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Which of these estimates do you disagree with? A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year B. Average course size: 25 C. Number of courses taken by average
by pw0ncakes 17y ago
Which of these estimates do you disagree with?
A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year
B. Average course size: 25
C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10
D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000
E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000.
This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following:
Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.
- tokenadult 17y agoAverage course size: 25 This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.) So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)? For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.
- ericd 17y agoI went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.
- tokenadult 17y agohttp://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/faculty/previous_enrollment.jsp?cat=faculty&subcat=coursestats http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/faculty/previous_...
- ericd 17y agoYeah, that seems to back up what I was talking about for undergrad courses. I'm sure this course I'm looking at with 680 enrollment brings up the average a bit... 772, 480, 280, 330, 248, 260, 223... and there are a good number in the 50-100 range. The grad courses of course have smaller class sizes since they're the long tail of education, but that's not what we're talking about here. If you remove the courses with 0 undergrads, the average is probably not below 25.
- pw0ncakes 17y agoFor our analysis, it's the mean and not the median that matters, since we're talking about the sum of money brought in by professor teaching divided by the number of professors. From first glance, it looks like the median is quite possibly below 25, but the mean isn't, if you only look at undergraduate courses. Also, professional schools have huge class sizes and charge tuition at the same or an even higher level.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]