Deferred Maintenance at UMass Amherst

It doesn't come as a surprise that UMass Amherst is, as the Globe reported today, "facing a daunting repair bill." In addition to a $790 million building effort that began four years ago, the campus now requires an additional $1.8 billion in the next decade. Yesterday it was reported that the school required $830 million but that number has been increased.

I've been on campus and what little I saw suggested that the need is quite real. Deferred maintenance; science facilities that must keep pace with ongoing advances; technological requirements in classrooms, and for faculty, staff, and students; not to mention staying competitive in the ever-expanding creaion of luxury dormitories and dining hall environments all combine to confront the administration and trustees with a ferocious, insatiable montster of constant building and repair needs. From where the money though?

It should be obvious, even though it is the tonier schools that get most of our attention, that the unsung heroes of higher education are—and will increasingly be—the most affordable insttituions: to wit, the public colleges and universities. I often counsel students and familiies of modest means to look to state schools as their best-case scenarios. It does not necessariy follow that graduates of state schools earn less than graduates of private institutions. However, the pattern of giving is quite different and thus we are back to our building problem.

Public institutions of higher education are increasingly asked by their state governments to raise money the old-fashioned way: from their alumni and other outside sources. State support is no longer a given. Here in Massachusetts I personally think it is a crime that we don't have a state system that can be counted among the "public ivies," as does Michigan, Wisconsin, California, and other up and coming systems. If education is one of our industries we should be capturing all of our homegrown students who want an excellent education and cannot afford a private school or prefer the advantages of a large state college. So, point number one is that Massachusetts should get busy and do whatever it takes to make UMass shine.

Still, a couple of billion dollars is a lot of money and there is another side to this. Students have come to expect education as a right—as indeed K-12 is explained as a service to society. We need an educated citizenry. But higher education is more typicaly considered a responsibility, an advantage. For this, there is a price. And students who were part of the public system are as indebted to their institutions as are the rest of us. Parents and families of those students are no less beholden. Their chidrens' education was subsidsized by tax dollars and, to the extent possible, their goodwill and generousity must also be called upon. In other words, the culture of giving must take hold in the alumni of public higher education just as surely as it has in the classes of the Harvard Business School. This requires a change in attitude that must be communicated when the students and their families first come to the campus: that higher education is a privilege and giving something—anything—back is what we do.

(By the way, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great if the government didn't provide higher education for its citizenry—maybe it should—Norway does, but the taxes show it. We just don't do it here.)