University fees

Colleges nationwide are asking students to pay more for their education

No one should go broke because they chose to go to college,” Ba­rack Obama said in January in his state-of-the-union speech. But American college students worry they might, thanks to recent fee increases at technical colleges and universities. On March 4^th students and disgruntled faculty staged protests at around 100 campuses in over 30 states, calling on state legislators and university administrators to put a halt to recent tuition hikes and funding cuts. In Oakland, California, student protesters marched onto a big highway and stopped the traffic. Elsewhere students carried coffins to symbolise the death of afford­able education.

According to the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think-tank, at least 39 states have decreased their funding for public colleges and universities or in­creased their tuition charges. In Califor­nia some public universities have in­creased fees by more than 30%. At the same time they are cutting back on their offerings. Many have tried to save money by laying off staff, closing academic departments and reducing the number of classes offered. Some are admitting more out-of-state students, who pay higher fees.

Several institutions have also started to cut the number of students they enroll in order to save money. California State University (SCU), a public university system that has 23 campuses in Califor­nia, will reduce enrolment by 20,000 students next academic year, because it has lost $564m, or around 20%, of its state funding.

It is not just public universities that are finding themselves in a tricky spot. Some of America’s richest private universities are increasing their charges, because their endowments have suffered steep losses. Yale recently announced that its fees will go up next year by nearly 5%, to $49,800, although it promised to spend around 10% more on financial aid for needy students.

These increases may signal a perma­nent shift in the cost of higher education, analysts say, which could dissuade poorer people from considering college. It is unlikely that fees will return to pre-recession levels once the economy recov­ers. “There is no law of gravity in higher education pricing,” reckons Kevin Carey of Education Sector, a think-tank. “What goes up never comes down.”

Unit 4. Corporate Morals. The psychology of Power

Script 1:

Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they deserve it

"Reports of politicians who have extramarital affairs while complaining about the death of family values, or who use public funding for private gain despite condemning government waste, have be­come so common in recent years that they hardly seem surprising anymore. Anecdotally, at least, the connection between pow­er and hypocrisy looks obvious.

Anecdote is not science, though. And, more subtly, even if anecdote is correct, it does not answer the question of whether power tends to corrupt, as Lord Acton's dictum has it, or whether it merely attracts the corruptible. To investigate this ques­tion Joris Lammers at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, and Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University, in Illinois, have conducted a series of experiments which attempted to elicit states of powerfulness and powerlessness in the minds of volun­teers. Having done so, as they report in Psy­chological Science, they tested those volun­teers' moral pliability. Lord Acton, they found, was right.

In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked 61 university students to write about a momentum in their past when they were in a position of high or lower power. Previous research has established that this is an effective way to “prime” people into feeling as if they are currently in such a position. Each group (high power and low power) was then split into two further groups. Half were asked to rate, on a nine-point morality scale (with one being high­ly immoral and nine being highly moral), how objectionable it would be for other people to over-report travel expenses at work. The other half were asked to partici­pate in a game of dice.

Taken together, these results do indeed suggest that power tends to corrupt and to promote a hypocritical tendency to hold other people to a higher standard than oneself. To test the point further, though, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky explicitly contrasted attitudes to self and other peo­ple when the morally questionable activi­ty was the same in each case. Having once again primed two groups of participants to be either high-power or low-power, they then asked some members of each group how acceptable it would be for someone else to break the speed limit when late for an appointment and how acceptable it would be for the participant himself to do so. Others were asked similar questions about tax declarations.

Script 2: