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To help make ends meet, Penn threw open its doors to vermin like me, admitting 4,491 students, a thousand more than in 1970. I wasn't aware of this either, but Penn clearly was and no doubt looked upon my class the way a bankrupt duchess might view the tourists using her castle as a bed-and-breakfast. Universities may lack the profit imperative that drives corporations, but they are just as fiercely competitive, always striving to get the best students, the best scholars, the best grants in order to attain the most prestige. Like every other top-tier institution, Penn seeks to attract as large an applicant pool as possible so as to admit as small a percentage of it as possible to fill its available places (a low "admit rate," considered an index of exclusivity). But it hopes most of those admitted will actually enroll (a high "yield," considered a mark of quality). Harvard, the gold standard, last year admitted only 11% of applicants for this year's class; three-quarters of them decided to enroll. Penn's admit rate my freshman year was more than 50%, a figure Penn officials recall with about as much nostalgia as a Vietnam vet recalls the siege of Khe Sanh.
Penn was in a bind. It was running at a deficit, but to avoid losing its place in the Ivies, it had to spend heavily to recruit and keep the best faculty and meet the growing demand by students for more course choices, more diversity, more access to professors and--one of the most salient trends of the post-'60s student body--more amenities, including comfy dorms, indoor tennis courts and pools. Meyerson had been acting chancellor at Berkeley during the height of student unrest. At Penn, he says, "the worst sit-in I experienced was when we tried to shut down the hockey rink."
Competition began driving up faculty salaries. Big-name professors not only drew top students but also improved a university's chances of winning harder-to-get federal research funds. (Competition for faculty can be fierce. Right now three professors at Penn's Wharton School are being aggressively recruited by other schools; one suitor is offering a 100% raise in pay.) To sweeten the pot, universities reduced the amount of time professors were required to spend performing such loathsome tasks as teaching undergraduates, serving as advisers and managing administrative operations. Courses proliferated: the course catalog for my senior year was 271 pages; today it's 375 pages. Yet the number of full-time arts-and-sciences faculty members remained stable. Graduate students and adjunct faculty increasingly shouldered the load, while professional counselors and administrators and their retinues of support staff took over tasks once within a professor's job description. In 1970 the number of full-time university employees was 12,155; by 1993 it had risen to 15,706. Yet the number of undergrads, with the exception of my class and a few others, changed little.
Despite such pressures, Meyerson managed to restrain Penn's tuition increases. By 1980 Penn's base tuition was $5,270, more than double the cost a decade earlier, but inflation had risen at roughly the same rate. So had median family income. If tuition was higher, so was America's ability to pay it.
The age of rational increase, however, had come to a close.