The Old College Buy

Hundreds of students rallied at the University of Washington last week in opposition of a proposed tuition increase. Had he been around, you can bet that Peter Drucker would have grabbed a megaphone and joined in.

For decades, Drucker decried the escalating cost of going to college in this country. “The financing of higher education affects everybody’s pocketbook,” he wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1956. “It is the central problem of American education.”

Some 40 years later, Drucker was voicing the very same concern. “Such totally uncontrollable expenditures,” he told Forbes in 1997, “means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.”

By all rights, most universities should have priced themselves out of existence long ago. That they haven’t points to something else that Drucker recognized and also worried about: the unparalleled clout they wield as “gatekeepers” to people’s futures. It is a role that has allowed many a school to get away with the kinds of sins that would sink almost any other organization.