Chicago
AFL-CIO Executive Council statement
The AFL-CIO and its affiliates will lead a national effort to ensure that all Americans have full access to a diverse range of excellent, affordable higher education opportunities because we recognize that higher education will be increasingly important for workers in the 21st century economy. However, America’s higher education system—once the best and most accessible in the world—is in danger of becoming unattainable for working families and of losing its quality edge.
America’s higher education system was built on an important public policy consensus: Investing in higher education is good for everyone. Beginning with the GI Bill and reaching its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, this policy consensus resulted in strong state support for public institutions and an impressive array of two-year, four-year and graduate programs, as well as an extensive system of federal financial aid to equalize educational opportunity. Our nation attracted the best faculty and staff in the world because our institutions of higher education provided good jobs and the freedom to work without outside interference.
These policies produced remarkable results. The share of the workforce with at least a bachelor’s degree doubled between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. Along with this dramatic increase in the number of people with degrees, the “return-on-investment” of a college degree also increased during this period. The hourly earnings of college graduates averaged 4.5 percent more than those of high school graduates. Similarly, the unemployment rate for those with bachelor’s or higher degrees was 2 percent in June 2007, compared with the 4 percent for high school graduates and 3.5 percent for students with some college or a two-year college degree.
Over the past decade, however, the public policies that supported the American higher education system have eroded, and working families’ access to college has declined as a result. Adjusted for inflation, state and local funding per student at public colleges and universities last year reached its lowest level in 25 years. Cuts in state aid have caused tuition and fees at four-year public universities to increase 52 percent over the past 10 years, while median family income increased only 3 percent. The system for awarding student financial aid now is skewed against working students and provides little support for part-time students. The Pell Grant, the federal program that provides the most aid to low-income students and that once covered nearly 60 percent of average tuition, fees, room and board at a public four-year college, now covers only 33 percent. More students need to take out loans to attend college, and graduates now average debts of $15,000 for attending public institutions, $19,000 for private institutions and $24,000 for attending for-profit colleges.
The results are clear: Higher education is not serving as the great engine of upward mobility it ought to be. Today in the United States, a low-achieving, high-income student is just as likely to go to college as the highest-achieving, low-income student, and only 36 percent of college-qualified, low-income students complete bachelor’s degrees within eight and a half years, compared with 81 percent of high-income students.
Reductions in state spending on higher education also have led to a deterioration of quality in the academic workplace. Less than 30 percent of today’s instructional workforce is made up of full-time tenured professors, while 70 percent work in term-by-term or year-by-year jobs. Very few new full-time tenured professors are being hired today. Meanwhile, part-time/adjunct instructors, graduate employees and other faculty without either tenure or collective bargaining rights are staffing more and more classes. Most of them receive scandalously low salaries (less than $200 a week for teaching a 15-week course) and few, if any, benefits and professional supports such as paid office hours.
Given the technological complexity of the modern workplace, the rising importance of jobs staffed by “knowledge workers” and the competitive demands of a global marketplace, even the most highly educated workers need to adopt new skills over their lifetimes. The AFL-CIO, through its state federations, area labor federations and central labor councils, will make restoring state support for higher education and keeping tuition down a significant legislative priority. Such support will include advocacy for policies that provide students from working families with the educational support they need to complete their education and for Labor Studies programs at our public universities. America’s unions will play a leading role in restoring and increasing the nation’s commitment to ensuring that all Americans have the opportunity to pursue a college degree.