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To be sure, state universities are not immune to the rising costs of education—but a skillful president can almost always get his regents and legislature to ante up for a new cyclotron or an added Ph.D. program in zoology. Administrators of private colleges claim that their available sources of revenue, while rising in dollar volume, no longer keep pace with expenses.
As a rule, private institutions pick up nearly 60% of their instructional costs from tuition, which has been rising dramatically in recent years. The national average has jumped from $700 to more than $1,200 in the past ten years; N.Y.U.'s soared from $940 to $2,000, Reed's from $800 to $2,200, Sarah Lawrence's from $1,551 to $2,350. At the present rate of increase, Harvard's tuition, now $2,000, will reach $5,000 by 1978. "But this is impossible," says Harvard's vice president, Lewis Gard Wiggins. "We'll have to look elsewhere for the money." Many small-college presidents are afraid that they will price themselves out of the market. The question that fathers ask, says Byron Trippett of the Colorado Association of Independent Colleges and Universities is: "What can Colorado College offer my boy for a tuition of $1,700 that the University of Colorado can't do just as well for $300?"
Good Will & Good Wills. Endowment is another traditional source of income, and some private colleges are courting aging millionaires with a fervor that verges on frenzy. "We are trying to build good will—and good wills," quips University of Miami President Henry King Stanford. "Unfortunately, naming Miami in a will seems to be a guarantee of longevity." Actually, as the 100 schools that hold 92% of the nation's $12 billion in university endowments have long since discovered, inherited wealth is not the answer. Columbia, for example, has quadrupled its endowment to more than $390 million in the past 30 years, but income from this source covers only 22% of the school's expenses today, compared with 42% in 1937. Roughly two-thirds of all endowment funds are committed to specific uses by their donors and cannot be used for general operations.
Virtually every college in the U.S. is now embarked on a massive fund drive —and most of them are succeeding beyond their wildest hopes in getting friends, alumni and business corporations to give, and give generously. The trouble is, most drives are aimed at expanding facilities and adding new faculty, which adds to operating costs. And as the fund drive becomes a permanent rather than a periodic process, the necessary go-and-get-it zeal will become ever harder to sustain. "We are going to have to raise $1,000,000 a week for as long as the university exists," says Chicago Provost Edward Levi—and he is not sure how it can be done.
The recent injection of federal money into higher education has turned out to be both a lifesaver and an irritant. The