James Piereson shares with Weekly Standard readers his assessment of key problems plaguing the nation’s top public universities.
To put it simply, big government is killing the elite public university.
In the heyday of the flagship universities in the 1950s and 1960s, state governments spent the bulk of their funds on just a few functions—primarily transportation, public safety and corrections, and higher education. During this period, flagship universities had few competitors for state funds, and, indeed, with their alumni numerous in the legislatures and the baby-boom generation headed off to college, they were well positioned to lay claim to a rising share of state budgets. Across the nation, close to 20 percent of state budgets flowed into the public universities at a time when public employee pensions, health care, and K-12 education were still minor line items. For a brief time, the political environment favored generous investments in elite public education. That environment encouraged an increasing share of 18-year-olds to enroll in public universities, and it attracted some of the most able young Americans into college teaching.
That is no longer the case. The flagship universities now face an unfriendly political environment in many places as a result of the expansion of state governmental functions since the 1960s. States now have many functions and constituent groups to attend to that command more money and attention than higher education. According to a report by the National Association of State Budget Officers, Medicaid accounted for 26 percent and K-12 education another 20 percent of total state expenditures in 2014, proportions that have been expanding steadily for years. Thus, nearly half of all state expenditures are now allocated to two programs that commanded no state resources during the heyday of public higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. The well-connected advocates and interest groups that support these programs are unlikely to permit those shares to decline. Public employee pensions, meanwhile, command about 5 percent of spending in many states, but, thanks to years of underfunding and deferred payments to the funds, some experts expect that share to grow to perhaps 10 or 12 percent in the decades ahead.
By contrast, higher education now lays claim to just 10 percent of state expenditures, or roughly half the share allocated to this sector in the 1950s and 1960s. Total expenditures for public education have grown in nominal terms over the decades, but not as rapidly as in the immediate postwar period or as rapidly as state expenditures in general have grown in recent decades. In the scramble for public dollars, the flagship universities must now contend with public employee unions demanding funds to pay for salaries and pensions for their members, court orders and referenda directing ever more public money to K-12 education, and the lure of federal matching funds for Medicaid, welfare, and other federally subsidized programs. Given political realities, the universities are unlikely to win many of these battles.
