States are failing their commitments to public universities, James Garland

As Education Secretary Margaret Spellings' new Commission on the Future of Higher Education gets to work, it might do well to begin by acknowledging this fact: The historical business model for public higher education is broken and cannot be fixed.

The days are long gone when generous government subsidies allowed public colleges to keep tuition low. Now that a public four-year degree costs more than $50,000, middle-income citizens must either saddle themselves with debt or scale back their college aspirations. Not a shred of evidence suggests this trend will do anything but worsen.

Furthermore, the compact between public universities and state governments has degenerated into a shouting match of accusation and finger-pointing. Legislators see colleges as bastions of inefficiency, while frustrated college presidents see elected officials as buck-passers who use their colleges as whipping boys.

The result is that public colleges are increasingly staring into the abyss. The marching bands, pastoral campuses and dedicated professors shown on TV commercials mask the reality of budget cutbacks, crowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings, angry faculty unions and armies of underpaid temporary instructors. In Ohio, for example, deferred maintenance at public campuses is a $5 billion problem, about 20 times the state's yearly maintenance budget. Elsewhere, professors' salaries at public, doctorate-granting universities lag $30,000 behind comparable private-school salaries. At many schools, public funding has fallen below 20 percent of total revenue. At my own school, it is about 10 percent.

With declining state support driving up tuition charges, the trend is absolutely clear: Public higher education is moving down the track toward privatization, and the train is not coming back.

James C. Garland is president of Miami University in Ohio. He wrote this article for the Washington Post.