By Chato Hazelbaker
In their recent piece “What Critics Get Wrong About the Ivy League,” Jeffery Sonnenfeld and Philip J. Hanlon open, “Barely a day passes without colleges scolded in the headlines over admissions or athletics and endowments or education and expression.” They go on to describe what critics and the public get wrong about higher education as they expose how the focus on Ivy League and other highly selective colleges is poisoning the national discourse on higher education.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have watched the gap between the public discourse about higher education and my day-to-day experience on campus grow. From my time as an adjunct faculty member, administrator and now community college president, I have often clicked into a story about higher education only to find that it is about one of the nation’s prestige colleges that has no resemblance to my day-to-day life. The effect is a total misrepresentation of the experience of the majority of students in America, which then hinders students from attempting college, confuses, and leads policy makers down the wrong paths.
The irony with Sonnenfeld and Hanlon’s piece is that they, too, focus on highly selective colleges. They have spent time in Ivy League classes — and are more experienced and smarter than I am — but time after time they use the phrase “American higher education” when what they are really talking about are the fifteen schools that make up the Ivy League or Ivy League plus. Ivy League plus students make up less than 1% of the total number of students. In terms of schools, that category includes only 15 schools out of more than 3,500 institutions in the United States according to the 2022 Digest of Education Statistics — or half of one percent.
The authors cite concerns about the costs of higher education, which might be the area where a focus on the Ivy League distorts the picture the most. A perfect example is the story of Brown’s $46 million dollar budget deficit, a story that was covered nationally (though I doubt most folks on the street could tell you what state Brown University is in). A $46 million dollar deficit would be unimaginable at most schools, but at Brown that deficit is only 3% of the operating budget, and the college is sitting on a $1.7 billion dollar endowment. They will need no cuts to right-size the budget, their growth will simply slow.
Brown’s 2025 operating budget was approved at $1.83 billion dollars. With that funding, Brown will educate around 11,000 undergraduates next year — just over $154,545 per student. As a community college president, I am currently looking ahead at my own budget: Next year, we expect to serve around 6,500 students. Our budget will likely land around $65 million, or about $10,000 per student — or about 1/15th what will get spent on the average Brown student. And, For my students half of that $10,000 will come out of their own pockets in the form of tuition and fees.
Now, before Ivy League administrators, graduates and faculty rise up to complain about me not comparing apples to apples, I agree; and that’s actually my point. Public perception is based on discussions of budgets of schools that have absolutely no relation to the average higher education institution in America. At the macro level, this makes people think colleges have all kinds of money when really only the very elite and large schools do.
At the micro level, it creates a false perception of cost that discourages individual students from pursuing higher education. Building on the above example, Brown’s cost of attendance next year will be $88,756, a fact included in some of the articles addressing the deficit and one, that has no relation to reality for most students and families. Five years ago, I watched a focus group of potential high-school students discuss what they thought a two-year degree at a community college would cost. One participant threw out the number $100,000. Others expressed numbers in the $10-15,000 range, but no one came close to that institution’s cost of attendance at the time: $4,400 a year. Skewing the cost perception also skews the value perception. According to the Social Security Administration, the lifetime earnings of men with a bachelor’s degree is $900,000 more than those with a high school diploma, and $630,000 more for women. The way I see this play out every day at a community college bears this out: The majority of our students come to us from low-income backgrounds; we can take a student making $15 an hour, give them six months to a year of training in welding, and they come out fully employed at $32 or more an hour. No one in the Ivy League is going to get excited about $32 an hour, but for an individual — and, in many cases, a family and community — doubling someone’s hourly wage is transformative. We know that if the student completes the credential with us, they are more likely to have all kinds of better outcomes for themselves and their children.