Thinking clearly about liberal arts colleges: cost
Full moon at dawn, Winston Salem NC
If you wanted to build a low-cost college you might start by selecting the disciplines that are the least expensive to deliver. And if you did that, you would find liberal arts disciplines at the top of the list. But if you were wondering which colleges in the United States are most expensive based on tuition and fees, schools that think of themselves as liberal arts colleges would also be at the top. Understanding this paradox is a key to thinking about the future of the liberal arts, and the future of college, in America.
Why are the liberal arts inexpensive? Liberal arts faculty earn less, on average, than faculty in other disciplines (though some social science disciplines are also low-paying). There are many more qualified liberal arts faculty than there are available full-time liberal arts faculty positions, which depresses salaries. So does the fact that in many disciplines there is limited competition from “industry” for people with advanced liberal arts degrees.
The liberal arts are inexpensive to deliver. Few require special classrooms or equipment, and even those that do–biology for instance–can be outfitted to meet undergraduate needs at a manageable cost. Learning materials aren’t specialized. Many are in the public domain and those that aren’t can be readily acquired. And liberal arts disciplines have worked hard to provide low-cost materials to students.
Why are liberal arts colleges expensive? If you pay attention to debates about college costs, you can recite a number of answers to this question. College cost increases, though moderating significantly in the recent past, have risen faster than inflation for decades. The easy availability of student loans makes it possible for colleges to raise their rates. Because cost is a signal of prestige, tuition and fees at liberal arts colleges are higher than those at other sorts of institutions.
Behind these causes there are two others, equally obvious but less frequently remarked. First, liberal arts colleges receive fewer operational subsidies from local, state, and federal governments than do other sorts of institutions. Community college operations are subsidized by city and county governments. Public universities are subsidized by state governments. (Those few public liberal arts colleges receive these subsidies as well, and charge less expensive tuition than their independent counterparts). And the federal government subsidizes the operations of research institutions. The bulk of liberal arts colleges don’t have access to these operational subsidies and therefore have to find other ways to cover operational costs. Charging higher tuition is one of them.
Second, while the liberal arts are inexpensive to deliver, liberal arts colleges offer all sorts of services, activities, and programs that are not directly related to the liberal arts. These activities can be valuable for students, and many of them–study abroad, say, or athletics, or living on campus–are routinely associated with institutions that call themselves liberal arts colleges. Those same activities, though, flourish on all sorts of campuses and may not bear any liberal arts imprints. They are also expensive to deliver, and raise the cost of an education at schools that call themselves liberal arts colleges.
Does it matter?
People from all sorts of financial backgrounds perceive college to be expensive. And people perceive the liberal arts to be less useful than other fields of study–business, say, or nursing, or the trades. Given these truths, many liberal arts colleges have eliminated liberal arts disciplines. Others have added new disciplines outside the liberal arts. Still more have built out the co-curriculum so that the experience outside the classroom is attractive to undergraduates even if the liberal arts may not be.
All of these moves are rational. But none of them respond to the truth at the core of this essay–that the liberal arts are cheap but liberal arts colleges are not. This truth suggests another approach, one that embraces the liberal arts both because of their intrinsic value and because they can be taught and learned inexpensively. It then reduces other costs so that the price to students shrinks and the experience of students is consistently a liberal arts experience. Several start-up colleges (here, here, and here) have designed themselves in this way, promising a rigorous liberal arts education coupled only with the experiences most essential to heighten the meaning of that education. I suspect we will see more established liberal arts colleges follow that path.