Tracy Jan's article in yesterday's Boston Globe totally misses what I think is a fundamentally changing attitude towards public higher education among middle class families in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Enrollment at UMass Amherst is growing strongly and the profile of its students has never been better. You would never know this from reading this article.
Instead what we learn is that elite high school students in Massachusetts (at least one at Wayland High School) continue to draw the obvious conclusion that, if price is no object, public universities in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Charlottesville and Chapel Hill are more prestigious places to get a bachelor's degree than our flagship public university in Amherst.
What the Globe is really missing here is how the recent recession and associated financial crisis has forced many families to think hard about how much they can afford to spend on junior's college education. This is beginning to bring some real price competition to bear in the higher educational marketplace. For more details, check out a 2006 MassINC report by Harvard's Bridget Terry Long that documents the growing burden of rising higher ed costs on Bay State households.
When I graduated from high school in idyllic Newton, MA, UMass Amherst was considered by many of my classmates and their families to be a safety school. I think that financial reality is forcing many of these same classmates to seriously consider public higher education for their own children.
The article does a nice job of highlighting how poorly our state college and university system has been supported in recent years and underscores the price of this disinvestment in terms of the number of faculty and overall research output.
On a related note....it is astounding to me that people are willing to to pay an extra $17,000 per year to send their kid to UConn. Cal or Michigan -- OK fine. But Storrs? Is a successful basketball team really that important? I'd like to think not. I also can't help but wonder if some of these "student exports" weren't accepted at UMass Amherst.
It will be interesting to see if the declining ability of middle class families in Massachusetts to pay for private colleges and universities will lead to any public call for greater investment in our public higher education system.
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