Hard Times on the Old Quad

By Susan Tifft

These are trying days on American campuses. Faced with the double dilemma of a shrinking student population and rising costs, colleges and universities across the country are simultaneously rattling tin cups and wielding budget axes. One result: sharp cutbacks in programs and services. "The 1990s," says Cornell University President Frank H.T. Rhodes, "are going to be very tough."

He should know. Last week Cornell announced plans to seek $1.25 billion in private donations by 1995 -- the largest fund-raising target in the history of American higher education. Cornell's drive is but the latest in a series of efforts to acquire huge sums for colleges and universities. Last month Columbia set a new five-year goal of $1.15 billion. Yale will embark on a $1 billion-plus campaign sometime in the next 18 months, and Harvard is said to be considering a target as high as $2 billion.

As they dun alumni and other donors for funds, schools are also pinching pennies, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Bryn Mawr is phasing out five graduate departments, including Spanish and anthropology. Lehigh has eliminated its classics department, while Northwestern has cut its nursing and dental hygiene programs. Columbia, which earlier abandoned its linguistics and geography departments, announced in June that it would follow the University of Chicago's lead and shut down its library science school. Dartmouth has cut 55 staffers and eliminated seven junior varsity sports, including men's tennis, lacrosse, soccer and golf.

Some colleges are hiring strategic planners; others are contracting out janitorial services. Stanford recently decided to form a new management % company, complete with a nonacademic CEO, to handle its finances and investments. Harvard, Duke and Princeton already have similar organizations. Last spring Franklin & Marshall College sold its bookstore to a private company, netting the school $900,000 and saving it the burden of carrying unsold inventory. "This is not a onetime adjustment," says Lehigh President Peter Likins. "It's going to be a way of life."

Post-secondary institutions are feeling both an economic and a demographic squeeze. As the stock and bond markets continue to wilt, schools can no longer expect robust returns on their endowments, so they are struggling to refurbish their capital. Meantime, the days of bulging classrooms are long gone. The 1965-75 baby bust led to a 10% dip in the number of college-age students in the 1980s; the head count will plummet a further 25% by the mid-1990s. The ability of institutions to simply crank up tuition and fees has also hit a ceiling. Last spring Princeton scaled back a projected 6.9% hike in tuition, room and board to 6.7%, leaving a still daunting annual bill per student of $20,498. "We used to view tuition as a tithe paid by grateful parishioners," says Northwestern President Arnold Weber. "Now there clearly is price resistance."

Traditionally, colleges have buffered the sticker shock of tuition with assistance programs that were heavily subsidized by Washington. But over the past decade the Federal Government's commitment to that aid has failed to keep pace with inflation, and universities have been forced to take up the slack. "It's ironic," says Eamon Kelly, president of Tulane. "The Reagan Administration criticized us for high tuitions, yet a substantial part of that was caused by their cutbacks in aid, which we then had to replace." At Cornell, the sum earmarked for student grants and loans -- $28.2 million -- is almost four times what it was in 1980.

Five-figure price tags and deep budget cuts at some private colleges may drive students to the less expensive public sector, where the annual bill for an undergraduate education averages just $6,991 this year. But that bargain is unlikely to last. State legislatures across the country are slashing their subsidies to higher education, forcing the same belt tightening and search for donations that afflict the private sector. The City University of New York has canceled 2,000 classes this year and hired 670 fewer adjunct teachers. "We're all facing a revenue diet," says Gilbert Whitaker, provost at the University of Michigan, where the state appropriation has fallen from 59% of total revenue to 44% over the past decade.

If there is good news in all the slashing, it may be that colleges are starting to take a more focused look at their priorities and discard the notion that they must offer a full panoply of academic disciplines. "Universities cannot be all things to all people," says William Danforth, chancellor of Washington University, which in the past year dumped both its sociology department and its dentistry school. The likelihood is that most colleges will weather the storms of reorganization; some may even emerge stronger than before.

But if the rough going lasts indefinitely, as it appears it might, high tuitions and stagnant sources of aid could turn America's pluralistic system of higher education -- the pride of the postwar era -- back into a preserve of the well-heeled. "We have some real social tinder here," warns Columbia President Michael Sovern. Already Smith College has announced that it will end its five-year practice of admitting students without regard to financial need, starting with next fall's freshman class. That could be an unpleasant harbinger of further strictures to come.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source:the Chronicle of Higher Education}]CAPTION: Major college fund drives