Higher education finance?
I work in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). It's a network of old normal schools and land grant colleges peppered throughout Pennsylvania. There've been big things happening at PASSHE. Over the last few years, six of the universities were consolidated into two bigger institutions. As if this wasn't big enough, recently, the chancellor of the system announced that the Governor is planning an even bigger 'redesign': merging the state's public community colleges and PASSHE into one big system.
Similar upheavals are happening throughout higher education in the United States. We've heard the stories about small liberal arts schools closing, but also big public institutions like West Virginia University getting sucked into black hole-like crises. Three quarters of professors are adjuncts. The tenure track is a razor's edge. Tenured professors lose their jobs everyday, whether because of doxxing for saying the word 'Palestine' or the wholesale dissolution of their department, which could be mathematics or anthropology. There's talk of 'demographic cliffs' where the generation born in the wake of the great financial crisis is graduating high school and there are fewer of them than previous generations. Fewer students means less tuition revenue, which means budget issues--or so we're told.
On the other hand, calls for (and maybe progress on?) the cancellation of student debt have gone further into the state apparatuses than ever before. Free College isn't a laughable dream. In fact, there are "Promise Programs" in nearly every state that guarantee some amount of tuition for public universities. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer put out a video with Professor Potato lauding the State of Michigan's new free tuition program. Meanwhile, I just learned that Swarthmore College, the private liberal arts school out of Philly, gets 50% of its operating budget from endowment investments, and charges around $70,000/year in tuition and fees.
What's going on in higher education finance? How does it work exactly? I've dipped my toes into these tertiary waters before but I haven't done a real dive into it. I know there's a difference between private and public, of course, and I know that public institutions that've neoliberalized are hard to parse clearly as public. I've looked at bond statements from industrial development corporations supporting that neoliberalization. But how do these budgets really ebb, flow, and work? What's up with federal programs, FAFSA, institutional debt, endowments, funding formulas, state-relateds, scholarship programs, promise programs, administrative bloat, unions, adjunctification, distance education/tech, etc? Where do the dollars go and where do they come from? And how does all this reverberate through the balance of forces? Political polarization is always unquestionably measured by educational attainment, which means whether a voter or potential voter has graduated from college. What's the connection here?
As usual, I want to get into the ideological plumbing of all this, not just general descriptions of revenue and expenditure with critical concepts but the lines of force in the institutions composing this aspect of the apparatus, going to primary fiscal and financial documents rather than takes and metatakes, with an eye towards what socialist policy can and should look like. I'd like to read the budget lines and bond statements and have a better sense of inflows and outlays.
If you have any reading recommendations please send them along! You know what I like and engage with and I really appreciation recs from readers (you all basically built my syllabus for my recent pensions project).