The essay by the superb Robert Meister is available here; although focused on the University of California, its analyses of privatization as a revenue enhancement strategy whose window is now closing are applicable elsewhere. An excerpt conveys the incisive nature of the piece.
Most of UC’s top administrators probably know that privatization is failing. Its internal documents no longer assume that students will pile on educational debt to avoid a lifetime of stagnant earnings as income growth becomes limited to an ever-smaller percentage of college graduates. In retrospect, privatization now seems like an attempt to leverage taxpayer funding so as to benefit from a late twentieth-century pattern of income growth and distribution that has turned out to be transitional rather than permanent. But public universities cannot simply go back to taxpayer funding as though decades of excessive debt, including student debt, had not already been incurred by taxpayers who bought more education, healthcare, and housing than their current incomes could sustain. As debt service eats up a growing portion of expected future income, many middle-income families who resist higher borrowing are likely to resist higher taxes, especially if they also have to set aside more money for defined contribution pensions. Is setting aside hundreds of dollars each month to pay off the compound interest on student loans that average $24,000 on graduation over fifteen years (or more) a better use of that income than earning tax-free compound interest on savings for retirement? It’s not if the incomes of many graduates are likely to be stagnant.
(Another of Meister's must-read pieces is "They Pledged Your Tuition," where he shows how the UC Regents pledged rising tuition as security for real estate deals for which the term "conflict of interest" is much too weak.) H/T Christopher Newfield's blog, Remaking the University.
[UPDATE: Newfield is co-author of this piece "Humanists and the Public University." Its abstract: "The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it now also demands from humanists a new level of institutional engagement and reflexivity about the conditions of their labor."]
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