According to the New York Sun, New York lawmakers are likely soon to institutionalize multi-year tuition hikes at the State University of New York and City University of New York. With a straight face, officials at the two systems have had the brass to comment that such a policy will put an end to “a dangerous game of ‘tuition roulette.’”

In a letter to the Sun, I responded:

Dangerous? To whom? With such hikes foreordained and fobbed off on the public as a prudent and rational plan for financing campuses, students will face endless tuition increases — increases designed to cover the endlessly rising costs that are the direct result of managerial inefficiencies. This scheme will of course inflict the most damage on students least able to afford higher education.
In the long run, phony “fixes” such as this one, which sanctimoniously enshrine rising costs, are also dangerous for the residents of the state, which faces a $4 billion-plus budget gap, and from which productive taxpayers are fleeing in droves. Institutionalizing tuition hikes implies that campus leaders are helpless in the face of spending, and that both costs and tuition can only increase.
Such policies serve as a sort of deus ex machina that greases the way for trustees, administrators, and politicians to abdicate their fiduciary responsibility for controlling, and even lowering, tuition by systematically and structurally controlling costs, all the while strengthening academic quality.

Yes, tuition at the state’s public campuses, and at other colleges and universities, could well decrease if the two boards had the stomach to seriously question and buck the interest groups that benefit from ever rising costs and infusions of funds. With vision and a bit of bravery, these trustees could, before raising tuition, and with the help of disinterested, objective advisers from outside the systems

  • Assess, and increase where feasible, the potential of faculty (and administrative) productivity, before, as proposed willy-nilly, and at vast cost, hiring large numbers of new full-time faculty at SUNY and CUNY, and
  • Assess the true value and utilization of campus programs and physical infrastructure, instead of acceding without a peep to the reigning interests’ demands and committing billions of dollars more to academic programs, many of which could well be consolidated or eliminated, and capital construction, much of which may well not be needed.

Tuition raises graven in stone are indeed dangerous, but it is misleading to associate them with roulette, a game of chance. Rather, they are at the heart of a calculated and opaque gambit designed to keep the cash flowing to self-interested constituencies, notwithstanding the danger to students and the public.

On second thought, however, roulette may be an apt allusion, since there too the house always wins!