Slow, Silent Impoverishment

Some of the best recent defenses of public higher education have come from the business press, in the form of attacks on the huge and growing resource gap between even the strongest publics and the top privates. The powerful 2007 essay, "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League," was published by Business Week, and begins with a wicked dig at vanity dorms at Princeton and goes on to say what few education leaders will say: the privates are cherry-picking faculty at the publics, paying much higher salaries, spending far more per student that their former peer "flagship" publics, and pulling away in lab facilities, publications, and other measures of knowledge production.

A year before that, the NY Times business columnist Joe Nocera criticized top-end fundraising in "The University of Raising Big Money." The movement for increased payouts at the fattest endowments kicked in later, and Nocera may have helped it along.

Public universities have over 4/5ths of total enrollments. Their quiet impoverishment affects everything - general skills, social integration, upward mobility, new technology, useful research, the general development of people and their society. Pulling top-quality resources back to the elite privates that educate 1 -2 percent of the college public is a perfect recipe for steady decline. Many more people need to start noticing this.