Enrollment Management at UofL.

I am getting  a lot of new material from Insider Louisville. I envy their information network! (Hint. Hint.) Friday’s content included notice of the fact that following a five-year tenure, Dean Jim Chen of the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law had left his position. This appeared to be a surprise to some because, among other achievements, he had been very successful in raising both money and the status of the Law School. Dean Chen will take a year of administrative leave and retain his faculty appointment. Dean Chen is a lot younger than me. If this was his career decision, I congratulate him and wish him well. However, in the secretive world of intrigue that is the University of Louisville, my default skepticism stirs.

Professor Chen’s change in status was noticed by the national legal community.  In the National Law Journal he was called “one of the more vocal internal critics of legal education.” He recently gained attention for a paper analyzing the impact of the cost of legal education on its students and on their future career options. He wished to “communicate the essence of urgency of making legal education more responsive to the people who rely on it most: students and their future clients.” In a just-published paper in the William Mitchell Law Review, Dr. Chen compared typical debt burdens of UofL students to those from private law schools. In addition to displaying a staggering command of numeric analysis that could place him on the faculty of a mathematics department, Dr. Chen concluded that the educational debt of a typical graduating in-state UofL law student of $75,000 makes it unlikely that the student could afford even a $100,000 house unless the student was one of the lucky few to obtain a high-end job.  It is my understanding that law schools are considered profit centers at major universities.  Dean Chen had the audacity to question whether the economic value of a legal education is as great as many schools advertise. He certainly made a strong argument that the amount of educational debt a student gains will influence their chose of careers. I have said before, that it is not always wise at the University of Louisville to serve as the conscience of your unit.

So why am I writing abut this in a health policy blog? All this follows on the heels of a recent UofL announcement that it will take full advantage of the maximum 6% tuition hike for in-state students permitted by the Kentucky Council on Higher Education. (Is there any such limit for out-of-state students?)  This of course is an announcement the University has been making annually for quite a while. The last time I did the analysis, UofL and UK were first or second among major state universities in the rate at which they had increased their tuition. (This is a ranking that UofL did not advertise!) Our medical and other health science students have also been the beneficiary of this parade of tuition increases. The debt accumulated before they can earn a dollar is much higher than that of a law or undergraduate student. Is there any wonder why medical students take positions in high-paying specialties instead of the relatively low-paying primary care careers that most health policy authorities believe are needed? I would like to see Professor Chen plug our medical students’ debt numbers into his equations!

We are hearing that the next major economic bubble that will burst is that of educational debt, which may have already surpassed even credit card debt. (UofL and other colleges with their bank partners also help launch credit card debt for students!)  Ironically, former students are not allowed access to the same bankruptcy relief that their bank and school  lenders use freely when bad business practices catch up with those institutions.   We are also hearing others question whether the value added to lifetime earnings by a college education is as great as it was in the past when fewer people went to college. You would think that public universities like UofL, or even private ones would want to minimize the cost to their students, or at the very least not subsidize sports and commercial activities on the backs of their students. I wish I could feel confident that this was the case at UofL, but I have been there too long. I was in the room when an effort was made to convert scholarship and other educational endowments into research money. I was in the room for the discussion of how the medical school would (illegally) increase the number of out-of-state medical students and their already much higher tuition to boost University income, with students of Asian descent from California targeted.

As an old dinosaur in education, I have always felt that just as a physician should act in the best interests of their patients even when there is a conflict with their own self-interest, that a teacher has an obligation to act in the best interest of their student. I acknowledge that our institutions of higher education have been asked, or chosen to assume a broader range of missions. I have to believe though, that among all of these, education of students must retain the highest priority. Does it look to you that this is the case at the University of Louisville and similar institutions? That is not what I am seeing. Students, like the sick or like veterans, are not simply fodder for economic development. Does anything need to be done differently? What do you think?

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
April 28, 2012