HIGHER ED'S FOUNDING PROMISE.

• Author: Zimmerman, Jonathan

FROM COLONIAL SCHOOLS TO THE LAND GRANT ERA, AMERICA'S UNIVERSITIES PLEDGED TO SERVE THE PUBLIC BY MAKING COLLEGE AFFORDABLE. IT'S TIME TO HOLD THEM TO IT.

Each fall, I teach a freshman history seminar called "Why College?"

Fifteen new students crowd around a table on the first day, exuding a mix of excitement and caution. They are watching me--and, of course, each other--as we all wonder what lies ahead.

I begin the class by sharing the founding mottoes of several dozen American universities. What, I ask, do these phrases tell us about the institutions that proclaimed them?

Slowly, as the veils of shyness come off, a few answers emerge. Students point out that some well-known secular schools of today had religious roots: Consider Princeton (1746: "Under God's power she flourishes"), Brown (1764: "In God we hope"), or Colgate (1819: "For God and for truth"). Most of all, though, the students are surprised by the mottoes' explicit emphasis on personal qualities--especially virtue, morality, and character--in the service of others. Howard University (1867) declared allegiance to "Truth and service." Elizabethtown College (1899) said it would "Educate for service"; three years later, the University of Indianapolis opened its doors under the same motto. The students also notice that state universities emphasized their own duties to serve the citizenry. The University of Missouri (1839) proclaimed its commitment to "The welfare of the people"; North Dakota State University (1890) was founded "For the land and its people."

That's still the story we tell ourselves about American higher education: It serves all of us. Over the past two and half centuries, the United States has developed the most extensive and diverse system of college and universities in human history. The public goods generated by that system--technical innovation, social mobility, and informed citizenship--are beyond dispute. But we never agreed to pay for it as a public good. Its costs have been borne heavily--and unevenly--by private citizens. We praise it as the basis of shared national prosperity and progress, then we turn around and present students--and their families--with the bill.

To be sure, America has also developed elaborate forms of government assistance to help people attend college. Every state created public universities; most of these schools remained free (or close to it) into the 20th century, reflecting their charge to serve all their citizens. The University of Kentucky's president declared that his school should be "accessible to the poor youth of the land"; in the 1880s, he invited state lawmakers to visit the campus and count the number of young men "with bronzed features and hard hands." The federal government passed important measures extending higher education to workers and farmers (the Morrill Act of 1862), military veterans (the GI Bill, 1944), and middle-class borrowers (the Higher Education Act, 1965). The language of these laws spoke to the perpetual dream of American higher education: that we could create a system "accessible to all, but especially the sons of toil," to quote the Morrill Act.

We never did. Federal and state intervention opened the college door to millions of Americans, but it failed to inscribe higher education as a truly public good--that is, something anyone can receive, regardless of circumstance or background, precisely because it benefits the nation as a whole. That doesn't necessarily mean it should be free of cost to students; instead, it means the costs shouldn't keep some people out and saddle untenable debt on others. The problem was far less urgent in earlier eras--when only a small fraction of mostly well-heeled white men went to college--than it is in our present moment, when almost all of us will need some kind of postsecondary education. But by examining how Americans debated college in the past, we can learn lessons that help us imagine a different future. College isn't--or shouldn't be--a consumer good, purchased by people who can afford it so they can improve their own opportunities. If it's good for everyone, we need to make it accessible to everyone as well.

At the time of the American Revolution, the new nation had nine colleges. That number tripled over the next 30 years, and then tripled again in the three decades after that. The United States boasted 811 institutions of higher education by 1880, which dwarfed the rest of the world. The United Kingdom had 10 universities, up from six in 1800; during the same period, the number in France rose from 12 to 22. In all of Europe, there were just 160 places to receive a post-secondary degree. "Colleges rise like mushrooms in our luxuriant soil," one American college president enthused in 1827.

Part of the reason, of course, was the widespread availability of that soil: As the United States moved westward, appropriating ever more territory, institutions could readily acquire cheap land on which to build. The other reason was the lack of a central regulatory authority, in religion or education. Any group of people could hang up a shingle and call themselves a church, or a college; sometimes they were one and the same. And just as churches tried to enlist the most souls, so did colleges compete for students. That created enormous opportunity as well as huge flux: Some schools thrived, while others fell by the wayside.

But it also meant that the public good--the high-minded civic purposes in college mottoes--often got buried in the hurly-burly quest for customers. That's the main takeaway of the historian Adam Nelson's new book, Exchange of Ideas, on the economics of higher education in early America. (Full disclosure: Nelson is a friend, and I supplied a blurb for his book.) Consider the University of Pennsylvania--where I teach--and Dickinson College, which were both started by national founding fathers named Benjamin (Franklin and Rush, respectively). Penn tried to block the creation of Dickinson, in nearby Carlisle, lest it lure young men who might otherwise head to Philadelphia. Once Dickinson was up and running, meanwhile, Rush worked to prevent the chartering of other new schools in Pennsylvania. Dickinson advertised itself as a "healthful" rural alternative to Penn, and Rush wanted to make sure it remained the only one.

There were two other ways to increase market share: cut prices or cut corners. The first one required new sources of income, to defray tuition costs. Penn and Princeton both sent emissaries to the West Indies to solicit donations from the owners of slave plantations; to a degree they have only begun to acknowledge, the early American colleges relied on profits as well as labor from slavery. (Princeton's first nine presidents owned Black slaves, who helped build and maintain the campus.) The colleges also got periodic infusions of cash from their respective statehouses, reflecting the widespread belief that these institutions served the broader public. In its first 150 years, Harvard accepted more than 100 appropriations from Massachusetts's colonial and state...