The numbers showing the exponential increase in Wayne State tuition over the last 20-25 years speak for themselves, but who is to blame?
Last week, Detroit News editorial page editor and proud Tartar Nolan Finley put much of the blame at the feet of his alma mater's administration.
Detroit News: I sensed the former Ford Motor Co. vice chairman [and Wayne President Allan Gilmour] didn’t fully appreciate how the $900-a-year tuition hike will impact the working commuter students who make up Wayne’s enrollment core. He spoke of the need to raise revenue to keep WSU competitive in attracting elite professors and students and to support headline-grabbing research — and as an alumnus, those things make me proud. But I don’t think that as a student I’d have been willing to pile on personal debt to pay for them.
The Freep editorial board, however, while acknowledging Wayne's paradoxical dual roles as aspiring elite research university and utilitarian commuter school, says blame for Wayne's absurdly skyrocketing tuition (even after adjusting for inflation, Wayne is roughly 2.5 times more expensive than it was 25 years ago) belongs to Lansing for its higher education spending cuts.
Free Press: The idea was simple: Wayne State’s primary purpose is to be an “opportunity campus,” a place where nontraditional students could access higher education as easily as run-of-the-mill, four-year students. If you’re working two jobs and raising a family, college — still the most valuable ticket to the middle class — has to be flexible and affordable. For years, Wayne State’s low tuition increases were offset by the state allocation.
But then the recession hit, and that allocation failed to keep pace with rising costs. And then, to add financial insult to injury, Gov. Rick Snyder cut higher education funding by 15% in his first budget, in part to pay for a big business tax cut. Some funding has been added back, but even so, Wayne State’s allocation in the coming year is the equivalent to what the university got in 1991 — essentially reflecting two “lost” decades in state commitment. Budgets are moral documents; draw your own conclusions about what Snyder’s decisions say about his higher-ed scruples.
And when Wayne State says it gets state aid equal to what it received in 1991, it isn't talking about inflation-adjusted real dollars. They're basically like an employee without a cost-of-living raise in 22 years.
But can you really put a price on "unrivaled connectivity?"
