Spring 1998
Dear Alumni and Friends, Do you know what service has risen in price just as fast as health care over the past two decades? If you guessed the cost of higher education, you are either (1) very well informed or (2) the parent of a student in college, or in medical, law or graduate school. In fact, while median family income rose 82 percent between 1980 and 1994, tuition at private universities in that same period increased by 234 percent. State colleges and universities have also experienced similar sharp increases in what they must charge their students. The rising cost of higher education is of great concern to us all. I have been thinking a good deal about this issue since May, when nearly 5,000 graduates received degrees from Hopkins. In what has become something of a tradition in the past few years, the weather cooperated brilliantly. Our graduates and their families from around the country and across the world gathered on the Homewood Campus for what is surely the most joyous event of the academic year. There were smiles and hugs and bouquets and balloons and an incredible sense of achievement and pride. All were well earned. Commencement capped an astonishing year for Johns Hopkins University. Just a decade after coming through difficult financial times our budgets are now solidly in the black. Yet rather than retrench or downsize, Hopkins has grown, with new buildings, and more faculty and students than ever before. During the month of commencement, we reached and surpassed our $900 million fundraising goal for The Johns Hopkins Initiative, thereby strengthening every division across the university. Our Board of Trustees has decided to continue the Initiative to the year 2000. Everywhere, new activities and new opportunities are presenting themselves. Yet there are some signs on the horizon that cause me to temper my enthusiasm with a note of caution:
At the School of Medicine, over the past ten years the average educational debt--including obligations from undergraduate studies--for graduating medical students has more than doubled, to nearly $75,000.
Anecdotal evidence here and at other universities suggests that more and more students are coming to college with more advanced placement credits, loading up with extra classes and going to extraordinary lengths to graduate a year or even a semester early in order to save on tuition costs. Recent decisions by Princeton and some of our other peer institutions to revise the way financial aid is awarded threaten to start a bidding war of competing aid packages for the best and brightest students.
I once saw a bumper sticker that was apropos to this issue. It read, "My mind s made up! Don t confuse me with the facts." The rising cost of higher education is one of those issues in which everybody knows what they know. All too often, however, what they don t really know are the facts. For instance, in April ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings began a segment titled "The Skyrocketing Cost of College Education" by telling viewers "the average fee for a student going to a public college next fall is $45,000-plus over four years. It will be double that at a private institution four years for $97,000...One estimate is that a student born today going to college in 2016 will pay $110,000 to go to public school, and more than $230,000 at a private college." These are the same numbers you will likely encounter if you are the parent of a young child shopping for investments for a college fund. A salesperson will lay out an impressive looking graph and solemnly tell you that in order to send young John or Mary to Harvard in the next century you will need to start putting away $500 to $600 a month immediately and continue doing so until the child is 18 years old. The fact of the matter is, most new parents with little babies don t have an extra $500 to $600 to set aside every month. It s no wonder they re scared! And we shouldn t be surprised that, in the past couple years, when focus groups are brought together and asked, "Tell us what s on your mind," one of the first things that comes up is "How am I going to pay for my kid s college education?" Across America, a generation of new parents is wondering what they re going to do when their child comes to them in 17 or 18 years and asks, "Mom and Dad, can I have a quarter of a million dollars to attend Johns Hopkins?" Clearly, we cannot let this happen. But before we make hasty declarations or implement unconsidered policies it s worth taking a closer look at some of these numbers. We need to make sure we really do know what we think we know. Here I will draw from the recent report of the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education titled Straight Talk about College Costs and Prices. This is a thoughtful and thorough look at the issues of cost in higher education. It can be ordered from the publisher, Oryx Press, by calling 800-279-6799. One of the first problems with the numbers cited above has to do with the public s confusion (often abetted by sloppy or inaccurate press reports) about the true costs of tuition and fees at public and private colleges. In the ABC news report, for instance, the figure cited is the mean average of four years of tuition and fees at public and private institutions. This number represents the average of tuition and fees charged, which can be useful in gauging the range of costs but offers little help in figuring just how much most students are paying. This is because it does not take into account the fact that the distribution of students by tuition level is highly skewed. A more accurate picture of typical tuition is the median, that is, the tuition cost that falls in the middle: half of all students pay less than this figure, and the other half pay more than this. These numbers might surprise you. The fact is, less than a third (28.9 percent to be precise) of all students enrolled in four-year institutions face annual tuition and fees in excess of $6,000, while 55 percent pay less than $4,000. Thus, median tuition and fees are below $4,000. Moreover, the scary projections of future college costs that start with the mean, rather than the median cost of tuition, tend then to use a doubtful rule of thumb provided by the College Board-- namely, that tuition will increase at a rate of 7 percent annually for the next 17 or 18 years. In fact, in the past four years the average rate of increase has slowed to 5 percent--still too high, I think we can all agree, but the trend clearly points toward a slowing in the rate of growth of college costs. At Hopkins we have reduced this year s tuition increase to 4.5 percent, and the Board of Trustees plans to reduce that rate further, by an additional one-tenth of a percent or more per year, each year for the next five years. The confusion of median and mean averages coupled with the uncritical use of an inflated growth number has led the public to two conclusions they are absolutely sure they know. First, they know that a college education today is already enormously expensive, and second, that it is bound to become largely unaffordable within the next generation. These "facts," so rooted in the public mind, were confirmed by extensive research conducted recently on behalf of the American Council on Education. When researchers asked the public to estimate the "average cost of tuition" (by which was meant the median cost) at community colleges, public colleges and universities and private schools, respondents consistently over-estimated the true costs, generally by a factor of three. Thus, though the true median annual tuition cost of four-year state colleges and universities for in-state students is actually $3,111, the public perceives the figure to be $9,694--more than three times the actual amount! While this news may provide some sense of comfort to our state-supported colleges and universities--which collectively educate 78 percent of all students and 81 percent of all undergraduates--it still leaves schools like Johns Hopkins with some serious issues to address. In the 1998-99 academic year undergraduate tuition at Hopkins will be $22,680. Overall, we are somewhere in the middle, in terms of price, among our peer institutions. Paying full price, it now costs more than $100,000 for tuition, books, room and board for four years education at JHU. Yet it is important to remember that as high as the "sticker price" at Harvard, Hopkins and other leading institutions may be, the fact is most students do not pay that full price. Scholarships and other aid help offset the true cost. Clearly we are much more expensive than the average university (no matter how that average is derived). Hopkins has never been and does not aspire to be merely an average university. Our goal is to be the very best at what we do. The caliber of our faculty, the opportunities we provide our students to work closely with recognized leaders and innovators in their disciplines, the quality of our facilities and of our library all contribute to providing a superior education. As with so much else in life, purchasing the best (in this case, the best possible education) costs more. Americans have long known that education is a valuable investment--and a superior education, if available, represents a superior investment. I believe this is why, in recent years, we have enjoyed record applicant pools of extraordinary quality and record enrollments. Yet even if, by their actions, our students and their parents currently are telling us a Johns Hopkins education is worth the premium cost, we can not and should not make the mistake of thinking we are exempt from fiscal realities. There comes a point where even the most valuable and worthwhile investments become priced beyond the means of all but the wealthiest. We must not let this happen. That is why the Board of Trustees and the university s administration have worked diligently in the past several years to start bringing the rate of annual tuition increases down--which we have done--and plan to continue to decrease this number further in the years ahead. As we work toward this goal, we must provide additional resources to ensure that qualified and capable students admitted to Johns Hopkins at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral level will find the resources they need to enroll and complete their educations. That is why, when the Johns Hopkins Initiative attained its original goal of $900 million, the Board of Trustees unanimously voted to raise that goal to $1.2 billion. A significant portion of those additional funds will be devoted to the two major priorities I have identified for the university as we move forward into the next century. First, we must make a Hopkins education affordable for all our students while maintaining the highest standards of excellence. I believe we must make a focused, concerted effort to increase significantly the number of dollars we have available to offer our students scholarships. Our tradition of academic excellence has always been coupled with a commitment to make a Hopkins education affordable for all qualified students. Today, while our tuition falls in the mid-range of comparable universities, the amount of scholarship support we are able to offer students is among the lowest. We must increase our endowment for student financial aid so that no student--graduate or undergraduate--will turn down an invitation for lack of funds, and so that our graduates are not burdened by unreasonable debt. This is our single most important need and I intend to make it my highest priority in this renewed campaign. My second goal is to reinvent the research university library to allow faculty and students to take fullest advantage of digital information technologies. This priority particularly concerns our university libraries. There are no great research universities without great libraries. The Welch and Sheridan libraries are central resources for the whole University, and their role is about to become even more important as fundamental changes in higher education, information technology, scholarly communication and publishing come about. We have extraordinary leadership in our libraries, and thus, extraordinary opportunities to achieve great things. To do so, we need to give them the central position and the stability they deserve to continue that leadership. The library of the 21st century will be far different from the traditional, industrial age library we all grew up with. Hopkins is positioned to take the lead in this area, but not without a consistent level of financial support. We need to begin creating that library now. I see this as a necessity--it s something that is clearly at the center of our academic enterprise. These are ambitious goals, but I am pleased to say Hopkins has assembled an exceptional team of academic leaders to chart a course to the new century. In the past months in particular, I have had the pleasure of welcoming two individuals who will be key players in this effort. On August 1, Ilene Busch-Vishniac, formerly the Temple Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, became dean of the Whiting School of Engineering . Dr. Busch-Vishniac is a dynamic and energetic leader, with a strong research and academic background. She is an acknowledged leader in acoustics and electromechanical transduction and is vitally interested in both undergraduate and graduate education. Ilene is dedicated to working with faculty, staff and students to take an already prominent school into the elite ranks of American engineering colleges. She has a good sense of what it takes to be a strong engineering program in the traditional sense, while she also recognizes that Hopkins, because of its deliberately smaller size and unique assets, affords an opportunity to create a school that really excels in ways that are different from some of the larger programs. Dr. Busch- Vishniac becomes one of fewer than 10 women deans of engineering at an American university and the first woman dean of a Johns Hopkins division other than the School of Nursing. One month earlier, on July 1, Herbert Kessler became dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Kessler, chairman of the Department of the History of Art and Charlotte Bloomberg Professor, has been a faculty member in Arts and Sciences since 1976. His is an extraordinarily distinguished career, in his scholarship, in his teaching and in the leadership of his department. Of all the very strong candidates for dean -- and the finalists were all leaders of major departments at distinguished universities -- Herb best articulated a vision for the future of Arts and Sciences. He is interested in bringing people together, in creative ways, across disciplines and across divisions of the university. He also believes that a strong commitment to undergraduate education, in the Hopkins way, is as important as the university's historic tradition as a graduate institution. Ilene Busch-Vishniac and Herb Kessler are stellar appointments who will do much to further the goals and objectives of Johns Hopkins. Each believes that increased financial support for students, including graduate students, is an important priority for their school. I am pleased to welcome them on behalf of the entire university, and look forward to working closely with them--and all our deans--in the year ahead. Thank you for your continued interest in and support for Johns Hopkins. I hope that you have a wonderful summer and look forward to writing to you again in the fall, after the next academic year begins. Sincerely, William R. Brody | 
