Chicago Tribune (Illinois), December 3, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

December 3, 2006 Sunday
Chicagoland Final Edition

SECTION: MAGAZINE; ZONE C; Pg. 20

HEADLINE: Can SIU stay in the game?;
Walter Wendler tried to raise Southern Illinois University's rankings by boosting tuition and launching an ambitious spending plan. Now he's out, but experts say he was just following higher education's only playbook for survival.

BYLINE: By Greg Burns, Tribune senior correspondent

BODY:
Walter V. Wendler had a little trouble getting home from the office at Southern Illinois University last May.
The veteran chancellor was pushing through a plan to jack up tuition and fees by 10 percent, on top of big increases he had imposed in previous years.
Across from the main administration building, student activist Whitney Shalda was leading a rally to protest the rising prices. After several hours of music, speeches and chanting, "people were pretty fired up," recalls Shalda, a senior English major from Evergreen Park.
When they saw Wendler leaving his office, about 20 students surged across the lawn to the spot where he had parked his silver sedan with the
SIU license plate "No. 1." The students surrounded him, demanding some answers.
"Step away from the car," the 6-foot-2, 225-pound administrator told the kids, but only one protester budged. He walked behind Wendler's Ford and lay down on the blacktop, pinning it in its parking space.
Wendler retreated to his office, but Shalda and several other students came after him, cornering him inside. He defended his expensive, long-range building plans, and pointed out that he didn't need their approval. They dashed back to the car and resumed chanting.
A pair of administrators came out next, distracting the students long enough for Wendler to escape into a nearby parking garage, where campus police picked him up and drove him home.
"This job, it's a cakewalk," he says, a smile peeking out from beneath his Clark Gable mustache. "I laugh about it now, but it wasn't really funny when it was happening."
Nothing about college costs is really funny these days, as the showdown in Carbondale suggests. Tuition bills have been soaring, from elite private universities to public four-year schools such as Southern that for decades supplied a coveted degree at a bargain price. A foundation of the American Dream is becoming less affordable with each passing year, and even the U.S. secretary of education says she doesn't know why.
To the insiders setting rates, however, the economics of higher education make perfect sense. Every university chancellor in the country wants top professors who bring in research grants. They want state-of-the-art facilities, too, and a better grade of student. With enough money they can have it all. But for most, that means raising tuition, because the only way to compete with the higher spending of their peers is by spending more themselves.
And it will take a lot more than a demonstrator lying in the path of a chancellor's Crown Victoria to slow down that spending spree.
In the years ahead, as the children of the youngest Baby Boomers line up for admission, the price of higher education is set to rise even more. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, mother of a college sophomore, gripes about the hit to her wallet just like millions of other parents.
"Is it fine that college tuition has outpaced inflation, family income, even doubling the [rise in the] cost of health care?" she asks. "Is it fine that only half our students graduate on time? Is it fine that students often graduate so saddled with debt they can't buy a home or start a family? None of this seems fine to me."
Spellings felt as clueless as anyone when she sent her daughter off to Davidson College last year. "There is little or no information on why costs are so high and what we're getting in return," she says. "I found it almost impossible to get the answers I needed, and I'm the secretary of education."
Davidson charges $30,000 in annual tuition and fees, up more than 5 percent from last year, in the same ballpark as Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and other top private schools. State schools like Southern typically charge far less, since affordable access is part of their public mission.
Yet year after year, the tuition and fees at public universities have gone up. They nearly doubled at SIU from $4,000 in 2000, not long before Wendler took over the top job, to almost $8,000 for state residents today. Out-of-staters pay more than twice that amount.
At a time of booming admissions for many four-year schools, including its sister campus near St. Louis in Edwardsville, SIU's enrollment is declining: The current crop of 18,295 on campus is down 573 from last year.
Its remote location and perfunctory marketing no doubt hurt recruiting, but it also suffers from an unusually high dropout rate, particularly between junior and senior years. In this hardscrabble part of the state, no one doubts that many of those dropouts simply ran out of cash, the rising costs hitting them harder than students in more prosperous areas. "It's money," Wendler says of the high dropout rate. "It always is."
Other potential students don't even apply, certain that a university education is beyond their means. Although financial aid defrays a big part of the cost for many students, it hasn't kept up, and more comes in the form of loans. So even after grants and discounts, the typical teenager today will need to raise thousands of dollars for a four-year degree. Most who graduate will start their working lives in debt.
Wendler has taken plenty of heat for jacking up the prices--among other controversial moves--and in early November he was forced out. But even as he expresses sympathy for those feeling the impact of higher tuition and fees, he sees no alternative to pouring them on, no matter who runs the university.
State funding is on the wane, government contracts and research grants haven't kept up with the bills, and private donations at a relatively poor school like Southern help only a little.
That leaves students and their families as the main source of higher revenues. If Southern doesn't get more money from them, then it will lose ground against competing schools. Its degrees will lose their value in the marketplace. Educational quality will erode. The campus will fall even deeper into disrepair.
And those maladies will be reflected in U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings.
In the absence of any other accepted measurement, the newsmagazine's report every August weighs heavily in the recruiting of students and faculty. University leaders curse it and invoke it in practically the same breath.
Since its 1983 debut, the U.S. News ranking has survived repeated attacks from those objecting to its supposed biases. One-quarter of the score, for instance, comes from an unscientific survey of college insiders who run their finger down a long list of schools, assigning each a rating for its reputation.
Most of all, the magazine ranks the size of the institutions' bank accounts. From "spending on instruction" to "faculty salary levels," the measurements give more weight to wealth than any other factor. As a result, schools with money can spend their way up the list, while those with less eventually lose ground.
Over the years, rich schools like Harvard and Yale have succeeded in amassing multibillion-dollar war chests. They invest their endowments aggressively, wine and dine well-heeled private donors and rake in the steepest tuition and fees.
Then they pour money into salaries and benefits for pedigreed faculty. They discount tuition for high-achieving students. They hire cubicles full of administrators to keep their sprawling enterprises on the move. Lately, they've been rehabbing their aging campuses with fancy new dorms, fitness centers, laboratories and sporting venues--projects undertaken partly on the theory that posh facilities will attract smarter (or wealthier) students, whose brains (or money) ultimately will buoy their ranking.
Every year, other institutions take their cues from the Harvards or Yales, and it gets tougher for lesser players like Southern to compete. The Carbondale campus ranks in the third tier of national universities, a grouping that falls somewhere between 127 and 182 on a list topped by Princeton University. "They are never going to dislodge these uber-wealthy institutions from their perch," says Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at the Education Sector think tank. "This is a fool's game they're playing. But what's the alternative? There's no other playing field. You're caught."
Education Secretary Spellings set out to scrutinize the higher-education landscape last year, appointing a commission to brainstorm ideas and recommend reforms. In June, the panel unveiled a draft report sharply critical of the academic establishment, blasting its "dubious" quality, "unseemly complacency" and fiscal inefficiency.
Predictably, those targeted in the broadside howled, saying their contributions to the quality of American life had been maligned, and attacking what they considered a string of cheap shots. By the time Spellings unveiled a final report in September, its aggressive rhetoric was mostly axed.
The report still calls for additional aid based on financial need, addressing the fact that a rising share goes to the affluent. It also proposes standardized testing to measure what college students actually learn. But the group has no power to press its recommendations, and the "action plan" that Spellings endorsed includes such pallid instructions as "raise awareness" and "develop [an] agenda." Her most ambitious proposal, for a national database to keep track of student progress through college, faces opposition on privacy grounds
fter Spellings presented the findings at a National Press Club luncheon meeting, one of the last to leave the room was Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist tapped to serve on the commission shortly after the publication of his manifesto, "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much."
Vedder had sat at a VIP table during Spellings' presentation, and it was all he could do to choke down his baked cod and ratatouille. He complained to reporters afterward about "errors of omission" in the final report, and "bribes" that would need to be paid if universities were to drop their opposition to achievement tests.
The tart-tongued Urbana native has emerged as an unlikely critic of higher education, considering that he occupies one of its choice positions as a tenured economics professor at a tier-1 school. After graduating from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, Vedder followed a traditional career path in academe. He published frequently, attached himself to a couple of think tanks and taught less and less as tuition went higher and higher--the lighter teaching load for tenured full-time professors like himself being a hallmark of today's higher-education "scam," he says. Once he jokingly urged his students to protest their tuition by paying in nickels, only to find the school newspaper embracing the idea.
At age 66, Vedder is launching a new Washington, D.C., think tank bankrolled by Chicago's Searle family to promote his view that colleges today have practically no incentive to hold down costs and every reason to raise them.
As he sits in the glassed-in conference room of his Center for College Affordability and Productivity, breathing in the new-carpet smell, Vedder says ranking schools based on how much they spend is like rating a car based on the amount of steel used in its construction. It inevitably results in a higher tuition price because it encourages the schools to consume more and more resources.
"It's a vicious circle," he says. "Nothing is changing the fundamental incentive system and the way the game is played.".
And what has the country got to show for all the money spent on higher education? Advocates say it has the best system in the world. Unlike its oft-criticized primary and secondary schools, America's research universities remain the pride of the nation, they say, perpetuating its economic domination with cutting-edge scholarship and lofty educational standards.
No way, says Vedder. "My guess is there is very little to show for all this money being spent," he says. "A lot of the so-called research in the humanities and social sciences is pretty third-rate. And I'm afraid that at a lot of schools, kids aren't learning very much."
So if a four-year degree is such a ripoff, Vedder's detractors counter, then why after decades of soaring tuition is it still among the greatest of financial bargains?
After all, even a marginal student graduating from a run-of-the-mill school can expect lifetime earnings far exceeding those of contemporaries without college degrees, notes James Heckman, a University of Chicago Nobel Prize-winning economist, who debated the issue with Vedder on a Fox News program last summer.
Based on the return for each dollar invested in a college education, Heckman said on the show, "Tuition is actually too low. I think tuition should probably go through the roof."
Even the highest tuitions cover only a fraction of the institutions' labor and other costs, he explained in an interview later. Collectively, taxpayers and donors provide a subsidy for each student. That's a great deal for the individuals, since they pay only a little and get a lot, Heckman says. But everyone should recognize that students would be paying a lot more without the subsidies, and the griping from folks like Spellings betrays an ignorance of economic realities, he says.
To the education secretary's complaint that soaring costs, delayed graduations and debt-laden students are not fine with her, Heckman responds: "Is it fine that Detroit is no longer the largest producer of cars? Is it fine that China is beating the hell out of us in textiles? A way of life that is protected and subsidized is tough to maintain."
Heckman thinks the huge subsidies never were justified: "People who are going to college are getting a lot of money for it. Why not let them pay?"
Many experts believe that national sentiment has shifted in Heckman's direction, toward viewing education as more of a personal benefit than a social good. "There just isn't the consensus there used to be that we as a society should pay for it," says Ronald Ehrenberg, a Cornell University professor and author of "Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much."
Vedder sees the same social forces at work and believes all signs point in one direction: higher tuition and fees. He sees little chance that new forms of competition such as for-profit schools and Internet-based learning will put a lid on spending anytime soon. Two-year colleges are coming on strong, but still lack cachet in the marketplace.
So to keep pace in the higher-education game, the majority of four-year schools will need to squeeze more out of their students.
Schools like Southern.
Not long after she started her second year at the Carbondale campus this fall, Jamie Harwerth, 19, settled into a gray couch in a quiet corner of the student center, hitting the books so she can graduate as early as possible. If all goes well, she'll finish her degree in social work after only three years, making her feel a little better about her mother working an extra bus-driving job to help pay her way.
Harwerth feels fortunate that her parents can afford to give her interest-free loans for tuition and fees. But the prospect of owing them tens of thousands of dollars weighs on her. "It's not like owing the government or the school. Stiffing your parents would be even worse. I think about it all the time," she says. "It brings me to tears. It makes me feel guilty. It makes me mad."
Harwerth knows she has plenty of company on campus. When she heard about the chancellor's car getting surrounded last May, she recalls, "I'm not a huge protester, but I was actually really happy. I was like, 'Go, go, go.' "
The irony is that even after years of hiking tuition and fees, Southern still isn't particularly expensive compared with other schools. The base rate for the University of Illinois at its Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses is $2,000 higher. The Princeton Review ranks Southern a "best value college," lauding the "nifty" aid packages that enable the typical student to graduate with a relatively light debt load of $13,700, compared with the national average of around $15,500. That's less than the cost of a single semester at Harvard.
But those loan levels vary: Robert Etherton, a junior at SIU, owes nothing because his parents paid in advance through the College Illinois savings program. Activist Shalda estimates she will owe $22,000 when she finishes in May, while graduate student Jon Pressley, pursuing a master's in bioarchaeology, owes about $80,000 so far.
Southern is raising its price even faster than the inflation rate for higher education as a whole, making up for what its administrators describe as the sins of the past.
Once dubbed "the university that shouldn't have happened," SIU was shaped by an entrepreneurial president who out-hustled his fellow Illinois college bosses for more than two decades, starting in 1948. By the time Delyte Morris got forced out in 1970 over a lavish renovation of his campus home, Southern had left behind its roots as a teacher-training center to become a university on the come. Research dollars poured in, and by 1985 Southern ranked a lofty No. 84 in the key benchmark of National Science Foundation funding.
Around that time, to hear the current administration tell it, the school took a wrong turn. Determined to remain affordable, it raised tuition by less than Illinois' other public universities. In 1985, for instance, SIU decided to charge each student $24 less than the average increase at rival state schools, according to Wendler. That small tuition break, multiplied by tuition hikes since then, erased $29 million in annual revenue, he says.
At the same time, the portion of Southern's budget covered by state funding fell sharply, a trend that has accelerated in recent years. As of 2005, state dollars accounted for barely one-third of SIU's revenues, down from 40 percent in 2000--"subsistence-level funding," Wendler says. The same squeeze is happening across the country, as states direct more tax dollars to health-care and pension obligations. Some flagship public universities get so little from their states that they increasingly act like private institutions, lobbying for the freedom to admit the students they want at a price they determine.
By keeping its tuition low while state support declined, Southern was less able to compete with other research institutions, its administrators say. In 1998, when Vice Chancellor John Koropchak took over his current task of rebuilding the school's research programs, the chemistry department that he had previously headed was down to just nine tenured professors from two dozen some 15 years earlier.
Other departments lost experienced scholars, too, as the university's fortunes ebbed. The workload went up for those who remained, cutting into their efforts to supervise graduate students and win competitive grants. Southern's ranking in research funding plunged. "Everything was moving in the wrong direction," Koropchak recalls. "If you're too affordable, eventually things are going to fall apart."
Wendler arrived on the troubled campus in 2001, becoming the fourth person in five years to fill the chancellor post. An architect by training, energetic and outspoken, he had a track record of strategic planning at his previous school, Texas A&M. In short order, he produced a long-term plan for Southern with the central goal of making it a "Top 75" research institution.
Wendler shifted funds into recruiting hot-shot faculty members. Certain departments that were always strong got a lift, and some others staged comebacks. Chemistry opened the current school year with more tenured professors, Koropchak notes, and Southern has stopped sliding in the National Science Foundation's benchmark rankings for research and development.
But at No. 109 among public universities as of fiscal 2004, it remained way behind its goal. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which held the No. 75 rank that Southern covets, collected more than twice as much research money from government, industry and other sources.
Anyone outside higher education may wonder why Southern, still living down its reputation as a party school in the middle of nowhere, would care so much about research. But from the insider's perspective, research funding helps attract elite faculty and ambitious students. In theory, it also serves the public interest by advancing society's body of knowledge.
On a practical level, it helps fill the university's coffers, as the grants and contracts defray the cost of new labs, graduate programs, travel budgets and faculty salaries, among other things. Letting research slip is equivalent to letting quality slip, says Wendler. "If quality dries up, people will vote with their feet."
Vedder thinks Southern should go ahead and let its research slip, allowing its ranking as a national university to fall. "Southern's goal should be first-class education of undergraduates," he says. "The reason they don't do it is because nobody would know it if they did."
As it stands, Vedder says, undergraduate tuition and fees are subsidizing the effort to rebuild a research faculty that caters to only a few. "They're taking the students for a ride in pursuing these goals."
Glenn Poshard, the veteran Illinois politician who heads the SIU system, sees it differently. The trade-off isn't as stark between good research and good teaching as critics like Vedder suppose, he says. "You don't have to sacrifice one for the other." Yet he also concedes that Southern's Top 75 goal "may be unattainable."
No wonder, then, that Southern has a newer goal. Dubbed "Saluki Way," in honor of the school's canine mascot, it would rebuild the heart of the campus. Wendler spearheaded the project last year, laying plans for a new football stadium and sports arena, along with academic buildings.
Everyone agrees that SIU's infrastructure needs attention. Deferred maintenance alone exceeds $300 million. As she walked around campus this fall, buildings chief Catherine Hagler pointed to Faner Hall, a classroom complex with a roof that won't stop leaking. At the Communications building, the kicked-in trim, broken ceiling tiles and other superficial wear-and-tear don't worry her as much as the unhealthy mold polluting the air due to excess moisture.
Nevertheless, as the financial details of Wendler's construction plan came to light, a campus backlash developed. Private donations amount to little at Southern, and although Wendler launched a capital campaign for Saluki Way, it has no chance of covering the 12-year plan's $500 million projected costs. Instead, higher fees will pay the way.
The project's critics have attacked its emphasis on sports as well as its scale. Southern can't afford first-rate research and massive construction bills without stiffing its faculty, reckons Marvin Zeman, a math scholar who heads the professors' union. "It brought into question if they were serious about being a Top 75 in the first place," he says. "If the football stadium has a higher priority than the math department, say so."
At $80,000, annual compensation for Zeman and other full professors averages $20,000 less than at equivalent institutions, he says. "The contribution I'm making to the university is not appreciated."
Some students feel the same way, and several days after protesters surrounded Wendler's car, a roasted pig's head with an apple in its mouth appeared on the hood with a hand-lettered sign saying, "Wendler, Stop Pigging Out on Tuition $$!!"
Student unrest wasn't Wendler's only problem. A teetotaler and devout Christian, he had taken heat in the past for speaking out in favor of an alcohol-free campus and against benefits for same-sex couples. The Daily Egyptian, SIU's student newspaper, prominently chronicled his unsuccessful attempts during the last school year to land a job at other universities.
Most recently, he came under fire for including, in the strategic plan he developed for Southern shortly after arriving, passages that were identical to ones in similar work he had done at Texas A&M. Wendler maintains he did nothing wrong, but an SIU committee released a report at the end of October scolding him for failing to properly reference his Texas work.
It all caught up to Wendler on Nov. 8 when he was removed from his post and reassigned to an architecture professorship. Poshard launched a new search for chancellor and both the research and building goals that Wendler championed were in jeopardy.
"We have made a lot of progress, but it's never enough," Wendler says. "I've learned a bunch of lessons. Every scar that I've got is tremendous experience for me."
From the Daily Egyptian's newsroom in the mold-tainted Communications building, student journalist Zack Quaintance keeps a close eye on the university's ups and downs.
Like the protesters he writes about, Quaintance says he's "feeling poor" these days. The Glendale Heights native took a cheaper route by earning an associate's degree at a community college before transferring to Southern, but he still has racked up $8,000 to $9,000 in student loans and another $2,000 in credit-card debt. He expects to graduate in May and already works for two weekly newspapers.
He has a pretty good idea where tuition and fees will be heading for the students following behind him, he says: "Going up."
That will deter many of Southern's traditional students, who tend to be wary of debt and often the first in their blue-collar families to pursue four-year degrees, he says.
"It seems like higher education is just going to become elitist and unaffordable for everyone else. That's a scary thing to think."
gburns@tribune.com

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS (color): Replacing antiquated McAndrew Stadium (left) was part of a controversial $500 million development plan launched by former Southern Illinois University Chancellor Walter Wendler.

PHOTO (color): A vocal critic of tuition increases at SIU, senior Whitney Shalda estimates she will graduate with $22,000 in debt. Tribune photos by Michael Tercha

PHOTO (color): (The Daily Egyptian)

GRAPHIC: The Squeeze on Students
ACROSS THE U.S.:
Between 2005 and 2006, tuition and fees for four-year degrees from public universities rose 6.3 percent. ... Financial aid from all sources went up just 3.7 percent. ... The value of federal Pell Grants for low-income students fell $120. ... The typical graduate took 6.2 years to earn a four-year college diploma ... and finished with $15,500 in debt.
IN CARBONDALE:
In the past five years, tuition and fees for a four-year degree from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale nearly doubled. ... State funding fell from 40.4 percent of the budget to 33.9 percent. ... The university added about 200 employees even as student enrollment dropped. ... More undergraduates took longer than five years to earn their degrees. ... And more than 1,000 additional students took out loans to pay the bills.
Sources: The College Board and Southern Illinois University Carbondale Fact Book, Tribune Interviews

GRAPHIC (color): On the cover: Illustration by Harry Campbell (Magazine, Page 2)

GRAPHIC (color): The runaway cost of higher education
PERCENT CHANGE IN AVERAGE PRICE, 1980-2005
2005
College tuition and fees: 571%
Medical care: 332%
Housing: 141%
Consumer price index: 137%
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Tribune graphic by Max Rust. (Magazine, Page 2)
- See microfilm for complete graphic.
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