An student who wishes to remain anonymous installed a toilet reading "insert tuition here" in the main gallery.
Someone should level with American college students. Don't go to college if you can't afford it! We have crossed the college tuition increase tipping point. Student loan debt slavery is crippling this young generation.
Economists predict that students will continue to pay. They won’t. They can’t. Student default rates will create an atmosphere that forces the lending to stop. I am going to tell you what so few will tell you. DON’T BORROW THAT MUCH MONEY! (unless you are studying to become a neurosurgeon or a bank robber)
The message is clear, if you can’t afford to pay all or a majority of the tuition outright then don’t look at attending schools that have high tuition rates. Scholarships may be offered the first year then they decrease or evaporate subsequent years. Those expensive schools aren’t for you. They are priced only for the wealthy and they are preying on the hopes of people who cannot afford the debt.
Those going into high paying sectors can pay back the loans. Expensive tuition is for them. The unemployment rate for someone graduating now is approaching 13%. Between 2010-2011 the real wages of a young college graduate dropped 5.4%. Expensive schools aren’t for someone going into education or the arts. It isn’t for someone studying social work or public policy. High tuition isn’t for someone interested in criminal law.
Expensive tuition hurts every student by constructing homogenous student bodies. Higher education has lowered the quality of education of all students by decreasing diversity through outrageous tuition costs.
Students who take out major loans for school are set back decades financially because their discretionary income or more goes to paying them off. They aren’t saving for retirement, they aren’t investing. Today, the cost of attending a prestigious, expensive school is exceeding the return on investment.
The current mindset came right out of corporate America and it has the US higher education system hellbent on gorging on federal money. Tuition rates will never be lowered. The schools are running on a constantly expanding model. More students, more buildings, more programs, more security guards, more improvements, fancier settings, offering more-more-more. Tuition will only be frozen and slowed but it would take a student uprising or another market crash. Students are angry because they have no say in how the school makes financial decisions nor are there explanations for what is being done with their huge tuition payments.
It has been true that attending a state school could save someone from crushing debt. That is not necessarily true today. Many state schools are now only for the wealthy. Wall Street has collaborated with school administrators to make it that way. Freezing everyone but the wealthy out of higher education is intentional.
If milk prices had risen at the same rate of a college education milk would now cost $24 a gallon.
I would like to use one school as an example of what is happening in sectors of higher education; the institute I am attending for grad school
CalArts. It was a wake up call when I realized that the scholarships offered other institutions do not exist here. As a result, I have no choice but to strongly consider leaving school.
Tuition is WAY too damn high. These signs are posted all over campus. Students are wearing small marijuana leaves and prints as a way of showing support to freeze tuition.
CalArts in Valencia California is a private school with just over 1400 students. It is one of the top art schools in the country. It offers intensive programs in dance, theater, fine art, writing, film, photography, film directing, graphic design and music. For the first time tuition will be over $40,000 and students are not happy. Keep in mind, we are studying to become artists, not Wall Street bankers. There is a tent in the front lobby with recordings of student voices talking about the financial strain they are under. A toilet with the word “Put tuition here” is in the main gallery of the school. There are students on food stamps, some regularly dig through trash for food and some work four student jobs. I am a first year graduate student in art at CalArts. I am not wealthy and I didn’t come from parents with money. I lived in my car when I arrived until I could find a situation with roommates in which I could somewhat afford to live. The school is in the Los Angeles area, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
School administrators are forcing the students to leave the front lobby. Many wealthier students have started to voice their concerns to administrators as well. One fellow graduate student who is well off told me she watches her friends around her, the amount of stress they are under financially and she is worried for them. She has started attending meetings with other students administrators.
Students routinely talk of the stress of money and for the first time next year tuition will be more than $40,000. It’s a surreal amount of money for someone entering the arts to commit to paying. It’s a mental shock to the system that cannot be ignored. Not long ago the majority of graduate school was free and the schools paid grad students a small stipend to teach and contribute to the curriculum. Those days are gone. I have witnessed CalArts students regularly break down and cry when talking about their financial fears, especially those that are graduating. High tuition is diminishes racial, cultural and economic diversity and affects the quality of artwork produced because the Institution is an echo-chamber. The “poors” of which I am one, work on campus jobs. These jobs have a very limited amount of hours and pay roughly what they did 10 years ago; 8-10 dollars an hour. That is exploitation. Well accomplished undergrads and graduate students should be compensated fairly for their labor. There are a few select job positions in one or two programs that waive tuition in compensation for work while those working the same position make $8. Beyond it being unfair, unequal compensation doesn’t encourage a collaborative environment.
Enraged and now impoverished students are starting to demand answers. Across the country schools are turning a profit and enriching themselves through student debt slavery. Students have been meeting with administrators and they have not received a full accounting for the high cost of tuition. Administrators are dismissive and outright tone deaf to the calls for a tuition freeze and refuse to provide budgets detailing specific budgetary breakdowns by expense.
The boards that govern the schools have a responsibility to resolve sky high tuition and find ways to offer assistance to underfunded students. Instead they have their now chubby fingers trapping them in the honeypot of trapping students into taking out fattening federal and private loans. It’s easy money, for them.
On May 1 CFO Don Matthewson walked the students through the budget, at least the budget that students are permitted to see. There are line items for bulk costs but very little justification for high operations budgets or details about the need for the amount of staff that is employed.
Tuition rates are now about three times what it was when the school opened when adjusted for inflation.
There are also nearly three times the number of students. The new CFO has his work cut out for him. He came to CalArts straight from Wall Street. A move he attributes to a desire to make a difference in the world.
CalArts CFO Don Mattewson meets with students May 1, 2014 to outline the general budget.
Don has worked for CalArts for only two years. To his credit he responded to student council favorably when they wanted answers for the high cost of attendance. Mr. Matthewson acknowledges that the school’s budget relies heavily (77%) on tuition revenue for expenses and that is unsustainable. He is currently advocating for alternative ways for the school to make money such as continuing education classes and winter courses offered to the general public. Yes, he is proposing an expansion.
Major financial restructuring is needed at schools like CalArts who have continued to operate on a tuition based model.
There is nearly a one-to on head count of faculty to staff and that is something the students want answers for. They also want to see justifications for what is being spent in each department and accurate accounting for where scholarship money does go.
By basing their financial models on an ever-expanding and ever-increasing budget American schools have three substantial threats to their existence:
1)Budgets are based on unsustainable models that collapse once the student loan free-for-all ends. Based on a high rate of defaults, economists are predicting this will happen very soon.
2)The cost of higher education has ever-diminishing opportunities for adequate financial scholarships damaging the reputation of the schools. The cost it then unattainable bur for the most privileged of society.
3)An over-reliance on high risk stocks in the portfolios of endowments leaves wealthier higher learning institutions extremely vulnerable to corrections and bubbles.
The American system of higher education has had a slow hostile takeover and it is now doing exactly what it has been redesigned to do: produce high profits, educate the wealthy and exclude the now endangered middle and lower classes from attaining a college education. If a school does not possess a huge endowment then the cost of their tuition is virtually unattainable for a normal human being.
There is a nearly invisible social agenda of producing cultural capitol in order to advance an agenda of social inequality and reinforce the myth of upward social mobility. That is being reinforced with the outrageous cost of higher education that is now reserved for the wealthy or the fiscally suicidal. The rest of us are told to eat cake and take the loans.
Because the cost is so exorbitant private institutions have to realize that their books can no-longer remain private. Students are being treated as customers and because of that shift, the now demand to know what they are paying for regardless of their economic background.
The unavoidable coming crash of student loans has been carefully and intentionally orchestrated. Consumer advocate and now Senator Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly asked Congress to pass legislation to at the least, cap the high interest rates on student loans. Warren asked Congress to let students pay what banks pay in interest. For every quarter student loans remained profitable and paid out bonuses bankers have scorned Warren for being a bleeding heart liberal and lobbied Congress to ignore the warnings of a coming crash.
To illustrate just how unequal opportunity is now, the endowments of nearly all American colleges and universities are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry. Coal, “natural” gas, oil, biomass and tar sands all poison smaller, mostly poor communities by externalizing their profits onto unwitting populations through pollution of air water and soil. Those living in poverty are most likely to pay the true cost of energy production with their health, the health of their children and sometimes their lives. Energy producers are most often located in communities who can’t afford to hire lawyers and sue them. There is a divestment movement underway asking institutions to rid their portfolios of fossil fuel holdings.
Harvard University is so violently averse to the idea of divestment they won’t even meet with their students. Harvard had a student arrested on April 30, 2014 for demanding to discuss divestment with University officials.
The endowments of major institutions of learning should first and foremost be run with an ethical responsibility to immediate human suffering. They aren’t. Endowments of major institutions should operate in a philosophically ethical manner and negate their impacts on climate change. They are not. They are also risking a substantial exposure to the coming carbon bubble as sustainable energy technologies are reaching cost parity with fossil fuel based energy.
When colleges profit primarily from student loans they are profiting from taxpayer dollars and should be completely subject to full financial scrutiny. Accepting federally funded student loans should negate a private institution’s right to keep their books private.
The students have been sold a commodity, not an education and now, as they have taken on the role of consumers they are demanding to be given an explanation for the expense of what they have purchased. Students have every right to know what the school spends their money on. They have been refused and given line item budgets with little detail and absolutely no information as to why fundraising has been stagnant for 10 years, where the school spends their money, how many donors the school relies on and if it is a small number of donors what the financial exposure is should one or more donors step away.
How did a once radical art school (CalArts) that prides itself on their contributions to counter culture become just another private art school with excessive tuition and fees?
We are witnessing firsthand the eradication of higher education for most Americans. The chances of getting to college for many were already slim enough. The cultural capital that is produced from a system of injustice perpetuates injustice. As we are systematically destroying our diverse cultural capital we are destroying our ecological capital. The bioeconomy, the life support of our world is coming undone and our large institutions are contributing financially to the destruction and constructing pedagogy that carries on the ignorance and greed from their generations to ours.
How does one pay $41,700 for tuition EVERY YEAR if they aren’t rich? How can one justify spending $200,000 for a bachelor of arts degree? Who spends that?
Many borrow it.
I borrowed it. I wanted to go to grad school so I saved what I could. I attended undergraduate school in the middle of the recession and worked 3-5 jobs at a time after graduating. Due to low pay and limited job opportunities I was unable to save more than a few thousand dollars for graduate school and now I’ve signed on the dotted line; To go to art school, yes for art.
Irrational?
Yes.
Insane?
Probably.
What could possibly make it worse? The collapse of student loans and crossing the tipping point at which people are willing to take on that much debt. My school, CalArts would not survive a semester if the pipeline of funds were cut off. Would your school?
What would be left would be Harvard, Yale and whatever other Ivy League schools possessing a billion plus in their endowment... that is until the stock market crashed as well.
The top official in the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra warned in November that a collapse of the student loan market and a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis is in store if something isn’t done about student loans.
-Inflation is up 115.06% since 1986
-American college tuition has increased 498.31% since 1986
-Student loan debt grows by $3000 every second
-Americans are forgoing marriage, buying homes or having families due to a 1.2 trillion dollar student loan debt. The debt started to cripple the economy long ago.
Lenders can garnish up to 15% of a borrowers net wages WITHOUT a court order in many states
There is an inevitable collapse coming to wealthy Ivy League institutions as well. A $1.2 trillion glut of student loans, calculating a projected default rate of 14.7% (in FY 2010) has the power to collapse the world’s global economy and that means the endowments of Harvard and Yale would take a big hit.
Student loan pushers are the snake oil salesman of the 21st century except the cure they are peddling costs as much as a small home.
This chart should give any CalArts student reason to be outraged. The actual cost of tuition rose steadily until 1986 when there was a big spike in cost and then again in 2004 when the actual cost in 2014 dollars went from 22,190 to 31,922. When the stock market took a big hit starting in ’07 the rate of tuition increases accelerated. What this chart means is that if you attended school in:
1970, in today’s dollars you should be paying $15,225
1980, in today’s dollars you should be paying $12,904
1990, in today’s dollars you should be paying $20,248
2000, in today’s dollars you should be paying $24,864
2010, in today’s dollars you should be paying $37,742
Has the cost of tuition passed the threshold of financial viability for those from families with modest incomes? Considering the financial emergency students find themselves in just 6 months after graduation and compiling interest; a degree conferred upon someone without the immediate means to begin payments is a crippling financial burden. Substantial enough that they may never work in the field of their major. Graduated students are sucked almost immediately into a job, any job they can find.
I justified this amount of debt, a debt that statistically speaking I am highly unlikely to ever pay off to attend one of the best art schools in the world. I am furious about the cost of tuition but I love my school. CalArts is consistently ranked in the top ten for many artistic disciplines. CalArts was founded and funded in 1970 by Walt Disney and reconstituted from the then prestigious Chouinard Academy of Art. It is an outlier. The school is known for theoretical experimentation, embracing failure and radical pedagogy.
It is not unusual to see someone carrying a Gecko, walking a dog, or scratching their teacup pig in the hallways of my school. It is the Hogwarts of the Western world. One can sometimes hear opera rehearsed with primal screaming, stop by a spontaneous reading of Kant or Deleuze and then witness seven people dressed as superheroes rehearsing next to a practicing tuba player. The school prides itself on being weird and the students thrive with weird while the administration builds bureaucratic infrastructure at each turn, combatively destroying the quality and experimental nature of the atmosphere.
The disconnect between the administration and the students lies in what each defines as what conditions make a “great” school. Administrators measure success by numbers of applicants and fancy facilities offered. Administrators at CalArts justify their tuition costs by pointing to comparable schools, schools which offer more in tuition money scholarship.
Has anyone ever investigated the nation’s colleges for price fixing and consumer fraud?
Student loans became easier to obtain in 1992 when the restrictions on parental income were removed.
The schools have had a tuition raising orgy ever since. Administrators have no incentive to keep tuition low. Tuition hikes are shiny golden, bloated piggy banks in the eyes of college administrators. As tuition is raised, the ceiling on student loans have been raised.
As CalArts students have sat down with administrators to discuss their concerns with an opaque budget and unjustified tuition hikes they are continuously threatened with one thing: cuts to professors. The professors are WHY people clamor to attend CalArts. The professors are THE reason that CalArts has produced so many great artists, writers, singers, dancers, film makers, actors and photographers.
The faculty is the where the wealth of the school is located. It isn’t the facilities or a host of perks. Budget conversations between students and administrators nearly always result in thinly veiled threats of cutting full time faculty. The quality of a practicing, professional and brilliant faculty is what makes CalArts a top choice for someone choosing to be a professional artist. Yet the school is being run on a model of expansion with a corporate mindset. The school is being run like it is a product to be sold and not an education that is co-created between human beings, students and teachers. The administrators are barely present.
The only conclusion is that there are too many administrators to justify their cost. There is an almost one to one ratio of staff to faculty. The rest of the expenses should be justified as well.
CalArts is not an outlier. CalArts is an example of what is happening to higher education as a whole. The school is a warning that we are losing the great educational institutions and very few are people are doing anything to stop it.
CalArts was once a radical school that produced artists who prided themselves on cultural agitation. Now it has become a organization that produces a lifetime of indebtedness. I am afraid I will witness the financial collapse of the school I love and many others. What will change that? How can we prevent our once-great institutions from becoming a establishment of corporate, Randian philosophies and only educating the children of the wealthy?
When the student loan spigot is turned off, schools who have not built in funding for significant need-based scholarships will disappear. How does the value of an education deteriorate when the school goes out of business?
I have realized that I am playing a part in a system that long ago went insane. The Institutions, Colleges and Universities are balancing their budget on the backs of students who will bear the cost of their education for decades. They are balancing their budgets on the backs of those who can least afford it.
Myself and others in my position would be doing themselves a great disservice if one did not seriously consider leaving the school in order to avoid another $50K of debt. We didn't register for school our first year when tuition costs were this high.
CalArts needs alumni to get involved, provide more funds for scholarships, and demand full financial transparency; not just for CIA but for all colleges who accept taxpayer funded student loans.
Imagine having a degree from a school that once was. The connections and the artistic foundation that was once CalArts will slowly fade away.
Should the school close, our investment in our education will lose its value. We cannot let that happen.
I came to CalArts because of the school’s history of being a radical and exciting incubator that shapes contemporary culture. The quality of the outstanding faculty was the primary reason I chose it. I couldn’t have chosen a better place to attend school but the cost is killing me. That old sense of radicality still exists here in small doses and I believe the Institution can change. We, the alumni, the students, the faculty and the staff can revive it to shape the Institute we want to see for us and for future generations of CalArtians. We need board and administrative accountability and regular transparent fiscal reporting to the student body. The student government should have a vote on financial decisions. There should be a concerted effort to inform and get feedback from the student body regarding major financial decisions of the Institution. That accountability needs to include allowing students to have some say in funding unethical companies that violate human rights with endowment monies. It is going to take some major changes to make the school financially viable enough and to offer adequate scholarship packages to students who need it.
Cori Redstone is a first year Graduate Student at CalArts in Valencia California.
She is studying fine art, painting and social practice. She will graduate in 2015.
Background Info:CalArts aka California Institute of the Arts
Student body:1500
2014-2015 Yearly Tuition: $41,700
Cost of tuition in 1970 when the school opened: 2500 ($15225 in 2014 dollars)
Fees: +$470
2014-2015 Estimated total cost for one year: $51,407
School Health Insurance: $2205
Average Scholarship: $1600
Endowment: $141 million (May 1, 2014)
Investment in Fossil Fuels: 9-10 million
-$1 million for scholarships
-$1.14 million to run Redcat
-$1.3 million to run the CAP education program
Gain in endowment in 2013: $7 million
Operating costs drawn from endowment in FY 2013: $4 million
Amount tuition is being increased in 2014-2015: 4.25%
Current rate of US inflation: 1.51%
Fees paid for endowment managers in 2012: $680,000
Fees for endowment managers in 2011: $460,0000
Amount given in scholarship 2011/2012: $3,086,063
Graduation rate: 56%
Annual Budget in 2014/2015: $57,835,900
Cost of Faculty: $16 million
Cost of Staff $13 million
Percentage of budget supported by tuition: 70-75%
Some Helpful Statistics about American Higher Education:
- Students borrowed $100 Billion in 2014
- The rate of the cost of education has consistently outpaced the rate of inflation by 2 1/2 times
- Adjunct professors are now over 70% of all College educators nationally
-Adjuncts are excluded from University Governance & have little say in what happens in their school.
-Inflation is up 115.06% since 1986
-American college tuition has increased 498.31% since 1986
-Student loan debt grows by $3000 every second
-Americans are forgoing marriage, buying homes or having families due to a 1.2 trillion dollar student loan debt. The debt started to cripple the economy long ago.
Lenders can garnish up to 15% of a borrowers net wages WITHOUT a court order in many states
-Graduation rates are the highest at the highest income levels.
-For profit colleges are milking us dry with taxpayer funded loans and a very high rate of student loan defaults:
2009-2012: 22% of for profit college graduates defaulted on their student loans2009-2012: 13% of public colleges and university graduates defaulted2009-2012: 8.2% of students from private, non-profit schools defaulted
Links:
Occupy CalArts on Facebook
Divest CalArts on Facebook
Loan Repayment Calculator
Trustees:
The board of trustees at California Institute of the Arts reads as a who’s who in LA Art World. There is no rational reason that CalArts offers so little in scholarships with a board that consists of:
Austin M. Beutner, Evercore Partners, Joseph M. Cohen, HTN Communications LLC, Thomas L. Lee, Newhall Land and Farming Company, James B. Lovelace, Capital Research Global Investors, Joan Abrahamson, The Jefferson Institute, Aileen Adams, The Rape Foundation, Thom Andersen, CalArts, Alan Bergman, The Walt Disney Studios, Alan Bergman, The Walt Disney Studios, David A. Bossers, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Louise Bryson, Zachary Davidson, Student at Calarts, Robert J. Denison, First Security Managment, Tim Disney, Uncommon Producations, Melissa P. Draper, Michael D. Eisner, Walt Disney Company, David I. Fisher, Capital Group International Inc, Rodrigo Garcia, Film Director, Harriet F. Gold, civic leader. Richard J. Grad, Sidley Austin LLP, Charmaine Jefferson, California African American museum, Marta Kauffman, Warner Brothers, More Horses Productions, Jill Kraus, civic leader, Nahum Lainer, Lainer Develpment, Steven D. Lavine, President, Cal Arts, Thomas Lloyd, Capital Group International, Michelle Lund, The Sharon B. Lund Foundation, Alfredo Miranda, CalArts, Leslie McMorrow, Civil Leader, Michael Nock, Michael Nock and Associates, Janet Dreisen Rappaport, Civic Leader, Tom Rothman, TriStar Productions, Araceli Ruano, Comissioner, LA County Arts Commission, David L. Schiff, The Schiff Company, Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, California Arts Council, Joni Binder Shwarts, Civic Leader & Arts Advocate, Thomas E. Unterman, Rustic Canyon Partners, Roger Wacker, Credit Suisse Securities USA, Elliot D. Webb, Swifty Productions Inc., Luanne C. Wells, Civic Leader