Trachtenberg also set a trend that other colleges--first his private competitors, then universities across the country--felt compelled to follow. Today, George Washington is only the 21st most expensive school, and the average American student accumulates $24,300 of debt earning her diploma. Collectively, Americans hold more student-loan debt than credit-card debt, and graduates enter a world where more than half of them are jobless or underemployed.

A recession requires austerity, and Trachtenberg concedes that the charge-more/spend-more model cannot continue in today's economy. "I don't think the current model can go on," he says, pointing out that schools can't spend when their cash reserves run low.

But his misgivings go only so far. He still swears by the system he built, and he believes that the economy will improve to accommodate universities' ambitions before schools have to scale back in response to the slowdown. If he has any regrets about his presidency, it is that he wishes he had pushed his board harder to spend more. "I would have been bolder," Trachtenberg says. "I devoted too much time and energy worrying about a rainy day."

DEBT IS GOOD?



In a world where reputation and endowment are the most tangible--and therefore the most important--measures of scholastic success, Stephen Trachtenberg's vision for higher education is a glimpse of the debt-driven future.

Trachtenberg himself chose Columbia University when he graduated from high school. He remembers feeling impressed by its "international repute," "academic gravitas," and "sense of serious scholarship." He did not mind that all it took to fill his dorm room was an armoire, two desks, and a bunk bed he shared with his roommate, Ted Small. Trachtenberg took the top bunk, Small took the bottom, and the two were content to be dry when it rained and warm when it snowed.

Trachtenberg was an only child, and his father was a life-insurance salesman in Brooklyn who could pay for only about half of the $816 annual tuition. Trachtenberg paid the difference and covered his living expenses by delivering The New York Times during the school year and waiting tables in the Catskills during summers. The college gave some aid based on need, but Trachtenberg got none. Still, he remembers being surrounded by students from both elite and working-class families at Columbia.

He graduated in 1959. After acquiring a law degree from Yale and a master's in public administration from Harvard, he eventually spent 11 years as president of the University of Hartford. When he moved to Washington to take over at George Washington, it was a school with a relatively meager endowment that accepted the overwhelming majority of applicants.

But students had changed since he and Small shared their hovel. Now they expected more from their schools--and they were willing to pay more for it. "It was a matter of competition," Trachtenberg says in the way of justifying the suite-style dorms he built, the remote campus he acquired, and the tuition hikes that he began almost immediately. "These sorts of facilities were being offered elsewhere. We were either in the game or we weren't in the game."