Last week, I was chatting with a mother and father about their daughter’s college plans.
Their high schooler is visiting college campuses, and they are encouraging her to consider attending a college out of state.
I was surprised. Both parents are such loyal University of Illinois graduates that I thought one must bleed orange and the other blue.
And their daughter is whip-smart, a National Honor Society member and a shoo-in to be admitted to Illinois’ flagship university.
“I hate to say it, but with the financial aid being offered, she can attend Iowa State as an out-of-stater for a lot less than the University of Illinois as an in-state student,” her mother told me.
It’s a common refrain being heard from parents of high school students across the state. In fact, most students who are admitted to the University of Illinois choose not to attend.
In 2006, 58 percent of Illinois students who were offered admission to the U of I attended the university, but by 2013, that number had dropped to 45 percent, according to the university’s records.
The primary reason for the sharp decline in Illinois students choosing to attend this great university is cost.
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If you are a student entering the U of I’s outstanding engineering college this fall, you can plan to spend $35,340 per year for tuition, room and board and other expenses. That’s $141,360 for the highly valued bachelor’s degree — if you’re able to graduate in four years.
There are a lot of reasons why college costs are escalating. But one of the biggest is a mindset among university administrators that has elevated their well-being above that of their students.
Look no further than the latest U of I financial shenanigans involving Phyllis Wise, chancellor of the Urbana-Champaign campus.
She got caught using a personal email account to conduct sensitive official business — including her controversial decision last summer, later supported by the board of trustees, to rescind a job offer to a professor who had posted on social media contentious comments, some of which were profane and inflammatory, about Israel’s military action.
It became clear that the university’s new president, Timothy Killeen, wanted Wise out. She agreed to quit the $549,069 job but negotiated a $400,000 bonus for sticking around on the faculty for four years.
At first, Killeen was hunky-dory with this sweetheart deal. Then the statewide media and Gov. Bruce Rauner and other politicians in Springfield began to squawk about it, the university trustees began to tremble and suddenly it wasn’t such a good plan after all.
The university appears to have promised Wise a $500,000 bonus if she stuck around for five years or a prorated amount if she got the boot before her contract was up.
After the cushy deal was revealed and drew a lot of heat, the trustees decided last week to fire Wise rather than accept her resignation and pay her the $400,000 bonus.
Why would the stewards of tax dollars and our children’s tuition agree to such a questionable deal in the first place?
Just think about it. Moms and Dads in Carpentersville, Galesburg, Moline and elsewhere in the state are sacrificing to pay their kids’ way through college so highly paid administrators such as Wise can collect $400,000 for losing her job?
Lots of those parents have received pink slips of their own and have received little more than a walk to the parking lot by a security guard.
Wise’s bonus was to be more than the salary of the president of the United States.
Our state is broke, mired deeply in debt.
Yet some of our hard-earned tax dollars are being funneled to the university so it can afford paying top administrators such huge amounts of money for doing their jobs poorly?
And our students are putting their futures in hock to pay tuition to a university that spends its money this recklessly?
Give me a break.
This is the arrogance of academia in full display. We deserve much better.
Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse reporter and a journalist with Illinois News Network, a project of the Illinois Policy Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]