The same week the news about the college admissions scandal broke, the ceiling fell in during a colleague’s class. While thankfully no one got hurt, the room has been closed. The pipes are so compromised there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again.
No story ran on the ceiling, but story after story after story after story ran on the revelations that Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin and a host of other wealthy people allegedly used criminal and corrupt means to secure their children space in elite colleges. Part of the appeal of the celebrity story is its delicious, gossipy value. Part is the self-righteous superiority the story allows (“I would never pay a tutor to take the test for my kid…”). But mostly it’s easy: It lets us off the hook for the real scandal of higher education today.
Undoubtedly, the criminal college admissions scheme has exposed legal institutionalized practices of legacy admissions and other preferential strategies at work in college admissions. But the much more serious crimes taking place in American higher education remain unspoken and uncharged — because they implicate a much broader swath of the public.
Indeed, the biggest scandal in American higher education today is the staggering disinvestment in public universities like CUNY, even as politicians and the public pay lip service to abhorring the inequalities in higher education. What would it mean to view as scandalous the well-documented decline in federal and state funding of public universities across the country over the last 25 years, at the same time students have been expected to shoulder the cost of those “missing expenditures” through tuition hikes (amid other persistent cuts to federal and state financial aid and vital support services)? What would it mean to view self-declared “education governor” Andrew Cuomo of New York as a part of the problem for the ways he has underfunded public universities in the state and to see members of the public who allow this as his accomplices? What would it mean to see the scandal that the broken ceiling exposes as part of a larger systemic problem directly tied to the current state budget’s continued underfunding of CUNY (which once again this time around, fell dramatically short)?
Nearly a quarter of a million undergraduates attend the City University of New York, and they are caught in a vicious bind. Tuition for CUNY — which was free until 1975 — has risen by 31% since 2011. It now stands at $6,730 for full-time students at CUNY’s senior colleges on top of the high costs of housing, food, transportation, books and other personal expenditures in New York City, where the majority of students attending CUNY come from families with incomes of $30,000 or less.
At the same time, CUNY’s per-pupil funding declined by 18% between 2008 and 2018.
Cuomo has repeatedly refused to sign a Maintenance of Effort bill, which would at least keep funding for CUNY and SUNY in line with inflation. An $86 million gap has grown between the state’s Tuition Assistance Program for CUNY’s neediest students and the actual tuition fees, requiring CUNY colleges to cannibalize their own budgets to cover the shortfall. The state budget agreed to on March 31 promises more of the same: insufficient funding to cover rising costs, deferred maintenance and a desperately needed raise for adjunct instructors.
The results of this underfunding for students have been disastrous. Class sizes swell and resources are increasingly scarce. Over 20% of students report being unable to register for a course needed for graduation. As Barbara Bowen, head of CUNY’s faculty and staff union puts it, under these shortfalls, “The City University of New York is reaching a breaking point.”
At Brooklyn College where we teach, we have seen first-hand the devastating consequences of the state’s disinvestment. An anonymous instagram account Brokelyn College chronicles the ceiling leaks, broken toilets, busted pipes and other manifestations of decline. Where we work, the administration had to institute a near hiring freeze this year because there’s no money to even replace faculty and staff who have left and retired — which has been part of a pattern of little hiring for years. (One department has lost six tenured or tenure-track professors in the past six years without hiring a single replacement.) Class sizes have been pushed up and up because there isn’t enough money even for adjuncts (though adjuncts teach most classes and are paid the horrifying low rate of on average $3,500 per class), let alone the full-time faculty that students deserve. CUNY’s 30,000 faculty and staff have been laboring without a contract for 16 months.
But what makes this financial neglect positively criminal from an economic justice perspective is the immense promise and transformation that CUNY embodies. Researchers studying how college enhances intergenerational mobility found that nine of the top 20 colleges nationwide that are actually succeeding in providing social mobility to their students were part of the City University. Brooklyn College came in eighth best in the nation.
Indeed, schools like Brooklyn College provides some of the best hope for the values this country professes to hold dear: the opportunity to transform yourself and your family’s situation, a space for deep inquiry into the most pressing questions of our time, a campus that embodies the rich tapestry of the U.S.
Our campus provides a daily reminder of the beauty and power of learning together, across lines of race, religion and nationality. Fall 2018 enrollment was 25% white, 21% Latino, 18% black, 18% Asian. Devout Jewish students work with equally devout Muslim students who work with equally devout Catholic Puerto Rican and Mexican-American students. African-American, Brooklyn–bred students eat with transgender Latina students, are lab partners with Ukrainian immigrants, study politics with Pakistani-Americans, do theater with students from upstate New York all-the-while learning accounting with Haitian immigrants studying philosophy with Chinese immigrants learning history with other longtime Brooklynites.
Our students also tend to be poor — in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Many suffer hunger and homelessness as college students ( a recent study found 48% of CUNY students experiencing food insecurity within the month and 14% homeless within the previous year), yet press forward determined to get an education.
Our students ride the subway for hours to get to school, they work overnight jobs doing home health care or stocking shelves to afford the cost of college. They take their siblings to school and their grandparents to the doctor because their parents work multiple jobs to afford rent in this city. They sometimes cannot afford even the subway ride to school — and yet over and over they do extraordinary work and show us what can be accomplished when a diversity of Americans actually gets the chance to go to college.
Our own experience as co-directors of a new research program illustrates what can be done with even a modest infusion of resources. Three years ago, we received a small pilot grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that allowed us to create a program to enable research opportunities and mentoring for transfer students. (Sixty percent of Brooklyn College students are transfer students, most from community colleges.) And even more amazing things ensued. From identifying and mapping book deserts in Brooklyn, to how Japanese manga is re-purposing and reshaping Shakespeare, from making a map of civil rights sites in NYC to interviewing and documenting gentrifying Williamsburg to cataloging Roman coins, our students’ research plumbed wide range of interests and research methods, as diverse as the students themselves. Over and over we have heard from students that not only did the program dramatically expand their research skills, it transformed what they saw as possible. “I feel like I have a future,” we hear again and again.
A young man who started at community college while working at his family’s deli is heading to Brown University for doctoral work in modern Shakespeare. Another young man who served time in prison has taken his project on the history of African Americans in his neighborhood in Brooklyn to a prestigious public policy master’s program. Another black Caribbean-American student traveled to Korea to study its language and its thriving hip hop scene; another is enrolled in a screenwriting master’s program at UCLA; another is getting her doctorate in English at Columbia. And the list goes on.
The crime taking place in American higher education is not just illegally gaming the system to get a rich student — or even 30 — in where they’re not supposed to. The real scandal is the endless professions of shock and horror about inequalities exposed in higher education but the refusal to see our public role in maintaining them. It’s the quieter act of systematically chipping away at the promise and possibility that public higher education provides for a much broader and more diverse group of students. Our city, our state and our country can do better. But so far we have chosen not to.
Aja is associate professor of public and urban policy in the Department of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies; Entin is professor of English and American studies; and Theoharis is distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College.
