630 private colleges and universities, the New York Times found in a survey recently, one in five are running deficits. Yale University's deficit is nearly $1,000,000, Columbia University's is $745,000, Johns Hopkins' is an estimated $260,000.

Next fall the situation will be even more serious. The great G.I. flood, which in one year alone (1947) brought $172 million to the private colleges and $129 million to public institutions, is becoming little more than a trickle. To make matters worse, at the very time that the G.I.s are going out, most campuses face dwindling enrollments as the boys & girls born in the low-birthrate years of the Depression start coming in. Thus, colleges with small endowments and a great dependence on student fees were looking into an uncertain future.

The only thing that seems certain is the fact of rising costs. "Everything," says Amherst's President Charles W. Cole, "has gone up--from chalk to footballs." Indeed, chalk is up 30%, footballs 59%, steel desks 50%. President James Phinney Baxter of Williams has noted: "The frogs used by our biology teachers [have] jumped from 72-c- to $2.25 a dozen . . ." All in all, the cost of running a campus has soared nearly 70% over what it was ten years ago.

Libraries and laboratories alike are swallowing up money like quicksand. Yale is spending $798,000 for books, against $476,000 in 1939; and its scientists, like those of every other institution, have long outgrown their Bunsen burners. A sign of the times is the fact that the University of California's new cyclotron cost $95 million; only the U.S. Government has that kind of money, so the U.S. paid for it.

Modern science is a costly business, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the medical schools. Here, the cost to the college per student, over & above the tuition it receives, has jumped from $388 in 1910 to between $2,000 and $5,000 in 1949. Out of 78 medical schools throughout the U.S., 44 are running in the red to the tune of $10 million a year.

Falling Incomes

But, with or without medical schools, U.S. colleges and universities are suffering in common. They have watched the rates of investment interest dwindle from 5.27% in 1930 to 3.74% in 1945-46. Though Harvard added $72 million to its investments from 1929 to 1946, the buying power of its income stood still.

Seeing a solution only in more income, the nation's institutions of higher learning have become the nation's most persistent campaigners for money. The day has passed when the trustees of the University of Chicago could solve their difficulties simply by voting "that Mr. Rockefeller be requested to consider the advisability of giving to the university the sum of $50,000 . . ." Now, fund-raising campaigns are intensive. Since the war, probably nine out of ten private institutions have embarked on them, with a whole new crop of vice-presidents-in-charge-of-development leading the way. The campaigns range from Columbia's long-range goal of $100 million to Yale's $80 million to Beloit's $5,000,000, from Harvard's $90 million to Pomona's $7,000,000.

In the midst of these campaigns, it sometimes seems to educators as if they scarcely have time to do any educating at all. "In one month," complains Williams' President Baxter, "I spent 24 days wholly or partly outside Williamstown, chasing dollars." But wherever they chase, and whatever they do, they have found no way of balancing outgo with income.

They have already raised their tuitions to the limit. Such big schools as the University of Pennsylvania have raised them from $400 in 1940 to $600 by this year, with the smaller ones following suit. Even the public universities have upped student fees an average of 100% in ten years. Four years for a son at Princeton these days costs the harried parent anywhere between $5,200 and $6,800, counting a conservative allowance for clothing, books and transportation. The University of Chicago costs an average of more than $6,000 and so does Stanford.

Dangerous Lures

The colleges have also surrendered to the temptation to shift their investments from conservative gilt-edge securities to riskier common stocks. Some have even tried operating businesses, factories, stores and hotels, cashing in on their tax-exempt status while operating for a profit. Recently, however, many educators as well as Government officials have begun to frown on the practice. The House Ways & Means' Committee is considering a bill to end exemptions in such cases ; and last month the U.S. Tax Court ordered the C. F. Mueller Co. (macaroni), whose profits go to the New York University law school, to pay back income taxes (TIME, June 5).

As for philanthropy, most educators remain gloomy. Their big returns, they know, are largely due to their campaigns. And once these have played themselves out, higher education will be competing for gifts with an ever-increasing number of well-dramatized charities, medical drives and welfare agencies, both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the millionaire is rapidly disappearing from the U.S. scene; some highly taxed businessmen, harassed by too many appeals, have set up "Let Us Alone Weeks."

There is one big philanthropist left --the U.S. Government. But of all the solutions U.S. higher education could hit upon, this seems, to private educators at least, the most dangerous.

As to just how dangerous, they do not yet quite agree. Some, like Yale's retiring Charles Seymour, see nothing wrong in the Government's subsidizing medical schools ("But I draw the line there"). Others, like Kenyon's President Gordon Chalmers, see little danger in direct scholarship aid to students. Still others, like President Charles F. Phillips of Bates College, see the "lure of federal aid" to private colleges in any form as "an enemy that looks like a friend."

A New Patronage?

There are many others who agree. Among them is a newcomer to the field of education -- Columbia University's President Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Because I believe that the Federal Government has no right to tax money out of our pockets and give it back to us without some form of supervision, therefore I say that they cannot give federal money for the support of higher education. When federal money comes into that field, we are entering a dangerous situation."

The fact is that federal money has already entered the field. As Brown's President Wriston has warned, "federalization of American higher education is coming by drift [if] not by design," whether educators approve of it or not. Such federalization is taking the form, no longer of a G.I. bill, but of $100 million worth of research contracts. "It is a matter for deep concern," says Wriston, "that already . . some independent, private institutions are (directly or indirectly) drawing half or more of their revenues from federal sources."

It is true that colleges and universities have snatched up contracts with eagerness. Harvard boasts more than $2,000,000 worth of projects involving 65 different contracts and 16 different Government agencies. M.I.T. is getting $1,000,000 a month for research, 90% of it from the Government. From Columbia University ($3,000,000) to Colgate ($6,000), private institutions of every type have held out their hands for contracts. "We'd be perfectly happy to have some," says empty-handed President Lynn White Jr. of California's Mills College (for women), "from the Government or G.M. or anybody."

Science v. Humanities

So far, such Government agencies as the Office of Naval Research have set a high standard in allowing universities to pursue pure and basic research without interference. And on their side, some universities have accepted only contracts involving such basic research. Nevertheless, should their financial problems increase, U.S. campuses might soon become less choosy. There is no assurance that the emphasis may not shift soon from pure science to applied science, from long-range projects to those that will give immediate results, e.g., Boston University's aerial photography project. There is no assurance that the whole contract system may not become, as the Hoover Commission has already warned, "in effect a new form of patronage."

Meanwhile, the very existence of so large a research expenditure is subtly changing the emphasis on many campuses. "Yale [Medical School)," reports its director, George B. Darling, "today has more money to spend on research than it does on its teaching faculty." M.I.T. can report the same thing: it is spending $12,000,000 on research compared to $9,000,000 on instruction.

Nor is the change limited to the battle between instruction and research. There is also the battle between science and the humanities. Grants-in-aid, whether from business or Government, rarely go to historians or philosophers. "In the sciences," complains Yale's Dean William C. DcVane, "the project needs the support; in the humanities, the man needs support. Unfortunately, he feels, men are losing out.

Gothic v. Modern

Most educators admit that many economies are still possible. Instead of building lavish collegiate-Gothic buildings, for instance, private campuses can become a good deal more daring in experimenting with modern and more simplified architecture. Academically, they can concentrate on strengthening a solid core curriculum to eliminate aimless overlapping. They can, as the University of Michigan has done, do away with such waste as having separate biology classes for medical and non-medical students.

There are also still endless administrative inefficiencies that can be slashed away. Yet some presidents have reached the limit. "Every economy has been practiced," says Mt. Holyoke's President Roswelle Gray Ham, "except the lowering of standards and the depletion of our plant."

How Safe Is Economy?

How safe are those standards? They have obviously not been affected substantially by some budget slashes, e.g., the fact that Mills College has cut its grounds-maintenance crew from twelve to six men, that one great Eastern university has turned down the chance to hire a top world authority on Ugro-Finnish as a luxury it must do without, that Swarthmore is using table linen only for weekend dinners, or that the University of Chicago's purchasing agent has declared : "We won't have our windows washed so often."

But they have been affected by such facts as that Harvard has curtailed its famous tutorial plan, and that President Baxter of Williams has complained of having to "deny . . . several students the opportunity to do honors work, which involves special individual instruction." This "Tiffany-type education," as President Seymour calls it, is expensive. So is Yale's scholars-of-the-house program, and so are small and intimate classes in general. As one economy measure, U.S. colleges may well have to resort to more & more huge lecture courses. "The unit cost of such education is low indeed,"

Meanwhile, professors are already suffering. Teachers' salaries have risen only 30% since 1940, while the cost of living has gone up about 70%. Yet, as their in comes dwindle, teachers can expect to take on a greater load than ever before. It is also highly questionable whether higher education will always be able to afford such honored academic gilding as the sabbatical.

Shared Facilities

In the face of these common problems, U.S. educators are not standing idly by. Last year 14 educators, lawyers and businessmen formed a Commission on Financing Higher Education, with Columbia University's Dr. Frank D. Fackenthal as chairman and Columbia Political Scientist John D. Millett as executive director.

Though the commission has three years in which to complete its study and recommendations, it has already proved one thing: the financial crisis has driven educators to work with one another as they have never dreamed of doing before.

Cooperation has become something of a postwar phenomenon. The South took the lead when its governors met in 1947 to organize a regional plan for Southern higher education. Now, for the first time, the South will share its facilities, sending medical, dental and veterinary medicine students wherever the best schools, public or private, may be. Thus a university can afford to be strong in one field without wasting its substance in trying to com pete in all the others.

Elsewhere, in lesser ways, other colleges and universities have seen the wisdom of cooperating. There is the Farmington Plan, under which 54 great libraries' plan their buying in common to avoid needless competition; the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, where 24 universities do research together; Chicago's Midwest Interlibrary Center, serving eleven campuses of the Midwest; and Denver's Bibliographic Center for Research, serving the Rocky Mountain states.

No Time for Vanity

Ten years ago, Chancellor Robert > Hutchins of the University of Chicago foresaw all this when he wrote: "Each endowed university still acts as though it were alone in the world, required to give every course and investigate every segment of every field. The reason for this is partly inertia . . . and partly vanity. One university cannot hold up its head if the university next door has a school of animal husbandry and it has none . . . Although this kind of comparison is doubtless better for the universities than appraising them in terms of their football scores, its educational consequence is mediocrity and its financial consequence is ruin. Inertia and vanity are luxuries that endowed universities can no longer afford."

By 1950, U.S. educators have learned that they can afford those luxuries less than ever before. But there is a limit to what the nation's private colleges and universities can accomplish on their own. If their standards are to be kept high, and the gap between private and Government-supported education maintained, they will need the support of outside private sources as well.

Sound the Alarm

Though the educators are not yet ready to admit to desperation, they are at least sounding the alarm. The alarm has gone out to alumni ; and many presidents are convinced, says Amherst's Cole, "that alumni loyalty alone can preserve the freedom of American education." They also want more from corporate enterprises. So far, corporation aid has come mostly in the form of contracts. Now, colleges want corporation gifts with no strings attached, and they want the U.S. Government to amend tax laws to make such gifts come easier.

Caught between rising costs and falling revenues, U.S. colleges figure their needs at $10 for every $5 they are getting now, and $100 for every $50. Speaking for most U.S. educators, Yale's outgoing President Seymour said it flatly: "We need more than token support." To keep the private colleges and universities going, U.S. citizens would, in effect, have to take over their support just as they now contribute to their hospitals, churches and community chests. And the support would have to continue, not for one year or two, but from now on.

*Encouraging as well to the big state universities, which also rely heavily on endowment funds. The University of Minnesota boasts an endowment of $33 million; California more than $54 million; Texas has a whopping $129 million (though its income from its vast oilfields is restricted to building only).

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