Some further thoughts to add to last week’s statement, reflecting on the past year at Berkeley, and the issue of public-private partnerships: They may allow the campus to build without going in to further debt, but they do so at the expense of students. All the evidence I have seen – and this is true of the new housing built locally for undergrads and grad students – is that they increase rents and thus the total cost of attendance, which in turn is a further deterrent to students from low-income households. In addition, as an AFSCME 3299 strike protested last year, the outsourcing of services within these dorms also depends on cheap and often non-unionized labor, predominantly done by workers of color.
Tyler Leed’s review of the literature is interesting, not least because it shows how dramatically these partnerships have grown within higher ed. The same thing has been happening for decades in the UK and Australia. Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote on the UK.
“The competition for students and the income they generated catalyzed a race to improve student ‘services’ and the ‘learning experience’ through, the provision of computers, the development of student learning centers, and grander housing complexes. In a classic neoliberal twist of language, the new student-learning center constructed in 2010 at the University of Manchester, at a cost of £24 million, is called ‘The Learning Commons’ and named after Alan Gilbert, the privatizing Australian Vice Chancellor hired in 2004. It has been companies, as much as university administrators, who have pioneered the ‘student experience industry’. Take Unite: formed in 1991 to develop student housing complexes, by 2000 it had been publicly floated on the stock exchange, and by 2011 housed 40,000 students in 135 properties across 23 towns and cities whose net worth exceeded £1 billion. In 2013, its chief rival, Universities Partnership Program (UPP), used the future income from its student housing complexes to raise a bond of £382 million to finance further construction. The student housing market, which is increasingly dominated by companies registered off-shore to avoid tax liability on their incomes, is now estimated to be worth £45 billion. The self-imposed asset stripping by universities means they save money from building maintenance and construction, while also outsourcing auxiliary services like catering, security and estate management. While we lack research on these developments, the lesson from the University of California, Berkeley, where student tuition has been used to leverage loans to fuel a construction boom for dorms and facilities, is that rents and costs will rise for students who in turn fall further into debt.”
James Vernon, from the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association