14
Dispatches
APRIL 2020SKETCH“I’ll tell you a funny story,” said
Mitch Daniels, the president
of Purdue University. It was
the day before the first home
football game of the season
and he was sitting in his cor-
ner office, overlooking the
postcard-perfect quad.
“So the cost of a year of
undergraduate college at Pur-
due University, tuition and
fees, is $9,992. I’m proud of
that number.
“One day I’m looking at
one of those college guides,
and it said, ‘Tuition and fees:
$10,002.’ I called up our
people and said, ‘Lookit here,
there’s a mistake. You got the
wrong number.’ They said,
‘That’s not a mistake.’ I said,
‘Yes, it is. Believe me. I know.’
They went back and checked
and they said, ‘No, that’s the
right figure.’
“It just bugged me to death.
Does Walmart have a special
and price it at $10.02? I found
out what happened. There’s a
second installment on a pre-
existing gym fee that got tacked
on. Ten dollars plus $9,
equals $10,002.
“Next time I’m at the gym,
I ask the guy who runs it,
‘How’s it going here?’ He said,
‘Membership’s up; we’re doing
well, making a little profit.’ I
thought, Okay, that’s all I needed
to know. And the next meeting
of the board of trustees, they
repealed that fee.
“So now we’re back to
$9,992,” he said. There was
both self-deprecation and a
note of triumph in his chuckle.
“I don’t know why it bugged
me so much, but it did.”
He may not know why, but
I do, and so does everybody
who’s followed Daniels in his
nearly 20-year public career.
He is notoriously tight with
a dollar. Friends recall that as
a beginning golfer, he played
with a garden glove he already
had instead of a store-bought,
$3 golf glove. His parsimoni-
ous nature, when applied to
public matters, is one reason he
received more votes than any
other officeholder in Indiana
history in 2008, when he won
reelection as governor, and it’s
why he and his university— a
150-year-old land-grant schoolin West Lafayette, Indiana—
are objects of curiosity and
even wonderment in the world
of higher education.
Most of the attention cen-
ters on that all-important
number, 9,992. Not only is
that the dollar amount an in-
state student will pay Purdue
for tuition and fees next year;
it is also the amount such a
student paid Purdue whenDaniels became university
president, in 2013. The univer-
sity has also reduced the price
of food services and textbooks.
An undergraduate degree from
Purdue, in other words, is less
expensive today than it was
when Daniels arrived.
Only when seen against the
inflationary helix of Ameri-
can higher education can thesingularity of this achieve-
ment be fully appreciated. The
college- affordability crisis has
become a staple of academic
chin pulls, news stories, con-
gressional hearings, and pop-
ular books written in tones
of alarm and commiseration.
From 2007 to 2017, the aver-
age annual cost of a degree
at a four-year public univer-
sity like Purdue rose fromTIGHT WITH
A DOLLAR
Mitch Daniels has kept
Purdue’s tuition under
$10,000 for seven straight years.
How has he done it?BY ANDREW FERGUSONabout $15,000 to more than
$19,000—a jump of 28 per-
cent after taking inflation into
account. Only health care
rivals higher education as an
economic sector so consumed
by irrational inefficiencies and
runaway prices.
The consequences are plain.
Students and their parents
have acquired debt totaling
more than $1.5 trillion, more
than all credit-card debt held
in the U.S., and sufficiently
large, according to the Federal
Reserve, to be a drag on the
economy. Roughly 70 percent
of college students take out
loans to finance their educa-
tion. The average undergrad-
uate leaves school more than
$25,000 in debt.
At Purdue, by contrast,
nearly 60 percent of under-
grads leave school without any
debt at all.
So how did Purdue do it?“I always say it’s easier
to explain what we didn’t do,”
Daniels told me. “We didn’t try
to get more money from the
state. We didn’t shift from full-
time faculty and fill the ranks
with cheaper, part-time adjunct
faculty. We haven’t driven up
our percentage of international
or out-of-state students,” who
pay more than in-staters. Each
of these measures has been
taken up by other public uni-
versities, even as most have
increased their in-state tuition.
Proud as he is of his num-
ber, Daniels worries that all the
attention paid to the tuition
freeze scants the improvements
that the school says it has simul-
taneously made in educational
quality and financial health.
Increased enrollment since
the freeze has brought in an
extra $100 million, reckons
Chris Ruhl, the university’s
treasurer and chief financial