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The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The universi

by lumost 6y ago

The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Given that the professors/assistants are certainly not getting paid within 2 orders of magnitude of 25k per student . There must either be irrationally high Capex expenditure, irrationally high administrative overhead, or universities are spending large fractions of tuition on other activities.

CJefferson 6y ago
In the UK at least, research is heavily subsidised by teaching income.
zhdc1 6y ago
You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries, overhead, and administration). Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations). The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe, which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal halls.
jldugger 6y ago
> The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well. The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc. So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.

by lumost 6y ago

CJefferson 6y ago

In the UK at least, research is heavily subsidised by teaching income.

zhdc1 6y ago

You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries, overhead, and administration). Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations). The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe, which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal halls.

jldugger 6y ago

> The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well. The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc. So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.