President Barack Obama criticized university administrators Friday, saying they’d driven up the cost of college with high-priced extras such as gourmet food and lush fitness centers.
He also teed off on state legislators who’ve cut funding for state schools, saying they were driving up costs past any link to value and leaving graduating students loaded with debt.
“Now, the school administrators, they have a responsibility to be more efficient. And students and parents, we have a responsibility to be smart consumers,” he said during a trip to Indiana to tout his proposals to help the middle class.
He recalled that when he’d started at Occidental College, he exercised in a basic gym and ate in a cafeteria where students called the entrée “roast beast” because they didn’t know what kind of meat it was.
Today, he lamented, he’s learned firsthand about the powerful lure of perks at some campuses, as his own daughters near college age:
“Malia is now at the age where she’s starting to look at colleges. And I said, you know, these days I hear everybody’s looking for fancy gyms and gourmet food.”
He made the remarks about four-year universities at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis, pitching his proposals to help the middle class, including a $60 billion plan to aid community college students.
“This is part of what we need to do to be more creative about how do young people get the skills they need without spending as much money or taking on as much debt,” he said.
Republicans noted that Obama had staged the event at a college whose president has criticized the Affordable Care Act.
“The head of Indiana’s extensive community college system told a congressional panel . . . that the federal government should ease the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that large employers offer health insurance to those who work at least 30 hours a week,” said an Indianapolis Star article last year that the Republicans distributed Friday.
“Ivy Tech President Tom Snyder said the law’s requirement, which begins next year, has caused Ivy Tech to limit the classes taught by each adjunct professor so they don’t qualify for health insurance,” the article said. “That, in turn, has required the hiring of additional adjuncts to fill the gaps, which can be particularly challenging in certain subject areas.”