The Five-Year Party (6 page)

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Authors: Craig Brandon

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Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire became Franklin Pierce University in 2007 after alumni and public relations groups decided that the new name would be more impressive to employers and graduate schools. Previous graduates were invited to send back their out-of-date “college” diplomas for the more up-to-date “university” models. The same thing was going on farther north, where Plymouth State College was reinventing itself as Plymouth State University.
 
Beaver College in Glenside, Pennsylvania, which had been named after the county in which it was founded in 1853, faced a more drastic name problem, which led to a poor marketing position. In recent years, however, the college had taken an enrollment hit when the name became associated with something else. Hint: It wasn’t a furry little animal that makes dams in ponds. To their horror, Beaver’s administrators found that many high school internet filters, designed to block obscene websites, were not allowing students to look at the college’s website. Any site with the word
beaver
in it had to be obscene.
 
Although Beaver College sweatshirts were popular all over the country for the same reason as Fairfield University’s popular F.U. baseball caps were, the college’s board of trustees hired consultant Dennis Nostrand in 1992 to reverse the college’s sliding admissions and improve its image. Late night TV talk show pundits like Jay Leno and David Letterman put on their thinking caps and offered alternative names such as the “University of the Southern Region” and “Gynecollege.”
12
 
The college’s marketing consultants, however, wanted something that started with the letter “A” so that it would be near the top on lists of colleges. Of course, it had to become a “university” as well. They eventually came up with Arcadia University, which the college felt sounded like a bucolic place for learning but which students probably associated with video arcades. In any case, the magic seems to have worked because enrollments increased by a third after the school’s expensive facelift.
 
Another nip and tuck for college nameplates involved adding the word
The
in front of college names. In 2009, Florida State University began calling itself “
The
Florida State University,” joining Johns Hopkins and Ohio State with the definite article prominently capitalized at the front of their names. Not long ago, colleges competed with each other in terms of academic excellence, but in the dog-eat-dog world of Diplomas Inc., academics spend hours discussing the pros and cons of this seemingly ridiculous name game. Party schools are terrified of falling behind the latest marketing trend.
 
Marketers and public relations experts also found that most college mottos were seriously uncool and out of date. The University of Idaho, for example, scrapped “From Here You Can Go Anywhere” for “No Fences,” but no one liked that either, so they changed it again to “A Legacy of Leading,” which tested better with focus groups. The cost of this motto-mania was $900,000, but who cares? Party school administrators can just jack up tuition again to cover the cost.
13
 
Rob Frankel, whose website proclaims him to be “the best branding expert on the planet,” said many colleges have bland, unmemorable mottos. Stanford’s “The Wind of Freedom Blows” is a good example. “That slogan blows,” he said in an interview. He didn’t like Dartmouth’s “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness” either because it sounds like failure. There is, in fact, an entire industry of college branding consultants offering their expensive services to colleges who think that a makeover will give them a leg up on the competition. It’s easy to spend this kind of money when you can just jack up tuition a few more notches to cover the costs.
14
 
The “Arms Race” to Add Campus Frills
 
Another major reason for the soaring tuition increases at party schools is the incredible, multi-million-dollar race to build the most eye-catching campus frills to attract students looking for the best party. Greg Winter, a reporter for the
New York Times
, went on an expedition in the fall of 2003 to take a close look at the state-of-the-art amusement park campuses that colleges were building to lure students. What he found reads like a shopping list for a higher education system that has lost its mind.
15
 
At the University of Houston, he found a five-story climbing wall that he said looked like it was transported right out of Arches National Park. It was surrounded by boulders and palm trees to make it more attractive. “Everyone says it looks like a resort,” Winter was told by Kathy Anzivino, director of campus recreation for the university. And that is exactly the idea, of course.
 
He found the largest Jacuzzi on the West Coast at Washington State University. It holds fifty-three people. Students at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh can get massages, pedicures, and manicures. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has room-sized golf simulators. Pennsylvania State University has a 200-gallon tropical ecosystem with newts and salamanders, as well as a 550-gallon salt-water aquarium.
The
Ohio State University is spending $140 million to build a 657,000-square-foot entertainment complex featuring kayaks and canoes, indoor batting cages, ropes courses, and a climbing wall that can accommodate fifty students. The University of Southern Mississippi is building a full-fledged water park, complete with water slides, a meandering river, and what they call a flat deck, a moving sheet of water that students can lie back on and stay cool while sunbathing.
 
The champion of all this craziness is currently High Point University in North Carolina, which features lobster and steak on its lunch menu and an ice cream truck that roams the campus to provide students with 500 varieties of free frozen treats. The residence halls have valet parking and concierge services where students can ask the resident clerk to pick up their dry cleaning or make dinner reservations.
16
The dining halls feature live music and wide-screen, high-definition television monitors. On their birthdays, students are greeted by name and provided with slices of birthday cake. All of this is coordinated by a computer, which also keeps track of students’ favorite movies and brands of candy bars and sodas. Students can sign up for automated wake-up calls with the college president’s voice urging them to have a nice day. Planned for the near future is a building informally called The Multiplex, which will feature a movie theater, a sports bar, and a steak house.
17
 
Anyone who has walked around a party school campus over the past decade would find it hard to ignore the construction cranes, orange barrier fences, and hard-hatted construction workers that have become as common as the ubiquitous red plastic cups that students use for illegal drinking. Colleges that engage in this expensive and insane arms race, as most of them do, have become increasingly disconnected from the real world as they raise tuition over and over to pay their out-of-control construction costs. Parents who want to know why college tuition is rising so quickly really have to look no further. Turning campuses into adolescent theme parks does not come cheaply, especially when student trends change from year to year, and woe to the college that gets left behind. College administrators defend the excesses as absolutely necessary if they want to stay in business. Mitchel D. Livingston, vice president for student affairs at the University of Cincinnati, said students and their parents decide during the first fifteen minutes of the golden walk if they are in or out. “They want to be wowed,” he said. “If we don’t wow them they go somewhere else that has more wow.”
18
 
There is no sign that the building boom is declining, even during the current recession. And going forward, the cost crunch from the recession will fall more heavily on what Maurna Desmond in
Forbes
magazine calls “country club campuses,” schools that drained their coffers to build luxury dormitories, spas, and top-of-the-line sports complexes. Party schools felt they had no choice but to out-build the other colleges in the neighborhood. “If a college decides we’re not going to have fancy dorms or build a shiny new gym, students are not going to that college,” said Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst at the College Board. “People are not choosing the lowest price college and that’s a consumer issue, not a public policy problem.”
19
 
The basic underlying problem is that parents and students are choosing colleges using the wrong set of criteria. Party schools have increasingly opted out of the education industry and become part of the entertainment industry. The low levels of learning are merely a by-product of this change of emphasis. Are students attracted to these theme park campuses really interested in education or just in having a good time? Increasingly, it seems to be the latter.
 
High Salaries and Elaborate Perks for Party School Administrators
 
College administrations aren’t just spending money on marketing. They also spend it on themselves. Colleges have bloated their pay-rolls with ever-increasing numbers of administrators and managers. In 1976, there were three non-faculty professional staff employees for every one hundred students. Today, that has doubled to six per one hundred students. In addition, for the past eleven years, college administrators have received pay raises higher than the inflation rate and, in the past five years, college presidents’ salaries have increased by 37 percent.
20
 
A generation ago, before colleges were taken over by Diplomas Inc., administrators made only slightly more than the faculty because the job was seen as little more than an extra duty on top of their teaching responsibilities. Many of them, in fact, hoped that they would return to teaching after their administrative tenure. But as party school administrators began to act less like professors and more like Wall Street tycoons, the mushrooming tuition rates made it easy to jack up administrative salaries. Although in the past it was common for colleges to provide their presidents with a free mansion, complete with servants, college presidents of the nineteenth century wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for golf junkets, salaries in the middle six figures, their own Learjets, and golden parachute retirement packages valued in the millions of dollars.
 
In addition, administrative duties have become much easier as presidents hired more vice presidents, vice presidents added assistant vice presidents, and deans added assistant deans. National statistics about the number of administrative positions that have been added by colleges are hard to come by, but on the few campuses that have reported on this, the numbers are staggering. At the University of New Mexico, where a study was made as part of a dispute between the faculty and President David Schmidly, it was found that in the six years between 2002 and 2008, executive salaries had increased $4.1 million, or 71 percent.
21
 
During the summer of 2009, the Raleigh, North Carolina,
News and Observer
found that the number of administrators at the University of North Carolina’s seventeen campuses had increased 28 percent in five years from 1,269 to 1,623, an increase that the president, Erskine Bowles, called “an absolute embarrassment.”
22
 
Nationally, the number of nonfaculty college professionals rose 123 percent between 1976 and 1989, the last year for which there were numbers, according to a 1998 survey taken by Research Dialogues.
23
 
University critic Cary Nelson said all of these new administrative jobs were being created with limited oversight, often without even a formal search, creating what he called “an opportunity for patronage if not a perk.”
24
 
Sociologist Arthur Levine explained how easy it was to create new layers of administration in colleges: “More admissions officers were hired to attract more students. More development staff were hired to raise more money. More student-affairs professionals were hired to reduce attrition. And more finance staff were hired to control spending.”
25
 
The
Chronicle of Higher Education
’s annual survey found that college presidents’ salaries had risen 7.6 percent during the 2007-2008 school year to an average of $427,400. The number of presidents earning more than $700,000 increased to fifteen, from eight the previous year. The highest paid president in the country, E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State, was paid a total of $1,346,225, including a $310,000 bonus.
26
 
The increase in college administrative costs attracted the attention of Charles E. Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who said he was concerned that, at a time when the country was in economic trouble and students were having trouble raising the money for colleges, presidents should be increasing their salaries. “In these hard economic times,” he said, “apparently belt-tightening is for families and students, not university presidents.”
27
 
The new presidents have changed the power structure on campus as faculties and their senates, which used to wield considerable power, have been bypassed and replaced by a bureaucracy of managers and administrators who follow a corporate ladder model taken directly from big business. Faculty are increasingly left out of the loop and have less knowledge of what is happening on campus.

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