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I find it amazing that someone can write so much about the cost of college, and yet treat tuition bills as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sina
by apsec112 11y ago
I find it amazing that someone can write so much about the cost of college, and yet treat tuition bills as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, rather than something colleges themselves might have any responsibility for. Colleges have become giant money-sucking machines, similar to Scientology. In fact, they're so similar that I made a handy comparison chart (http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/06/15/universities-vs-scientology/ http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/06/15/universities-vs-sci...).
The author here insinuates that the increased cost comes from paying for teaching and research. But this is wrong for at least five reasons:
1. Research is not a cost center for colleges. It is a profit center. Usually, research is not funded by the college itself; rather, professors get grants from outside agencies, which the college then takes a large, juicy cut of for itself. (Ask any professor.)
2. At most colleges, the number of faculty members per student has remained stagnant for the last thirty years. The author waves their hands about "new areas of knowledge", but these new areas aren't leading to more hiring.
3. Wages for tenured faculty have also remained stagnant, adjusted for inflation.
4. Colleges are rapidly replacing their tenured faculty with adjuncts, who are given heavy courseloads, and paid peanuts even compared to tenured faculty (barely minimum wage, in a lot of cases).
5. Most of the actual work of research and teaching is done by grad students, of whom there are far more than tenured faculty. Grad students are, again, a profit center rather than a cost center, since the university gets to charge them "tuition" (despite most of them taking few or no classes). This "tuition" is either paid by an outside research agency, or "generously" waived in exchange for the grad student doing teaching and grading, again at very low wages.
- drjesusphd 11y agoSo who is getting all that money?
- guelo 11y agoI find that a lot of budget arguments in general, not just of Universities but all kinds of government and private institutions, suffer badly from the lack of having two budgets to compare side by side. Say a budget from 1990 and a budget from today, side by side line by line. But clean data is almost impossible to come by. So people just argue in ideological generalities. Which is absurd when it's a numbers question. Can we see the numbers please? No.
- douche 11y agoUseless middle-manager administration. Look up how many deans there are at your local university, and how many directors of mumble-mumble social justice mumble mumble. Or look at how many wildly expensive infrastructure projects are getting built, with very marginal usefulness.
- milesskorpen 11y agoI don't think this is fair. Modern society expects universities to act in loco parentis. We expect them to prevent (or deal with the fall out from) school's alcohol culture. We expect them to prevent sexual assault, or respond to it with some kind of judicial system. We expect a fully staffed career center to help students revise resumes and draft cover letters. We expect them to have a full time staffer dealing with diversity issues, and another with Title IX, and another (few) with financial aid. These are all new positions, and many are actually required by law. If you want to argue against middle management, I'm not at all clear the schools are to blame. They're responding to clear demands from the government and from parents.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI'm completely flummoxed by the notion that universities need a private justice system. The potential for abuse is staggering.
- milesskorpen 11y agoWhile you might be flummoxed, colleges & universities are facing substantial federal pressure to have this kind of system.
- joshuapants 11y ago> colleges & universities are facing substantial federal pressure to have this kind of system That's the part to be flummoxed about
- drjesusphd 11y ago
- cfqycwz 11y agoI'd like to echo drjesusphd and ask if you could point us to any good information you've found on increasing per-student expenditures. My university likes to justify increasing tuition by pointing to a decrease in the proportion of a student's education that is funded by the state. The implication, is that per-student state funding has gone down and that's why tuition is going up, but state funding per student has remained relatively steady in inflation-adjusted terms for decades. It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on. I have yet to look into the numbers in greater detail but if you could point me toward some good sources it would be much appreciated.
- nhebb 11y ago> It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on. I just looked up the operating budget for my alma mater (Oregon State University), and if I'm reading it correctly, administrative costs are about 1/3 of the total. Interestingly, the direct instruction and research portion increased 5% since last year whereas the administration portion increased 15%. And looking back 10 years, the the direct instruction and research costs increased 85%, whereas admin costs increased 110%. So the admin : education costs ratio appears to be slowly increasing over time.
- abandonliberty 11y agoThis is the same as in any organization. The wealth filters to those who run it.
- mjn 11y agoThe funding numbers I've found for the University of California system are that per-student expenditures are roughly flat, and that tuition increases are almost 1-for-1 offsets for decreasing state funding. Here is a little ASCII table of the state funding history I collected in 2012: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt I have no idea how representative this is of other universities, though, and wouldn't be surprised if it isn't.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoAlyssa, if you want to know what happened, just look at state budgets. Public universities have seen their budgets cut at the same time that private universities have been able to gorge on low-interest student loans (whose collection is backed by the force of the government, and not subject to bankruptcy).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jmspring 11y agoI'd just like to know the increase in administrative staff and their salaries against the rise in tuition. Local University has many more Assistant, Vice, etc. Deans and Chancellors than it did when I was there awhile ago.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoSo where is all the extra tuition money going?
- pstuart 11y agoThe administrators