GRE costs

 I was part of a discussion some months ago about helping foreign students with the costs of taking a GRE test and application fees for graduate college.  Because of the costs, some argued that the GRE requirement for application and admissions should be either optional or completely eliminated.  I argued that the GRE, though limited as a predictor of graduate school success was still useful and that it is perhaps the only measure that would be common across all applicants, and is, therefore, valuable for comparing applicants who are competing for a finite number of full-ride tuition scholarships and assistantships.  One person (a very nice and well-intentioned individual) argued that the GRE requirement was unfair because some of us did not understand how poor other countries are and that, for instance, the cost of taking the GRE in her country was the equivalent of one month of her father's professorship salary.  Impressive rhetoric.  But then I thought about this.  I have traveled and lived in many places and I am aware of income disparities across the globe.  Then I paused.  Was college free in Russia, the country used in the example?  Yes.  I'm informed that college students even get a small stipend to help out.  Tuition and dorms are often free as is much graduate education there.  This person then came to the US, I am assuming, on a full ride from a major public university for their doctoral degree.  This was the person complaining about the injurious cost of the GRE.  Okay, well my university was not free to me.  My father spent well over a month's salary over the years supporting me in higher ed.  Perhaps this person does not know much about working-class America.  From the day I was born my parents wanted me to attend university and began to save.  My mother did not have a job outside the home.  She only had a high school education. And my father, with an eighth-grade education, was a meter reader for Ohio Edison electric company.  He walked from house to house manually reading meters including in the winter.  Not a fun job. They didn't have much.  However, they prioritized my education.  They never vacationed or traveled outside the US except when my father went to the South Pacific as a Marine to fight in WWII.  They were not "fancy people," elites within their community.  They never visited European capitals or traveled much at all.  They were just working-class folks but they did their best to support me.  I also worked in the summers on assembly lines and other jobs to cover my college expenses. One summer carrying countless buckets of hot water for Stanley Steamer Carpet Cleaning. My point is not to belittle the fact that folks, "even professors," in some other countries find sending their kids abroad for advanced education expensive.  But to be fair, such an ambition was not in the cards for me at all.  My parents never dreamed of sending me abroad for education.  In fact, they struggled with my public education in my home state of Ohio.  That was the pinnacle of their vision and aspirations for me. And trust me, despite the National Merit Scholarships, the Bloomberg Scholarships, and other financial awards my sons Alex and Preston earned to attend Johns Hopkins University, I paid many months of my salary out of pocket to get them through. That was my choice.

Should we try to lower the cost of admission?  Absolutely.  If it is a struggle for some, should we abandon the one measure that is most fair?  I don't think so. Rather we do need to address the costs, but for everyone. My parents paid dearly for every second of medical care they needed. And for those unfamiliar with working-class life in the US, you might reflect on your own presumptions and sense of moral superiority and worldliness in the context of others.  You are not special in struggling with the costs of higher ed in the US (if you choose to come here).  Join the club. You might think that a professor's kid has a natural privilege over a meter reader's kid. But in this instance, the financial difficulties are very similar. This is what we need to understand. Free higher ed does not exist in the US unless you are admitted to a handful of universities with such massive endowments that they can offer free rides to anyone admitted and who can prove need. But these amount to tiny freshman classes... This is not an answer to the needs of the larger population. In 2023 Harvard had over 60,000 applicants but only 1,984 were admitted. In 2023 Yale "expanded" its freshman class size to a whopping 2,304 students.  Duke enrolled 1,744 students in 2023. Princeton, 1,345. MIT 1,136. Johns Hopkins, 1,310...  All who were admitted could either afford to pay the tuition or got scholarships. That is not the case in the vast landscape of higher ed where endowments are paltry in comparison to the elite universities. 

What about foreign students?  I've known a few in my lifetime. Elaine, my wife from Taiwan, who grew up next to an open sewer, told me the story of this little glove made to shine up one's shoes. She keeps it as a memento. This is the story: “I remember the late nights when my dad brought big bundles of discarded cloth back from the factory after a long day of work, cutting them to the right size with the help of my mom in our living room. I was asked to stand far away because there was too much textile dust, and the blade was too fast for little curious fingers. The next morning, when my dad was off to work, my mom would pour the bright red ink over the wood-framed screen-print and put the prints on, one after another. She would then sew them into a mitten. They worked 12+ hour days. The mittens were given to patrons of a famous hotel in Taipei. My family's living room was a production line of a young couple...for their dreams and for their daughters' futures. Lai Lai Shangri-La Hotel (now Sheraton Grand Taipei Hotel) was a big deal back then (and still now). I do not know how they got this gig and how long they kept it. I think this shoeshine was left in the house because it was not printed squarely in the center. They were free to the patrons of the hotel, a hotel we could never afford to visit or eat at. I wonder if the patrons knew that the shoeshine in their room was literally handmade?” Elaine's father worked at a textile mill and for a time as a manager of a bowling alley. Her mother never worked outside the home. But they managed to help Elaine make it along with her sister, who also earned a Ph.D. They are proud of their accomplishments.  But we need to try to make austerity less a badge of pride. Access is the key to advancing civilization and I don't think I am bombastic in arguing that education is essential to community development. How can we open the doors?  They have been shutting for decades.  When I went to university it was easier because costs were lower. The US is diverging from the global trends on this.  

The main thing, the one thing that we all agree on, is that it is our time, our duty to make access to education as open as possible to as many as we can.  It is shrinking.  Costs are rising.  To be sure, I don't know about the circumstances of every foreign family.  I do know that many I have met in higher ed had higher status and wealth than my family -- were more worldly and better educated than my parents whose taxes built and supported the public (and to some extent private through grants and such) universities. And I know that many of their poorer countrymen could never come to the US for education. I wonder, how much debt do foreign students coming to the US for full rides in grad school carry for college?  I doubt that it is as much as the average for the US because so many countries have very cheap or free college education for their citizens. In the US, many who are in graduate programs are carrying long-term debt for their bachelor's degrees let alone more debt for housing and such, as graduate students.

As teachers, we have little power -- unless we organize.  That's the truth. Elaine and I are trying to find ways to subsidize admissions at our new university home. Until we can pay for them, waiving the fees or abandoning our standards is not possible or a real solution. Yes, we can keep cutting but at some point, we have to try to shore up rather than abandon our standards. Meanwhile, global income inequality has decreased far below where it was when I was an undergraduate back in the 1970s.  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese now travel and study abroad while back in the 1970s the horrendous cultural revolution was still ongoing. Same for folks from the former Soviet Bloc nations. Thousands now travel abroad to study. People today have more access and mobility but it is always threatened. Today in the US, demographic changes are being used to cut budgets and to even attack tenure. This is discouraging to so many including people who aspire to become future college professors.  Why sacrifice so much when increasingly tenure-track lines are being replaced with adjunct and part-time, short-term contracts with little to no security and low pay?  

The difficult fact remains that applicants must compete for scarce resources.  What needs to be defended are the public institutions of education at all levels and that is a struggle regarding the political will of everyone. When teachers from even "conservative states" strike, as in West Virginia and Oklahoma, we must support them. And we must support political candidates who promote pro- public education agendas.  Privatization closes doors.  Abandoning public education does not fix shortcomings that may exist. Walking away from the starving man does not save him. It just saves the person who abandons him the ordeal of coping with his visage, or so the bystander may delude himself.  When the starving man dies the survivor is poorer too because his community is impacted. We can't all hide within gated communities. If you are surrounded by despair, then you become a prisoner in your own tiny world. Fear becomes your ever-present warden. Building more and bigger walls is not, in my opinion, the solution.