This is the season of mixed emotions for parents of the college bound. The joy of a letter of acceptance is followed by the sobering message of a tuition bill. They were supposed to reply by Thursday to the school of their child’s choice, committing themselves to the burden of what a bachelor’s degree can cost.
Decades of tuition inflation have left many families wary of the financial hurdle posed by higher education — and fearful their offspring could be denied the American dream of a path that runs through a college campus en route to the middle class.
But when Mikka Ratliff was accepted by Berea College, which sits here in the foothills of Appalachia, it was an occasion for unconditional celebration. Her tuition bill was zero.
Her letter came when Ratliff was at an after-school job in a small-town jewelry store. Her mother rushed there, and Ratliff tore open the envelope.
“I wanted to yell, but had to whisper, ‘I got it!'” she said.
“Tears came to my eyes,” Kenya Ratliff recalled.
Mikka Ratliff wasn’t the only one to get the good news. Every one of the 420 students who enrolled alongside her at Berea last fall was admitted free of charge. Recently, a group of elite universities — led by Harvard and Stanford — announced they will forgo tuition for needy students.
By their definition, “needy” means young people from households with annual incomes that seem a princely fortune here. Stanford has set $100,000 as the line separating those who get a freebie from those who pay tuition. Officials of Berea College have mixed reactions to the news that big-name schools are following their lead.
“I have no choice except to celebrate what Stanford and the others are doing,” said Joe Bagnoli, associate provost for enrollment management. But he added, a question comes to mind:
Why did it take the nation’s premier universities so long to recognize that a college education is fast being priced out of the reach of average Americans? Congress has been asking a parallel question, one that has prodded some schools to action: Why are universities getting richer as tuition escalates?
“It is fair to ask whether the tax breaks that lead to big university endowments are serving the public,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), point man on the issue. “That’s especially true when low- and middle-income working families are struggling to pay college tuition.”
For more than a century, Berea hasn’t billed a single student for tuition. A non-denominational Christian liberal-arts college, it’s committed to helping the children of Appalachia escape the region’s endemic poverty.
A few other colleges don’t charge tuition — among them, College of the Ozarks, Yale School of Music and Cooper-Union, a New York school for arts and engineering. But Berea officials think their college is unique for its combination of a free liberal-arts education, an on-campus work requirement and instilling graduates with a sense of responsibility to the communities from which they come. A large percentage of alums remain in Appalachia, rather than heading off to the bright lights of big cities.
Campus job required
On a typical day, students are to be seen not just in the classrooms or science labs but on work crews all across campus. Some serve as groundskeepers, others are office assistants — they perform just about every function that, at another school, would be done by outsiders. Every Berea student is required to work 10 hours a week, which gives them pocket money and saves the college a bundle on operating costs. It also instills an ethic of service that Berea takes as the core of its mission. Mikka Ratliff is a library cataloger.
If she hadn’t gotten into Berea, her fall-back was Eastern Kentucky University. Like other state schools, it is less expensive than private colleges.
Still, it would have put a considerable burden on the Ratliff family. Kenya is a secretary; her husband, Mike, is a custodian at the high school in Paintsville, Ky., from which their daughter graduated.
Their net income is about $36,000 — about the same as what Harvard and many other private universities charge for tuition and fees. If their daughter went to Eastern Kentucky, Mike and Kenya Ratliff would each have to work a second job; Mikka, who wants to be a nurse, would need student loans.
“We’re the ones you hear about — living from paycheck to paycheck,” Kenya Ratliff said. “We didn’t want Mikka to live like we do.”
The U.S. government once underwrote that perennial hope of a better life for the next generation. As a thanks, veterans of World War II were provided federal stipends that enabled 7.8 million ex-GIs to attend college and other educational programs by the time the program ended in 1958.
The GI Bill of Rights, as it was called, put higher education on the intellectual horizon of a broad section of Americans. But by the later 1960s, tuitions began to increase faster than the general inflation rate. Some years witnessed double-digit tuition inflation, making it seem like the window of educational opportunity was closing — especially to children from working-class families, like Bill Fitzsimmons’.
His father drove a cab in a small town about 15 miles from Harvard. But before Fitzsimmons chose to enroll as a freshman in 1963, he had never seen its campus.
“Coming from a blue-collar background, Harvard was a very different place,” said Fitzsimmons, now his alma mater’s dean of admissions.
The financial burden of increasing tuition was heightened by a shift in universities’ financial-aid policies. Financial aid used to mean cash rebates on tuition; but in recent decades that shifted to brokering loans for students and their parents. It is estimated that college students on average graduate with between $18,000 and $20,000 in outstanding loans.
But while the cost of higher education shot up dramatically at other schools, Berea stuck to its no-tuition policy.
“We like to think of Berea as the best school money can’t buy,” Bagnoli said.
He explained that, 80 years ago, the trustees decided to invest gifts to the college, rather than spending the money immediately, and use only the interest produced. By now, the endowment has grown to about $1 billion.
$35 billion endowment
Other schools have accumulated even greater wealth: Harvard’s endowment is about $35 billion. But alone, Berea has used its nest egg exclusively to bring students to campus who probably wouldn’t otherwise go to college. It draws from students at the bottom of the social-economic ladder.
At other campuses, tuition escalated even as endowments grew. “Students began to put us, and colleges like us, out of mind,” said Harvard’s Fitzsimmons. So two years ago, Harvard began an initiative to bring more diversity to its campus. Initially, it extended full-ride scholarships to young people from households earning up to $40,000 a year. Since then, it has raised the support eligibility level to $60,000.
This year, other Ivy League schools and Stanford announced similar programs — taking a hint from members of Congress making noise about universities piling up enormous endowments.
So next fall, a few thousand more students will be able to afford Harvard, Stanford and a handful of other elite schools. As before, 1,500 needy students will attend Berea.
Even so, those numbers are small compared with the need — young people’s, and the nation’s.
Berea officials note that in the pool they draw from, only 7 percent of young people get a college degree; a percentage that rises to 60 percent at upper-income levels.
In that 93 percent of disadvantaged children there might lie talent to, say, find a cure for cancer. Or, the artistic ability of another Norman Mailer, perhaps the sagacity of a Patrick Moynihan, both of whom benefited from the GI Bill.
Too few families can, like the Ratliffs, offer up praise that their children have a shot at a better life. Kenya Ratliff smiled at her daughter, the future nurse, and said: “We give God all the glory for her coming to Berea.”
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How Berea College does it SOURCE: Berea College officials
History: Founded in 1855 by ardent Christian abolitionists, the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. Its motto: “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth.” Since 1892, has not charged tuition.
How does it do that? In 1920, the board of trustees voted to salt away gifts, rather than spending them. That “seed corn,” as college officials like to call it, has grown into a $1 billion endowment. It earns about 75 percent of the cost of keeping the 1,500 students on campus.
And the rest? Some comes from government funds. But a large percentage comes from annual giving by people who have heard the Berea story and responded with their checkbooks. Expenses are kept down through students doubling as the campus workforce.
How do you get in? Berea is pledged to serve academically promising young people from the impoverished Appalachia region. Its student body comes from the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
How does it measure success? When its alumni enjoy the financial success that makes their children ineligible to go to Berea because family income is over the limit.
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rgrossman@tribune.com
