WITH COLLEGE FOR ALL

By NICHOLAS LEMANN

One hundred and three years ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made his famous elegiac announcement that America no longer had a frontier. Turner was interested in the frontier less as a place than as a sociological phenomenon. "The West was another name for opportunity," he wrote; to his mind it had been the means by which the nation delivered on its promise of a chance of advancement for all citizens. It was the possible loss of this, not of open range, that worried him.

What is not so well known about Turner is what he thought the replacement for the frontier would be: state universities. They could take on the mystical duties for democracy that free land had once performed--with, of course, an academic twist. "The test tube and the microscope are needed, rather than the ax and rifle, in this new ideal of conquest," he wrote.

Turner's dream of making state universities the main avenue of opportunity in America was hardly unique to him. Hints of the concept can be found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (founders of the universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania), and of Abraham Lincoln, who signed into law one of this country's first landmark pieces of national social legislation, the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided "land grants" for the establishment of colleges of agriculture and engineering.

During the golden era of American higher education, the middle decades of the 20th century, the democratic potential of public universities seemed endless. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1943 calling for a new social type, the American radical. "He will favor public education, truly universal educational opportunity at every level. He will be little concerned with the future of private education," Conant wrote--this from the head of the country's most prominent private university.

In one sense the vision has come true. Increasingly, a college degree and middle-class opportunity are the same thing, and four of every five college degrees are delivered by a public university. Back in the '70s, when the number of college graduates was growing rapidly because of the coming of age of the baby boomers and a wave of campus construction, the economic "return" from a college degree began to fall; economists nodded their heads with satisfaction at this proof of the law of supply and demand at work. Then in the '80s the return began to rise dramatically because the high-tech economy put more and more value on the degree. Today college graduates earn double what high school graduates earn, or more.

The problem nowadays is not with the value of a college education but with the other side of the equation--the idea that if college is going to be "another name for opportunity," then it should be open to everyone with ability and ambition, irrespective of ability to pay. In that regard, a distinct erosion has taken place.

Traditionally, public higher education was not completely free of charge, but the cost was nominal. Average tuition and room and board for in-state students at public four-year schools was less than $1,000 until 1966; tuition alone was less than $1,000 until 1985. The understanding was that states would charge a student only about a tenth of the actual cost of educating him or her in a public university. State universities were fantastically good politics: pork-barrel construction projects and middle-class entitlement programs rolled into one. Most states committed large portions of their budgets to subsidizing their universities.

In the late 1970s, two foundation-sponsored blue-ribbon commissions recommended that the states ratchet up what students paid for a public university education to a third of the actual cost. Nothing happened right away, but afterward the states got into the habit of increasing the cost of higher education whenever a recession would hit--even though recessions are exactly the times when families are least able to absorb higher bills. (Later, of course, when the recession ended, the cost would not be ratcheted back down.) In most states, rising Medicaid costs and tough-on-crime legislation that required the construction of new prisons also cut into the funds that were available for higher education.

The worst increases came during the "Bush recession" of the early '90s. Between 1991 and 1994, the average state-university tuition went up at least 10% a year. Since 1980, the cost in most states has tripled or quadrupled. Today the price of a state university education is distinctly not nominal. The average total cost for a year of public higher education is $9,285. At the world-class, "flagship" state universities, costs are approaching the private-university level. Next year the University of California at Berkeley will cost more than $13,818 and the University of Virginia an estimated $10,620.

It is amazing that greater attention has not focused on what amounts to a real shift in the operating principles of schools that together serve 9 million students. Rising tuitions at such institutions as Stanford and Harvard generate national discussion because their costs are the highest and because they are the schools on the minds of the opinion-making classes. But prices at the handful of most prestigious private schools do not affect very many people and are not a clear public issue. Across-the-board increases at state schools amount to a major change in government policy, yet they remain mysteriously underdiscussed.

The main federal student-loan program, created in 1965, is interest-free while the student is in college. Because of the run-up in the cost of public higher education, loan demand was rising so rapidly that the program was in danger of becoming ruinously expensive. So Congress started a second student-loan program, in which the recipients pay interest even during their school years. This program, rolled out in 1992, now has 2 million borrowers and a loan volume of $7.6 billion. The effect has been that of a one-two punch: as tuitions and fees have risen, so has the cost to the borrower of a student loan. Loan interest adds a few hundred dollars a year to the cost of a college education.

In defense of the cost increases, two arguments are usually made. First, as costs have gone up, so has the availability of financial aid--hence students of modest means are not being shut out. Second, public higher education is still a great bargain, offered to students at substantially less than cost and, if viewed as an investment, likely to produce a high return in the form of future earnings.

The problem with the first argument is that the fit between costs and aid is not close enough. In most states the cost of education is controlled by one bureaucracy and the dispensing of financial aid by another; increases in aid almost always lag behind increases in costs. Moreover, the parents of students who use state universities as a gateway into the middle class are often unfamiliar with the process of putting together a financing mechanism. Also, some state-university systems have responded to budget cuts by simply reducing their student body. In 1992 and '93, to cite the most notorious example, the California State University system cut 20,000 slots and the California community-college system more than 150,000.

Even if a state-university education pays off richly in the long run, allowing it to go from practically free to expensive changes the bargain between the citizen and the state. For most Americans, public education is the most important government service--important economically, important socially because it binds us together as a people, and important psychically because it represents opportunity, the central American value. It gives a distinctive feeling to this country if, unlike the rest of the world, we offer education at all levels in an open and unrestricted way to everyone who qualifies. This unique and precious national commitment is now diminishing.