Originally published in The JHU Politik on February 24th, 2014.
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Johns Hopkins undergraduate tuition has risen from $37,700 in the 2008-2009 academic year to $45,470 in 2013-2014. This steep increase is one that continues to grow, virtually unquestioned by the student body, and with no end in sight.

Hopkins has defended the rising price, saying that tuition increased each year at only an average annual rate of 3.8%, compared to an average annual rate of 5.6% in the five years prior. But still, it’s well worth asking, what is this money for?

This past month, the Delta Costa Project, a nonprofit nonpartisan social-science organization came out with a new report on costs in higher education. The report, “Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive: Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education“, concluded that between 2000-2012, expansion in wages and salaries in higher education came not from instruction or academic support but from student services, including athletics, admissions, psychological counseling and career services.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education puts it, “just as a cable company bundles channels together and makes you pay for them all, whether or not you watch them, colleges have bundled counseling, athletics, campus activities, and other services with the instructional side to justify charging more.”

Hopkins and other universities have rationalized their expansion of student services by pointing to external regulations as well as pressure from students, parents and policymakers. Indeed issues like sexual assault and campus mental health have received substantial news coverage recently. And there are some new positions, like the Director of LGBTQ life on campus, which were enthusiastically met with widespread approval.

However, there is more to the story.

JHU Political Science professor, Ben Ginsberg, has written a book entitled “The Fall of the Faculty” which delves into what he observes as severe bureaucratic bloat in higher education. He sees our nation’s burgeoning administrative sector driving up the cost of education with little verifiable value in return. He contends that the growth of the administration has resulted in a shift of power away from the faculty.

“In the old days, if the President of the University lost the faith of the faculty he couldn’t do his job,” said Ginsberg in an interview. “Now he circumvents that and the president has become relatively autonomous. It’s presidential imperialism.”

As Ginsberg argues in The Washington Monthly, “Universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.”

We go to a private research university, so the rising costs of our education carry different political significance than that of state institutions, which are also seeing increases in price. And yet, it’s a mistake to think that somehow negates the difficult impact of these costs.

Notably, the financial aid budget has increased under President Daniels’ administration, with grant aid for Homewood undergraduates increasing from $50 million in 2008-09 to just under $75 million in 2013-14. According to Director of Media Relations, Tracey Reeves, more than 40% of Homewood undergraduates receive assistance to offset the cost of attending Johns Hopkins.

Nevertheless, while expanding the amount of assistance is surely good, with an ever-increasing cost of attendance, at some point it just becomes impossible for many students who might have otherwise been able to attend. Then at that point, our students, faculty and administrators have to ask themselves if the administrative growth and the expansion of student services is worth it at the expense of making the cost of attendance too expensive for many otherwise qualified students to afford.

Perhaps there could be alternative models for degree seeking students, for those who want to come and get a Johns Hopkins education but do not want or cannot afford to pay for the sectors of the University that they will never plan to utilize, like student activities, Greek life and athletics.

Or perhaps the status quo, with hopes that financial aid can adequately meliorate the burden, is the best solution given the difficulties of implementing any alternative system. There aren’t easy answers to these questions.

The point is, however, that our school has never really had the opportunity to openly discuss and debate these issues and explore the larger consequences of these growing economic trends.

 This must change; none of these choices are, or should be mistaken as, inevitable.