Description
Book SynopsisColleges and universities are richer than everso why has the price of attending them risen so much?As endowments and fundraising campaigns have skyrocketed in recent decades, critics have attacked higher education for steeply increasing its production cost and price and the snowballing debt of students. In Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler reveal how these trends began 150 years ago and why they have intensified in recent decades. In the late nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began fiercely competing to expand their revenue, wealth, and production cost in order to increase their quality and prestige and serve the soaring number of students. From that era through today, the rising wealth and cost of higher education have continued to reinforce each other and spiral upward, increasing the heavily subsidized price paid by students. Kimball and Iler explain the strategy and reasoning that drove this wealth-cost d
Trade ReviewKimball and Iler's richly researched, provocative and pivotally important history of college endowments, campus fundraising campaigns, university finances, institutional spending and student debt.
—Steve Mintz,
Inside Higher Ed[Bruce A.] Kimball and Sarah M. Iler explore the historical roots of wealth stratification, lay out the advantages that allow rich universities to get exponentially richer, and propose ways to close the gap with less-wealthy institutions.
—Mike Scutari,
Inside PhilanthropyWealth, Cost & Price in American Higher Education: A Brief History, is indispensable and essential for anyone considering the wealthy university's present and future.
—Joshua Kim,
Insider Higher EdThis is a timely, well researched monograph....we applaud Kimball and Iler for writing this fascinating backstory to the crisis we now face.
—Christopher P. Loss & William Krause,
Review of Higher EducationTable of ContentsPreface
Acronyms and Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Introduction
Part I.: The Formative Era, 1870-1930
1. "Endowment" Emerges, 1870-1930
2. Free-Money Strategy, 1869-1909
3. Birth of the Annual Alumni Fund, 1890-1925
4. Fundraising Drives Begin, 1915-1925
5. Campaigns Proliferate; Presidents Resist, 1920s
6. Did Cost Escalate in the Formative Era?
Part II: The Golden Ages, 1930-2020s
7. Depression, the 60/40 Rule, and Cost-Disease Theory, 1930s-1960s
8. Stagflation, Total Return, and Revenue-Cost Theory, 1965-1980
9. Wealth, Cost, and Price Ignite Resentment, 1980-2008
10. What is the Real "Cost Disease?" 1980s-2020s
11. Steady Price, Rising Debt, Widening Wealth Gap, 2009-2020s
Conclusion: Plato's Descent, Perseveration, and History
Appendices
Index
Notes
