Students walking on Low Steps. Photo by Brian Loebig.

Over 3,000 students have signed a petition to strike tuition for the upcoming 2021 spring semester. The movement grows in response to months of outcry against Columbia’s mismanagement of finances and increasing tuition fees, which are now the highest in the nation. Organizers demand a 10 percent tuition reduction, 10 percent financial aid increase, waiver of the student contribution, and a commitment to the democratically-decided demands of other activist groups across all undergraduate and graduate schools of the University, including Barnard and Teacher’s College.

Striking on the payment tuition is a last resort for students who refuse to wait any longer for the University to end its malpractices in the midst of a national crisis. Despite student attempts to bargain in good faith and present their concerns to university administrators, school officials have maintained a years-long track record of disregarding the demands of the student body. In response to movements to divest from fossil fuels, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the on-campus Public Safety unit, and costly projects that have gentrified Harlem and Upper Manhattan, administrators have merely provided statements. These false promises of “anti-racism” only uphold justifications for actions with perilous consequences for students and the surrounding community.

Students’ calls for action have intensified since the onset of the pandemic, but Columbia’s administration has continued to disregard them. In March, 8,500 students requested tuition remission to no avail. Then, this August, 400 students signed a petition for fair tuition and received no response. While Columbia opted to freeze tuition this summer, Princeton, Georgetown, and Williams reduced theirs by 10 percent or more. Undoubtedly, “Zoom University” has been an eye-opening experience for many who were already disillusioned with high college costs: the absurdity of a $60,000 price tag, excluding room and board, becomes more apparent when in-person facilities are barely in use, the quality of courses has declined, and Columbia’s high-cost amenities are now out of student reach. But for some, tuition costs during the pandemic have had far worse consequences: graduate and undergraduate students have recounted stories of homelessness, food insecurity, and worse in the months since March.

But the movement for tuition reduction is far broader than addressing the immediate implications of the pandemic. As with many other issues, the pandemic has shone a light on problems that have long underlied Columbia as a financial enterprise—namely, its pandering to elite students, mismanagement of funds, and inadequacy in addressing the financial needs of first-generation and low-income students. Elite universities increasingly operate as hedge funds run by a for-profit motive, and Columbia is no exception. The University has continuously prioritized fiscal growth and institutional expansion over educational value or student well-being. In tandem with this transformation, students have become a new type of “consumer” to be lured by prestige and used for financial gain.

Indeed, Columbia unethically invests billions of its endowment to attract wealthier students and to build the University’s elite brand. Over the past decades, Columbia has expanded into Upper Manhattan and Harlem to construct sleek new graduate facilities that entice America’s elite and reel in graduate students to whom the University has minimal obligation to provide financial aid. Its Manhattanville project to create new university buildings costs a grand total of $6.5 billion and is projected to displace up to 32,000 community residents upon its completion in 2022. Conversely, a 10 percent tuition reduction would cost less than half of the institution’s $310 million recent endowment increase and pales in comparison to the $6.5 billion expense of this expansionary enterprise. The project is emblematic of Columbia’s evolution into a non-profit for profit operated by financial motives and expansionary desires. As its construction continues, Columbia’s well-documented chant becomes the new morbid reality: “Who owns New York? C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A!”

The Manhattanville campus’s Jerome L. Greene Science Center under construction in 2017. Photo by Frank Oudeman.

In lieu of these investments, organizers demand budget reallocation into existing educational resources and grants that safeguard students from inhumane conditions arising from the recession. Students, especially those in graduate programs and the School of General Studies, buckle under financial pressure as they watch Columbia’s assets grow. Despite claiming to meet all demonstrated need, Columbia’s financial aid office caters most generously to Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences whilst undercutting the grants of students in other schools that need them most. This penny-pinching is common across top universities. As public university funds shrink, elite private institutions expand their endowments, hike tuition, and close their gates to low-income students for which they have the potential to serve as the highest engines of socio-economic mobility.

Due to this decades-long trend, national student debt has burgeoned to a grand $1.6 trillion shared by 42 million Americans. Since the 2008 recession, student debt and college costs have increased by 107 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Evidence affirms that this weighs heavily on students’ ability to leverage their degrees to secure financial stability: seven million of these indebted students, who comprise over 2 percent of the national population, have defaulted on loan payments.

This widespread student debt bondage has been normalized in the American psyche by pundits and politicians alike. Undertaking debt is now a “coming-of-age” phenomenon—a new pillar of the noble American bildungsroman of working hard and climbing the socio-economic ladder. The narrative is collectively reinforced by corporate liberals and conservative right-wing figures. While Democratic President-elect Joe Biden has expressed interest in student debt cancellation, moderate Democrats have historically united with conservative figures to propose feeble measures that, at best, would minimize loans but skirt addressing the higher education industrial-complex. In 2016, Democratic goliath Hillary Clinton compared free college to a child’s campaign of “free milk for all,” poking fun at the idea of establishing higher education as a public good.

University officials reinforce this narrative whilst high-level administrators tout massive pay raises. In testimonials compiled by the strike organizers, a low-income student recounts reaching out to the financial aid office to explain their inability to pay half-priced tuition and being told that they should “defer [their] admission for a year so that [they] could afford going to Columbia.” This notion is absurd in light of President Bollinger’s bloated $4.6 million income. While university figureheads are given bonuses atop million dollar salaries, the University tells burdened students to carry their own financial weight.

Scrutiny of these practices has grown, but some students still show disdain for the movement for tuition reduction and University democratization. Critics of the tuition strike argue that affordable higher education is a privilege, not a right. This concept is blatantly elitist: high-income earners should have no more access to the benefits of university or the Ivy League than other families. An opinion writer at the Columbia Spectator has even stated that all Columbia students are inherently privileged as “consumers of university education.” But as long as universities and their students believe that higher education is a luxury product, access to its advantages will continue to disproportionately remain in the hands of the wealthy.

Students on campus protest tuition. Photo by Columbia-Barnard YDSA.

The discourse surrounding higher education can be changed, and the plights of suffering students can be addressed. Columbia and other private universities across the country have the means to provide for their most disadvantaged populations. Whether or not they choose to do so has thus far been contingent upon the whims of university administrators. Strikers are now taking matters into their own hands. After waiting years for just policies, students’ threats of withholding tuition hold top faculty accountable and spark national conversation on the commodification of higher education. Since students in precarious financial situations bear the most risk when striking, the movement requires the participation and solidarity of all students—especially those who pay full tuition—to make this action successful.

Leena Yumeen is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore in Columbia College studying Political Science. She is an organizer with the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America, the chapter that has been working alongside other activist groups to organize the tuition strike.

The Tuition Strike: A Protest Against Commodifying Higher Education