Colleges: Where the money goes (LAT)

[mike r]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dreifushacker-college-cost-20100912,0,6821452.story

Colleges: Where the money goes
Athletic teams, administrators and tenured professors soak up huge chunks of colleges' budgets, and tuition and fees rise to keep up.
By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year's sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980. This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm. In New England, Williams College charges $41,434, or an inflation-adjusted 3.2 times what it did 30 years ago. USC's current tab of $41,022 is a 3.6 multiple of its 1980 bill. Tuition at public universities, in a time of ailing state budgets, has risen at an even faster rate. The University of Illinois' current $13,658 is six times its 1980 rate after adjusting for inflation...

If you look at how that added revenue is being spent, it's hard to argue that students are getting a lot of extra value for all that extra money. Why? Colleges aren't spending their extra revenues, which we calculate to be about $40 billion a year nationally over 1980 revenues, in ways that most benefit students. One thing colleges are spending more on is athletic teams, which have become a more pronounced — and costly — presence on campuses everywhere. Even volleyball teams travel extensively these days, with paid coaches and customized uniforms. Currently, 629 schools have football teams — 132 more than in 1980. And all but 14 of them lose money. It's true that alumni donations sometimes increase during winning seasons, but most of those gifts go specifically to athletics or other designated uses, not toward general educational programs. The average football squad has gone from 82 to 102 players... The number of women's soccer programs has soared from 80 to 956. And teams cost money — often lots of it... Because there are no revenues for most sports, the deficits often have to be covered by tuition bills.

Another source of increased expense is administration. Since 1980, the number of administrators per student at colleges has about doubled; on most campuses their numbers now match the number of faculty. Here are some of their titles: senior specialist of assessment; director for learning communities; assistant dean of students for substance education; director of knowledge access services... Tuition pays for all these deans and directors; having more of them means higher bills for students. Added tuition revenue has also gone to raise faculty salaries. Yale's full-time faculty members now average $129,400, up 64% in inflation-adjusted dollars from what they made in 1980. (Pay in other sectors of the U.S. economy rose only about 5% in this period.) Stanford's tenured and tenure-track professors are doing even better, averaging $153,900, an 83% increase over 1980. We're told such stipends are needed to get top talent, but we're not so sure. Faculty stars may raise prestige, but they are often away from the classroom, having negotiated frequent paid leaves and smaller teaching loads — underwritten, of course, by tuition...

Complete data on college presidents' pay is easily accessible only back to 1991. Yet even in that relatively short span, many college leaders have seen their salaries double in inflation-adjusted dollars. Carleton's president today gets 2.4 times more than the president did 19 years ago; at NYU, pay has risen by 2.7 times. Measured another way, it takes the tuitions of 31 Vanderbilt students to cover their president's $1.2-million annual stipend. We have yet to see evidence that lofting more money to the top enhances the quality of instruction...

[Brickbat]

1. As a liberal arts grad, I would strongly discourage my kids from going to my alma mater unless they

had a very clear idea of what they want to do. My last year, tuition/room/board was $13K. Now, a year is $45K. It's shameful and disgusting.

[leveymg]

2. Much of it goes into real estate acquisitions, and only part of that is for campus use.

A lot of universities have turned into big-time land speculators, with parents and the federal gov't paying for it.

[stray cat]

3. I guess tenured college teachers are fair game compared to K-12 tenured teachers?

is that because most of them are not union?

[d_r]

4. as a tenure track faculty member

My salary in Michigan was cut about 10% four years ago. I came here to Tennessee for about the same salary as the cut in Michigan pay; in Tennessee the faculty haven't gad a cost of living increase (or any increase at all) in those four years, although our cost of health insurance (along with the copays) is going up this month. So, if you are following that math, I make less now than I did 5 years ago, and have less health coverage. And I make around 1/3 the quotes salaries there. And the student loan folks don't really care that there is less money in my house. So pretty much I think this article is a load of crap.

Tuition has gone up at such crazy rates because the money that has went to support education from the states has went down at such crazy rates.

[uponit7771]

6. This would be good information for students to know, tutition is expensive for a lot of colleges

...and I would sooner avoid the overtly expensive ones if I can

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Note that all the salary data in the excerpt are for private colleges ...

no such increases at taxpayer-funded schools, though in the article they address increased tuition at state universities in the same context to make it sound like the same applies everywhere. Smoothly deceptive.

The whole article has about it a strong smell of cherries ... when they cite an example of faculty taking extended leave, the best example they can come up with is the religious faculty at Williams, who are probably the lowest paid of all, and probably facing declining student enrollment in their courses. Then when they want to target tenure, they cite the cases of Yale and Stanford, which are about sixth and fourth in the country in terms of faculty salaries, and fail to mention the role played by their huge endowments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Clearly, the authors are not interested in representative samples.

I tend to suspect Hacker is something of a shameless shit-stirrer ...

[Manifestor_of_Light]

8. "that has went"????? Are you kidding me???

You don't know how to conjugate "Go, went, gone" properly? And you're on a tenure track?

How come nobody knows how to conjugate anything anymore?

Helper verbs are incomprehensible in making past perfect forms, apparently.

"Go, went, HAS gone".

:banghead: And I'm not even an English major!!!

:banghead: :grr:

[d_r]

9. jhc

I was typing quickly with a two year old on my lap, get over yourself this is a freaking message board.

[d_r]

10. For that matter....

This sentence is grammatically incorrect:

"Helper verbs are incomprehensible in making past perfect forms, apparently."

The next sentence is incomplete, and the comma goes inside the quotation marks. The next sentence after that is incomplete as well.

[JerseygirlCT]

11. But your status as a faculty member

isn't the real problem, is it?

It's the vast number of administrators, all paid handsomely (I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn often more handsomely than tenured profs). It's the building, land expenses for ever more attractive accommodations. It's often the big sports programs. (Drives me nuts to read that a coach or AD is paid much more than a tenured professor - what better illustration of skewed values?)

[uponit7771]

5. Yeap, that's why I'm telling my Neice\Nephews state schools or a JCs first....

...to get their degrees.

I've been working in IT For 15 years, no one ask me what college I graduated from or my GPA or how much tuition cost....