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The president of the University of Minnesota is leaving (front page, April 4), and what happens in the next month will irreversibly set the future of our state, for better or for worse.
It is up to the regents. They must choose an interim leader and then the next president. But they must do something else first. They should perceive and then publicly state the problems that have caused the university to lose not only enrollment but academic standing. Being able to overcome those problems and then to achieve and exceed the strengths of our university's best days should be the only criterion for choosing its next president.
Some of those problems affect all universities right now and are not the result of local mistakes. But some are. Whoever is to blame, problems must be acknowledged if they are to be cured.
If I were still a regent I would urge my colleagues to begin right now by acknowledging the following:
1) A major reason enrollment is falling is because tuition is too high. This is as simple as economics gets. The key question is why tuition has grown so astonishingly. The answer, alas, is the student loan program, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time but has had disastrous side effects, particularly on those whose needs were the highest priority of the program's advocates.
This is because colleges and universities, public and private, large and small, used the availability of federal loans as the answer to affordability. If university spending exceeded income, no problem: just raise tuition. Let the kid take out a loan. When I became a regent it was still possible for students to self-finance their educations through summer or part-time jobs. No more.