Dollars for Culture

A gathering hue and cry proclaims that the academic professionals have been subsidizing undergraduates for half a century. Although this theory has received its latest boost from Devereux Josephs' Committee on Education beyond High School, its inventor and leading local proponent is Seymour Harris, who should know better.

Professor Harris' argument is, however, convincing enough to deserve close analysis. A Harvard degree, he argues, is worth $500,000, since the average alumnus's life income is $500,000 higher than the life income of the average non-college man. Yet the Harvard faculty sells this valuable degree for so little money ($4000 tuition) that it must live in a state of penury. This, says Professor Harris, is ridiculous, and should be remedied by a radical increase in the price of the degree.

Such an analysis depends upon two questionable assumptions. First, it assumes that the Harvard degree produces the additional income of the Harvard alumnus. According to this theory, Karim Aga Khan makes 1,000,000 times as much as his stable boy because he went to Harvard, and the young genius from Slippery Rock gets richer than the idiot down the block because of the benign influence of the Harvard faculty.

This assumption is not only preposterous, but its implication, that going to Harvard raises earning power, is untestable. You cannot compare the income of Harvard alumni to any control group, because there is no comparable group of equally intelligent, equally wellbred, and equally highly motivated young men who do not go to college.

In the second place, Professor Harris is assuming that undergraduates should pay the salaries of their professors. This concept is usually formulated by mentioning the "subsidy" given undergraduate education from endowment. Now it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that tuition should pay the expenses of Harvard College if the full facilities of the College were dedicated to educating undergraduates. But they are not.

On the contrary, most of Harvard's educational facilities benefit undergraduates only indirectly. Most of a professor's time goes to his graduate students and his research, not to his lectures and office hours or even the meeting of committees concerned with undergraduate affairs. If the academic profession is subsidizing anyone it is the graduate student. The small courses, the obscure and ancient volumes, the complex scientific apparatus are only really useful to the graduate student.

Consider the fact that each undergraduate pays $125 for every course he takes. In return for this he gets 30 lectures, a reading list, a library from which the professor has usually withdrawn the course texts, and a grader to read the examination he does not want to write. If more professors paused to consider the number of students they inspire daily, multiply that number by $3.00, and ask themselves whether their lecture was worth so much money, the course might come closer to its assessed value.

As it is, we might ask whether instead of saying that the academic profession is subsidizing the undergraduates, it would not be more accurate to say that the undergraduates are subsidizing the academics.