By Craig Wolff/The Star-Ledger

Rutgers University, banking on the promise of new wealth when it joins the affluent Big Ten Conference this summer, projects it will soon begin slashing subsidy payments to the athletics department and bring the sports program — almost, but not quite — to a break-even point by 2022, according to a draft of the school’s financial forecast obtained by The Star-Ledger.

The projections rely heavily on the prospect of mega-television deals and the allure of the Big Ten to sell tickets and attract donations and sponsors even as the Scarlet Knights face a difficult initiation against more powerful and established opponents.

After giving the athletics department an unprecedented $47 million last year — much of it to cover one-time expenses — the university anticipates its subsidy will be reduced by nearly half over the next two years and continue to fall until 2022, when a $3.1 million subsidy is projected.

The projections contained in the financial forecast fulfill Rutgers’ recently unveiled a long-term strategic plan to begin slicing into the athletic subsidies within five years.

Getting close to solvency will be expensive.

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Politics thwart colleges’ role 
in upward mobility

By Suzanne Mettler

The American system of higher education is in crisis. Over the past 30 years, it has gone from facilitating upward mobility to exacerbating social inequality. College-going, once associated with opportunity, now engenders something that increasingly resembles a caste system: It takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and widens the divisions among them. The consequences are vast, including differences among graduates in employment rates and lifetime earnings, in health, and in civic engagement.

The rise of for-profit colleges, changes in federal student aid, and the demise of state funds for public colleges and universities have helped produce these circumstances. But at its core, this transformation represents a political failure, a breakdown of representative government that no longer provides effective mechanisms by which Americans can pursue a better life. Higher-education policies that worked well in the past to mitigate inequality are still in place, but they have deteriorated and gone off course. Thus we are squandering one of our finest accomplishments and historic legacies, a system of higher education that was long characterized by excellence and wide accessibility.

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How public colleges were crowded out, beaten up, and failed to fight back

By Karin Fischer and Jack Stripling

It happened so slowly that no one really noticed at first. That’s the way erosion works. It is a gradual decay.

But somewhere along the line, over the past three decades or so, the deterioration of support for public higher education became hard to miss. Appropriations tanked. Tuition soared. College leaders embraced gloomy rhetoric about broken partnerships with the very people who had built these institutions from the ground up.

Now we have come to a precipice. College students and their families, who just a decade ago paid for about one-third of the cost of their education, are on track to pay for most of it. In nearly half of the states, they already do.

Behind these changes is a fundamental shift. Public colleges, once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good, are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought to foot the bill themselves.

The story of public higher education’s transition from a key national priority to an increasingly neglected special interest is untidy. It cannot be traced to any single moment in time. It cannot be laid at the feet of any one individual or ideology. Rather, it is the story of dozens and dozens of consequential moves made by individual actors across the country. They are lobbyists and activists, antitax conservatives and big-government liberals, conflicted idealists and self-preservationists. Even college leaders themselves.

They are the American public.

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By Tom De Poto/The Star-Ledger

Lior Naor is a junior at Rutgers University living in Rockoff Hall in downtown New Brunswick. She won the apartment through a lottery that about 12,000 students looking for housing enter every year.

“I love it,” the psychology major said. “The location is great and there’s a lot of Rutgers students in the area.”

In February, however, a private, Pennsylvania-based company purchased the building for $44.1 million.

Naor will be returning in September and didn’t have to enter any lottery. Instead of paying Rutgers, she’ll be sending a monthly rent check to McKinney Properties, which bought the building.

The Economic Stimulus Act of 2009 paved the way for public colleges to partner with private developers to keep up with demand for upscale dorms without taking on more debt.

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