It is unlikely that states will be able to continue to spend so much of their budgets on education. Here in Florida, education at all levels takes just over 50 percent of the state budget.

I'm not enthusiastic about the cost-cutting proposals in this article, but people do need to be thinking about what education needs to accomplish and how to get that done at a lower cost, and perhaps in less time.

If Wal-Mart ran your college, you would have never enrolled there, as the profs would have associates degrees, and they'd serve chicken nuggets daily in the caf. The fitness center would be a jump rope they gave you at enrollment, and the dorms would look like an Ibis Hotel. Seriously, colleges-state universities and private-- have had to add upscale facilities across the board to attract those students whose parents pay full freight. I don't see many students clamoring to attend schools with worn-out facilities so they can help the school save a few bucks. This economy will, however, penalize those colleges with high tuition whose students have poorer outcomes, irrespective of the facilities. The days of paying $40K to attend a third-rate school should be over.

Here's an idea. How about making these highly-paid, can't-be-fired professors actually teach instead of relegating this ignominious duty to can't-be-hired graduate assistants? The sudden shock of doing an honest day's labor instead of pissing away time on projects that may interest half a dozen peers would force plenty of these old crocks into retirement. Then cut the administration exactly in half. Nobody will know the difference.

Zac, you are my hero! I am not a college student, but a 1995 college graduate. I took 10 years to get a bachelor's degree because I attended college part-time and worked full-time at minimum wage to pay off my tuition each semester. (I also changed majors several times.) I graduated with no debt; something I do not think is even possible now. In the course of my 10 years at a regional university in the Midwest, tuition costs more than doubled. By the time I graduated in 1995, I was paying more for six hours of classes than I paid for 15 hours when I enrolled 10 years before. At the same time, being in the college setting for so long totally disillusioned me about the value of my supposed "education." I didn't buy a textbook for the last five years I was in school because I discovered 95 percent of the professors based their tests on their in-class lectures. Textbooks were a scam; the professors were egotists in love with the sound of their own voices; and the majority of students were united not by academic zeal, but by a culture of alcohol and substance abuse that ended a lot of lives and careers before they ever got started. College education wasn't about learning; it was about jumping through hoops. There's nothing like paying through the nose to be treated like a trained poodle to make one question the value of higher ed. Since I graduated, my alma mater has made itself more exclusive -- choosier about the students it accepts and much, much, much more expensive, even though it is a state institution that supposedly provides public education. Needless to say, they get no donations from this alum. For more on the whole higher education shell game, see the brilliant documentary "Declining by Degrees." It's long past time we took a wrecking ball to the ivory tower, and especially the tenure track that values esoteric research over excellence in teaching.

I agree with rhinophile. The "wal-mart" approach to your college education would result in your diploma being worth about as much as, well, anything you buy at wal-mart. Colleges charge high tuition because they can and because students are willing to pay more to "shop" there. If they want a wal-mart degree, they can already get one online or at a community college. Judging by the fact that the columnist has no expressed plans to transfer to any number of wal-mart-priced higher education institutions, he is also clearly willing to pay extra for a a degree of higher value.
It is unfortunate that this system disadvantages poor students and makes it difficult for them to get a competitive education. The answer is not, however, to lower the quality of our best institutions to save a few quick bucks. You get what you pay for.
On the subject of selling off valued books, this is a good-sounding gimmick that would yield no real results. To make enough real money to be able to lower tuition costs, colleges would have to sell off entire collections. These valued collections are what attract graduate students, research fellowships, and prestige. That's worth more than a one-time windfall of cash off ebay.

Every college in the US is a corporation. The whole thing is set up that way. State schools=Wal-Mart. Ivy Schools=Bergdorf. Everything in the middle=Macy's/Kohl's.

"Here's this student's perspective: College costs have been rising at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades"

The only other enterprise in this country that has been able to get away with this kind of super-inflation is our health care system. One of the reasons health care has gotten away with it is that most of its customers have no idea what their health care really costs.

With college costs, the problem is that the recipients (mostly young people) have no idea how much the cost of higher education have increased since they generally have no point of reference. To the extent that their parents are sources of funding for them, parents are loathe to deny their children anything so important as college. And to the extent that additional funds are required, students have simply relied more and more on borrowing against their future -- with no one, not their parents, not their lenders and certainly not themselves, suggesting that for many of them their college education was not a good investment.

Meanwhile, college administrators continue to jack their prices and fleece their ignorant customers. It would appear that we are entering an extended period where people will be more careful about how they spend their money and lenders will be more careful about their loans. Finally, college administrators may have to recognize that, like real estate, the value of a college education cannot outstrip inflation forever.

I graduated - as a non-traditional students - with my PhD in December of 2005. College/university costs are skyrocketing and the only things making money on some campuses are the athletic teams. We have a coach here with a $10million contract for four years. Renovations of athletic facilities have far outpaced renovations for housing, libraries or any other facilitiies. Expenditures for athletics is vastly larger per capita than expenditures for other students, and this is a state-supported university. Athletic programs generally pay for themselves. Everybody points this out, but not always the corollary: Student fees and tuition do not pay the bills for most universities. Supporting an ivory-tower mentality on universities and campuses does not help, but Wal-Martizing higher education isn't the answer either.

The point of this piece is not to present a cogent, or even plausible argument, but rather to provoke in a manner more suitable to campus newspapers or debate societies. Why has this essay ended up here? To be inflicted the self-serving garbage of the conceptual bag lady is punishment enough.

Something neither the author nor posters seem to realize is that, for research faculty, not only does the university not pay us, but we pay for the privilege of our title. In the two places that I've been faculty, Assistant Professor costs about $100k per year, Associate costs $250k per year, and I've not been full professor, so I don't know. I occasionally teach classes (for which I generally am not paid) out of the kindness of my heart. Running a research lab at a university, whether public or private, is a small business, and we pay for space (what we get in return is the cachet of the University's name when we're going for funding). So - everyone stop complaining about research faculty. We're paying to be there too.

Professors who teach three classes a week and spend the rest of the time sitting around, eating donuts,and complaining about the health plan. Students who spend 8 hours a day playing videogames in their dorm rooms on plasma TVs, 4 hours a day shopping online, and all weekend binge drinking.
Staff who spend 12 hours a day backstabbing each other over trivial resentments. Deans who give faculty no-interest loans from their budgets to buy $500,000 houses. Vice chancellors who spend tens of thousands of dollars to have rented geraniums planted on campus the day before commencement led by celebrity speakers who charge $50,000 to $100,000 for 40 minutes of gab. New personal computers for entire departments every 18 months, new Blackberries for an entire staff, new logos on new stationery to replace thousands of boxes of expensive stationery with old logos that have to be trashed. Zac -- obscene waste in universities is everywhere.
That's why your parents, and you, ought to think very carefully before making a generous pledge to your alma mater. How much of your hard-earned dollar will be used to buy a new hard-wood floor for the chancellor's office? Or to pay a barista to make espresso in the library? Think very carefully about what universities actually need. I think teaching and research are the reasons universities exist. Do universities also need to be running a cruise ship for all of their students, their staff and their faculty every day?

Zac, your logic is not logical.

Anyone who actually ran a business, rather than just reading about it in articles, can tell you that if you cut the number of employees while the number of customers (students, in this case) remains the same, the lines will get longer and slower.

If UMass really was overstaffed, it would not be the top Google hit for "long lines and red tape."

Colleges and universities are not "just businesses." If an especially determined writer were determined to wrangle them into a business category for the purpose of rhetoric, then they might qualify as long-term investments. They are institutions that deserve public funding and protection from market whims and caprice because they are repositories of knowledge and places where new concepts and technologies grow.

They provide short-term returns in the form of encouragement, tutelage and mentoring. Unless Mr. Bissonnette leads a blessed life following graduation, he will soon see the rare value of these returns. If Wal-Mart ran his college, the entire faculty would rightly strike, and the janitors he wants to hear from would have their union busted.

Having seen the transitory nature of wealth and the durable nature of beauty, the most graceful art enthusiasts in their autumn years tend to funnel their collections into public museums and institutions. Placing a library's catalog on the auction block would generate a bump in income at the expense of generations of public access to first editions of classic works.

Similarly, selling dorm space would be sacrificing an invaluable income stream for a single cash payment. University grounds and their surrounding neighborhoods are prime real estate. It doesn't make sense for a college to cash out its dorm rooms at the cost of collecting future housing fees any more than it makes sense to sell a structured settlement to buy a car or a kidney to buy groceries.

Colleges are feeling a pinch in their endowments because the firms they trusted threw away their long-term investments for short-term gains. A philosophy professor would tell Mr. Bissonnette that money is just a word and send him back to his publicly funded dorm room to ponder the meaning of "wealth."

"I would love it if my college would ask every person on campus (not just the economics professors) to submit three blue-sky ideas for how the school can cut costs."

In Holub's defense, he did set up a place on the Web for that:
http://www.umass.edu/chancellor/budget.html

He spoke to the faculty senate tonight, and it seems like their looking at combining a few colleges to save administrative costs. The faculty seemed none too pleased.

It's going to be an interesting semester.

Be careful what you wish for. As in the arts, education is spoiled by business concepts. I work at a school that is a thinly disguised business model. The problem is that quality is the mission statement but not necessarily (and seldom is) the product. The reason that the IVYs and the other power schools like Stanford can attract the best students is their network of former students run the world. Their professors come there to teach after their stint at running the world. Everyone wants to be a part a of it.

That is unlikely to ever be true of the University of Phoenix, which is a model of what you have suggested. Now that a Bachelor's Degree is as common as a high school diploma was 50 years ago, education has become an attractive business venture. (You need a degree to get anywhere because HR uses a degree to weed out applicants.) Only now that degree costs a fortune because the government enables it. As a rule, State Universities charge fees but the taxpayers pick up the real costs. Private Universities charge tuition, which is much closer to the real costs, and donors pick up the difference. Phoenix and their ilk charge about the same tuition as the best schools and they make a ton of money. How? They do it by underpaying their teachers (calling them "instructors" rather than "professors"), writing common curriculum which a monkey can teach, using office buildings that provide as much atmosphere as, well, office buildings, and allow anybody to enroll if they can get a loan.

Sounds like Walmart, doesn't it? Like I said, be careful what you wish for.