Letter to the Editor: ‘Don’t believe the stories being told to us’

The recent Op-Ed, Editorial: Who’s really to blame for the tuition raise, addresses an important issue. Its suggestion is that our State Government is to blame. Yet, the truth is that it’s far more complicated than that, and both the premise and rationale for the dramatic Oakland University tuition increase deserves further scrutiny.

The cost of higher education has grown dramatically over the past three decades well beyond what inflation or relevant indices might predict. These trends are decoupled, largely, from lagging government funding.President Hynd and other college presidents have blamed public funding for financial woes, but this is not a novel argument, nor is it the first time that it has been made. It is true that public funding has not kept up with cost, but it is not a central driver for increasing costs at universities across the country. (In fact,) It is a harmful distractor and obfuscates the true impetuses for skyrocketing tuition rates.

OU claims that current enrollment growth should be a primary motivator for more state funding. But since the recession, Lansing has based funding on a performance model. Despite increasing enrollment year over year, documents on OU’s website indicate very little progress meeting performance metrics. In fact, the next highest funded state university, GVSU, outperforms OU by wide margins in both retention and graduation rates. Enrollment has increased, but that is a very weak foundation for claiming that the University is more successful or prosperous.

Despite OU’s strategic plan and efforts to clean up its own expenditure, there have been a dearth of specific details for why the tuition hike was necessary to hit performance targets or enable the university to educate its students better.

President Hynd has requested that students shoulder more cost in order to improve the university because of a deficit in public funding. Yet, it is concerning that Pres. Hynd was hired on last year at a rate 10% higher than his predecessor and is the fourth-highest paid state university president in the state despite not being hired to helm a university of equal caliber. Furthermore, the Office of the President has seen its budget increased more than any other department in the very same year that tuition increased so dramatically.

It is reductionistic to assume that ballooning administrative cost growth is to blame for tuition increases, but we need to delve deeper. We should not simply accept the narrative provided us.