The National Conference of Black Political Scientists has become the first academic professional organization to sign on to a Labor Party-led campaign for free higher public education. In March, Adolph Reed Jr., a prominent political scientist and a member of the LP's Interim National Council, introduced the proposal at the organization's annual meeting in Atlanta. It calls for free tuition and fees for anyone meeting the admissions criteria at any public, post-secondary educational institution.

"It went over very well," reports Willie Legette, who teaches political science at South Carolina State University. Legette and other academic activists, together with campaign co-chairs Reed and Mark Dudzic of PACE, is helping to lay the groundwork for a national campaign for free public tuition, built on a resolution the Labor Party passed at its 1998 convention. The campaign is under the auspices of the Labor Party's educational and cultural arm, the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute.

The campaign's statement of academics in support of free higher education is circulating among leading academics around the country. The call is also going out to unions and organizations in resolution form. In march, the New Jersey Industrial Union Council and the California Nurses Association signed on. In February, Reed, who teaches at the New School in New York City, traveled to South Carolina to present the proposal to groups there - including the South Carolina State AFL-CIO, the Progressive Network, and ILA Local 1422, the home local of the "Charleston Five." The resolution and campaign are now under consideration by all three entities.

Legette says the high cost of tuition is a daily issue for him and his students at South Carolina State, the only public, historically black university in South Carolina. "Many of my students work to support themselves through school," says Legette. "They may work 25 or 30 hours a week. They have problems devoting sufficient time to study. Sometimes they leave school for a semester or two to generate funds." When a colleague of Legette's at a private college told his students about the Labor Party's campaign for free higher education, he says "the students broke out into applause."

Stealthily Rising Tuition
Most people believe that a college education is a key to a good job for themselves and their children. But paying for it is getting harder and harder. Tuition and fees increased nearly tenfold (in inflation-adjusted dollars) between 1969 and 1999. Average tuition and fees at public four-year institutions rose from $338 to $3,243 during that time. Private four-year college tuition now averages over $14,000 a year.

Joan Greenbaum, a professor at the City University of New York's LaGuardia College and at the CUNY Grad Center, says that tuition at CUNY stabilized in the early 1990s following militant student protests against rising costs. Now, though, CUNY, once famous for providing free high-quality education for all New Yorkers, is increasing costs in "stealth wars." For instance, she says, tuition has just doubled for non-documented immigrants. Serving immigrants, she notes, is part of CUNY's original mission. And yet these hard-hit students face huge tuition increases just because, as Greenbaum says, "somewhere at the INS, the paperwork's not finished."

CUNY has also been steadily piling up new fees for students to pay. "There's a technology use fee, a lab fee, a student affairs fee. And now textbook manufacturers are ‘bundling' textbooks, often putting more than you need in a bundle, but then you have to buy the whole thing. It adds up to between $60 and $100 worth of textbooks per course. If you've got five classes, it could be $500."

Legette says that tuition at South Carolina State has been creeping up. "They're under a lot of pressure because now funding is based on an index created by the state legislature, and it's going to progressively decrease over the years. Institutions are increasing tuition throughout the state, because the legislature isn't keeping up with the costs, and no one wants to talk about increasing taxes. So the only option is to make students pay more."

Too Much Work, Too Little Education
To cover the rising costs, students go to work - and that causes another set of problems. Greenbaum estimates that about 90 percent of her students are working their way through school. "Of those, a majority work up to 40 hours a week. And these are full-time students - so it's insane. We tell them that it's very hard to get an education and work full-time." (Greenbaum, health and safety officer of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing over 20,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York, has been helping to organize the free public education campaign.)

Greenbaum's students take the only jobs usually available to them - low-paying ones with demanding bosses. "They work in places like department stores, and in the busy season, they're asked to work extra. And somehow the busy season always seems to correspond with exam time. It's a horror story every year. Many of our students work in warehouse jobs or at the airport. They might be scheduled to work 20 hours a week, but they end up working longer. The employer says, ‘You've got to work extra hours tonight,' and they say, ‘I can't - I've got a test tomorrow' - and then the employer says, ‘You want the job, you work extra hours.' All this really affects their ability to plan their lives, take classes, prepare for their courses. They don't have the time for the kind of reflective thought that higher education demands."

Other students are forced to "stop out," says Greenbaum. "They're not dropping out. They just have to stop for a semester or two until they get the money together." All education ceases until full tuition is paid. "Every semester, we never know until the last minute how many students are actually going to attend, because they can't be fully registered until they're fully paid. Sometimes I get attendance lists where half the people are missing because somebody hasn't come through with their piece of paperwork."

Education Gaps Widen
Although college enrollment has grown dramatically, there is evidence that rising tuition costs are preventing some people from attending at all: The total number of high school graduates headed for college rose only slightly if at all during the 1980s and 1990s, according to a recent study by the Lumina Foundation (www.luminafoundation.org). The growth in enrollment during that time is largely due to dramatic increases in part-time student populations.

The cost of higher education only serves to widen the education gap that exists in this country. Teens whose parents have degrees start out thinking they'll go to college (86 percent say they plan to get a bachelor's degree). But less than half of the kids whose parents have a high school diploma or less expect to get a college degree. Later, those expectations are often fulfilled: 65 percent of young people from more educated families enroll in four-year institutions - compared to just 21 percent of young people from families with less formal education. (Information from Economic Policy Institute based on U.S. Department of Education data; www.epinet.org).

The racial divide is also great. In 1998, 41 percent of white non-Hispanic 18- to 24-year olds were enrolled in college, compared to 30 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos, according to the Digest of Education Statistics.

Debt-Ridden Grads
Financial aid could help close these gaps. But in the past decade or so, outright grants have increasingly been supplanted by loans as the primary way to help lower-income students finance their education. The Lumina Foundation study found that in most states low-income students simply can't afford to go to public four-year colleges without borrowing significant amounts of money. This is wreaking havoc on students' lives.

A new report by the State Public Interest Research Groups bolsters the Lumina study: It found that two out of three students now have to borrow money to attend college, and four out of ten face unmanageable debts once they graduate. According to the report, which is based on information from the Census Bureau and the Labor Department, 42 percent of students had to borrow to pay for college in 1992. Four short years later, in 1996, 59 percent had to take out loans. The average debt of graduates rose from $9,188 in 1992 to almost $17,000 in 2000.

Legette says his students typically "wind up with a tremendous amount of debt when they graduate. One student of mine who graduated last year just found a job. And now she has to immediately pay back her loan. But the job she has doesn't pay that much, and she doesn't get any benefits. She gets Medicaid, actually."

None of this makes a good deal of economic sense. The GI Bill, in which the federal government provided a generation of World War II veterans with full tuition and support and stipends (up to $12,000 in 1994 dollars), was one of the best investments the country ever made. By 1952, the federal government had spent nearly $39 billion, in 1994 dollars, to send the vets to school - about 1.3 percent of total federal expenditures during that period. But a 1988 report on the GI Bill by a congressional subcommittee found that every dollar spent produced a $6.90 return. Those educated vets paid back their debt six times over by increasing national output and through taxes.

But beyond that, the GI Bill lifted the sights and expanded the minds of millions of Americans. By renewing and broadening that commitment to higher education for all, we could, in the words of Adolph Reed Jr., "expand the foundation of American democracy."