<p>I read recently that Pomona College spends $70,000 to educate each student per year. That's greater than the amount it charges with its tuition. That made me curious about the amount other colleges spend on their students. Obviously, it's probably correlated with the school's endowment, but does anyone have any solid statistics on this? I think it's something to think about when considering choosing a private school over a public one.</p>
<p>Whatever responses this question elicits, it is important to differentiate one major from another, and a graduate student from an undergraduate student.</p>
<p>For example, let’s say X college spends $5,000,000 per year on its physics lab and professors and staff. Suppose there are 13 undergraduate Physics majors and 12 Ph.D. candidates. Do you divide $5M by 27, or do you realize the Ph.D. students suck up $4M of the $5M budget (funded generally by outside research grants), leaving $1M for the 15 Physics undergrads? Is the school spending $400,000 per undergrad ($5M/25 students), or is it $1M/13 undergrads, or about $90,000 per undergrad?</p>
<p>then there is the Anthropology Dept. Suppose at this same X college there are 80 Anthro majors, (50% of whom are scholarship athletes). The annual budget for the Dept. is $1M. Does the school therefore spend $25,000 per Anthro major? </p>
<p>At the same school there are 300 History majors, with an annual History Dept. budget of $3M. Would that then be $3M/300 students = $10,000 per student?</p>
<p>What I am saying is that the cost to educate a student varies tremendously from one Dept. to another.</p>
<p>This is nothing new. When I attended Pomona, we were constantly told that our tuition only covered half the cost of our education. And that was back when tuition, room and board totalled only $5000 per year!</p>
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<p>MIT and Harvey Mudd both probably have to spend more money educating their students by virtue of their majors, but I am still interested in seeing whatever the results are.</p>
<p>Swarthmore is probably the most spendthrift college in the country. It has an annual budget of $119,000,000 a year to lavish upon 1400 undergraduates which works out to abvout $85,000 per student. </p>
<p>However, because Swarthmore has no graduate programs, no professional schools, no med school or teaching hospitals to operate, about half, or $54,000,000 gets spent on administration, academic deaning, dining services, the bookstore and various and sundry “enrichments”. Only about $60,000,000 a year or aboout $42,000 per student is expended on the core academic enterprise.
[source: <a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/finance_investment_office/FinancialReport_09-10.pdf][/url”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/finance_investment_office/FinancialReport_09-10.pdf][/url</a>]</p>
<p>Consider the costs of real estate! Differences in “spending” on students may reflect the vast differences in these costs and may have nothing to do with actual education.</p>
<p>levirm, are you talking about real estate investments or new real estate purchases for buildings?</p>
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<p>Not so sure about that. Williams College has an annual budget of $205 million, and a total enrollment (mostly undergrads, but also including a few grad students in art history and policy economics) of 2,123. That works out to a little under $97,000 per student.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing, though. Williams unquestionably has the resources to provide its students a deluxe education. But critics point out that Williams’ athletic budget is roughly twice that of the typical top-tier LAC. That’s a fine thing if you’re a student-athlete at Williams, but if you’re not into intercollegiate sports, just how much benefit do you derive from Williams’ lavish expenditures on its sports teams? (And keep in mind that at this level intercollegiate athletics is essentially just a large cost item in the budget, unlike the big-time football schools where ticket sales and television broadcast rights haul in enough revenue to make the entire athletic department self-sustaining).</p>
<p>Spending-per-student is a very crude proxy for educational quality, if it is that at all. There could be a lot of inefficiencies driving up expenditures. A bloated administration and overpaid administrators are expensive and drive up spending-per-student without necessarily contributing anything to educational quality. Energy-inefficient buildings can be a major expenditure item. An aging faculty generally costs more than a younger one, but seniority is not necessarily indicative of quality. A school that’s carrying a lot of debt will have a larger budget than an otherwise identical school not burdened by large debt service expenditures. It costs as much to maintain a million-volume library whether the school has 1,000 students or 5,000, but the school with 1,000 students will have 5 times the spending-per-student on library services, even though the identical services may be ample to serve the needs of 5,000 students. A school located in a high-crime area may spend millions on security services that are simply not necessary at a school in a low-crime location. A smaller school might end up spending much more per employee for health insurance than a larger school that is able to use the size of its insured pool to leverage discounted rates; that translates into higher costs per employee and higher spending per student at the smaller school, without any discernible benefit to employee well-being or educational quality. Same deal on other high-volume purchases of goods and services from external vendors; the bigger school may be able to negotiate for lower prices on everything from airline tickets to copier paper. A school in a remote location may spend much more on faculty and administrator travel than a school near a major airline hub. And on and on.</p>
<p>And then, of course, there are opportunities for gamesmanship. Spending-per-student is one of the key measures in the US News ranking system. College administrators know this. Arguably at the margins this creates an incentive to inflate expenditures. Some of this is real spending. A college could give all its faculty a big raise, for example, and thereby increase spending-per-student enough to leapfrog one or more competitors in the US News ranking without affecting educational quality in the near term—because it’s the same faculty. And even in the medium term, it’s not clear it will improve faculty quality, because if the school is paying more than the prevailing wage among its peers, the principal effect will be to make the current faculty stick around longer. (Actually, faculty compensation is double-counted by US News, first as part of spending-per-student, then a second time as part of “faculty resources,” so jacking up faculty salaries is one the most effective ways to boost a school’s US News ranking). Then there’s the tactic of fictive spending. A school could jack up tuition, for example, and simply recycle the additional revenue into increased financial aid. The net cost to students remains the same; the net revenue available to the school remains the same; but it looks like spending-per-student has increased. This is one of the main reasons public universities fare so poorly in the US News ranking system. They’re effectively giving a $30,000/year tuition discount to in-state residents. If they instead made in-state residents pay the higher OOS rate, then turned around and gave that money right back to the students in the form of increased FA, they’d dramatically increase spending-per-student and rise dramatically in the US News rankings. The high tuition/high FA model adopted by elite privates essentially does this. Public universities generally can’t go there because they’re under political pressure to keep tuition low, and they pay for it with lower US News rankings.</p>
<p>Stanford and Princeton.</p>
<p>bclintonk, thanks for the very long reply, but I’m only looking for this out of curiosity. But I don’t think there’s any number that is a good measure of educational quality anyways.</p>