No peer institution has borrowed so much in relation to its assets; none spends remotely as large a percentage of tuition on servicing debt. Despite gifts and the surge in the stock market, the University’s endowment has actually shrunk under its current president from 2021 to 2024 because it has been liquidating assets to mask the size of its deficits.
But its story also distills forces and trends in American higher education that are corroding ideals, and wasting money, throughout the land.
America’s leading research universities distinguished themselves both in their commitment to an extraordinary ideal, namely, the creation and questioning of new knowledge in every field that touches on human existence, and in their commitment to integrating persons at every stage of learning into this process. One way Chicago and all research universities actualize these ideals is by placing undergraduate students in the classroom with faculty who perform research. Students at these universities learn from people who exist at the cutting edge of what we know.
In a 2009 strategic plan, Robert J. Zimmer, the then-president of the University of Chicago, confessed to the university’s trustees that the faculty-student ratio was lower in 2009 than it had been in 1972. This decline, Zimmer averred, “threaten[ed] our core ethos as a University that places a premium on rigorous inquiry.” And yet, after a brief amelioration, the faculty-student ratio at the University of Chicago has gotten worse nearly every year from 2011 to 2024, for the very simple reason that the University of Chicago placed itself so deeply in debt it could conceive no other way out. (There were plenty of ways out.)
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K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago’s pension crisis is heading for a Detroit-style collapse