Is UMass Pricing Out Kids Like Joe Drury?

Is UMass Pricing Out Kids Like Joe Drury?

As the system's flagship school in Amherst becomes more expensive, more competitive, and acts more like a public Ivy, it's time to ask what happens to the mission of furthering the common good - and who'll get left behind?

By Lisa Prevost | December 11, 2005

GROWING UP IN PITTSFIELD, JOSEPH DRURY JR. never thought of himself as different. His father worked as a machinist at the General Electric defense systems plant; his mother juggled a home day-care business and evening waitress shifts. After his father lost his job in the massive layoffs of the late 1980s, the family struggled, but so did the families of most of Drury's friends. "Everyone I knew on a personal level went through some kind of hardship because of the layoffs," Drury says. Nothing about his circumstances felt particularly unusual - until Drury's first semester at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst three years ago.

During an Introduction to Economics class, the professor asked students to break into groups of five and talk about their families' economic backgrounds. "We went around the group, and I was shocked by what I heard," Drury says. "The first person said her family income was about $250,000 a year, and she thought they were middle class. The next person said something like $500,000." Nobody came in under $200,000. Drury, the last to speak, found himself trying to persuade the group that he wasn't exaggerating. "They didn't believe me when I said my family made less than $25,000 a year."

...

The working-class kid, once a staple of the UMass-Amherst undergraduate population, is becoming an oddity on a campus increasingly geared toward the affluent. Established in 1867 through federal educational land grants, UMass-Amherst has evolved over the years. It's gone from being a tiny agricultural college to a sprawling state university and reliable "safety" school to a major research institution that is the flagship of the state's five-campus university system. What began as an affordable ticket to a higher standard of living for anyone who was willing to work hard enough is now, according to a recent USA Today survey, the fifth most expensive of the country's 67 public flagship schools.

While tuition remains relatively low, steep increases in student fees (which cover everything from sports to health benefits to course fees) and room and board have put a UMass-Amherst education out of reach for many lower-income families. More than a decade of budget cuts has whittled the state's contribution from a hearty half to barely one-third of the university's total funds. Long among the stingiest states in per-student spending on public higher education, Massachusetts is effectively forcing its most prestigious teaching and research institution to rely more heavily on private fund-raising, student charges, and research dollars, putting it on the road to privatization.

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