Dear Dr. Monday,
When I came to Duke just a couple of years ago, I thought I’d have enough money to pay my way through, even though I was just over the cutoff for financial aid. I get that a Duke education is valuable, but I’m having a tough time thinking about how much debt I’m going to be if tuition keeps rising like this. Can you use your infinite sway with the admins to do something?
Thanks!
Upper Middle Class
Dear “Upper Middle Class,"
Probably the only thing on Duke’s campus for which there is universal hatred, besides anyone who thinks Grayson should have been suspended (can you fault the guy for trying to stretch his calves a little at the end of a long basketball game? We’ve only got 5 guys, man!), is a rise in tuition. Over the past ten years, tuition has risen at a rate that outpaces inflation, median household income and offense taken to party themes, and has more than doubled since 1999.
I have a theory that these tuition rises aren’t about making sure Duke stays solvent, or even satisfying President Brodhead’s weird construction fetish (we know you don’t need a crane that big to make a three-story building). As a board member it just seems natural to tell students you’re sorry, pick 3.8 percent to keep away from those big round numbers as advised by Dan Ariely and hit the greens. This time around, though, Dr. Monday, C.P.A., has decided Duke needs a quick audit before we just throw a 4 percent raise their way.
The number-one defense for a high cost of tuition at Duke is financial aid—namely, that the financial aid budget over the past 7 years has increased at a faster rate than tuition. While this is true, the old “So how much can ya give me?” approach feels less like paying for an education at the eighth-best school in the country and more like buying protection from a guy named Gino who owns a chain of Italian delis in Long Island. Can I really afford not to pay? Why are all of Gino’s friends in the construction business? Is he seriously building a water reclamation pond with my money?
My beef is that I’m not seeing the benefits in critical areas for Duke: academics, housing, security. For 67 grand a year, I should be able to walk down Main Street in Durham with $500 in cash taped to me, and Dicky B should be right at my side, ready to take a bullet for me. I shouldn’t be worried about being woken up to the sweet lullaby of construction at 2 a.m., but rather whether the maid remembered that chocolate chips hurt my sensitive stomach, and that she should only leave sugar cookies on my pillow before bedtime. At least let me feel the prestige associated with dropping that much dough, perhaps with an embossed, hand-framed piece of paper stating that I am an elite member of society and deserve to be treated as such.
This article isn’t meant as a substitute for Bernie Sanders’ Viagra prescription; you have to feel for the little guy here, and that little guy is Duke. For some students, their Duke education will be worth millions, and they can easily afford to pay whatever you ask. But what do you do about the money pit departments, where your faculty demands “unions” and “salaries”? What do you do when students in your moneymaker departments realize that their 8:30 a.m. being taught by a professor fresh off Rosetta Stone is really being taught to them by Bill Gates’ greatest gift to Duke, PowerPoint? Students are unhappy with Duke for charging them more, and Duke can’t exist without doing so—so what do we do?
The answer, of course, is to reinvent the Duke corporation as a whole. As long as there has been capitalism, organizations have had to adapt to changing market circumstances or die. The cautionary examples are many—Blockbuster with the movie rental business, Borders with online book sales, the list goes on and on.
So we shut down all this academic nonsense, and focus on a business model Duke already shines at: consulting. Rather than waste all this time and money maintaining our own school brand, we use our resources to teach the lower schools (I can think of one just a few miles away) how to actually hold classes and become a true brand—think of how good the company basketball team would be! The best part? The entire workforce would be 100 percent free, disguised as Duke’s newest summer internship program. With that, we can get away from this whole discussion of “financial aid” and accelerate our students towards what they’re really here for: making money.
Dr. Monday would like to remind his readers who say “Well, tuition increases can’t go on much longer than this” that Donald Trump looks to be the Republican party’s nominee for President.
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