Please suggest what administrative jobs the colleges can cut…and when doing that you have to consider the needs of the students, staff, and governmental reporting mandates/requirements.
Many colleges already have a hard time attracting and keeping high quality staff and other workers because the pay is often below market…it’s part of the reason many schools don’t have as many social-emotional counselors on staff to meet the demand of the students, to take one example.
It is up to college presidents to decide which rolls to cut and that would vary widely based on the institution. As I am not a college president and this conversation is not about one specific college, that question is not relevant.
I am simply pointing out how other businesses make decisions when facing uncertainty. If it works in other industries, why wouldn’t it work in education? I am not, however, suggesting that those steps will ever be taken. There is no need to do so, so prices will continue to escalate out of proportion to the general inflation rate.
An army of external consultants exists to help colleges optimize staffing and the related costs. Said consultants are paid handsomely, unlike many college staffers. If there were obvious cuts across the board to be made, those would be happening.
Average net tuition at 4 year colleges is decreasing. In real dollars.
I’m not saying that average gross tuition is completely irrelevant, but that’s not what people are paying. People are paying net tuition. Which again, is decreasing, on average.
I see what happened to my own alma mater in one generation. The dining hall closed at 7 pm and the athletes (and anyone else) who couldn’t get to dinner by then ate ramen noodles in their dorm room. I do not recall a single person on campus (except for a few elderly professors who walked with a cane) who had mobility issues- many of the dorms were built in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, not to mention lecture halls with winding stairways. There was one computer center, and you lined up to use your punch cards-- the notion that the entire campus would be wired with 24/7 help desks, etc. was far into the future. None of the dorms were air conditioned, and you could only have a mini-fridge in certain buildings.
Who would put up with such a “bare bones” campus today?
I agree with you that costs have escalated sharply. I’m just not sure what you can cut (it’s not attitude, it’s reality) without p-ing off some stakeholder group. Could ANY college campus declare “if you need learning support- tutoring, extra time with an individualized proctor for exams, the writing center, etc. don’t come here because we’ve fired all those people to save money”? What college can state “we cannot accommodate food allergies-- what you see is what you get in the dining hall, and by the way, dinner ends at 7 pm because we no longer pay overtime”? Does your kid want to go to a college where the gyms are only for the use of athletes? (Mine would have been fine, but most kids would not!)
And the regulatory environment has changed. And we live in a consumerist/litigious society.
How do you propose to put the genie back in the bottle?
A D1 school that is frequently mentioned on these boards tried this 5-10 years ago. The coaches, athletes and parents went nuts. Not to mention a significant proportion of college athletes (overall) experience food insecurity every year…bad optics if that happens at your school. Suffice it to say that policy was changed very quickly, which meant the school had to staff up the main dining hall until 9pm each night.
Everyone tries it. It makes perfect sense. The fixed costs of running several food service operations are baked in already-- but the variable costs of keeping things open from 6 am-8 or 9 pm are significant since you’re either hiring an evening staff just for dinner, or paying ginormous amounts in overtime (not just servers-- the folks who clean up, mop the floors, do the prep for the next morning).
And then your “constituents” go crazy. So sure- eliminate breakfast and just open at noon for lunch? And a different group of constituents go nuts- students who work in the psych lab and have to clock in at 8 am to feed the animals, so they need breakfast before then. The early athletes (crew) who have morning practice. Etc.
Meals are particularly tricky when athletes are involved, and it gets quite a bit of visibility because of the food insecurity issue.
My kid’s LAC, oft mentioned on these boards, pays $19/hour starting wage in the cafeteria to both townspeople and student workers because staffing the operation has become so difficult. Even at that rate, they continue to experience significant turnover. Costs of food service operations are going in one direction…up.
All of the hyperbole about meals aside, I have toured a few colleges recently.
The dorms look like Disney Vacation Club villas. Public, private, and in between.
I’ve seen more resort amenities on multiple campuses than most resorts I’ve paid to vacation at, and I’ve stayed at very nice ones over the years. Just not that luxurious. I’m not a Trump.
Every college I’ve visited except one has roughly doubled the number of administrators that they employed 30 years ago, some even more than that. Meanwhile, there are more adjunct faculty and food service staff complaining of the compensation disparity- I’ve seen visible protest boards to that effect on two campuses I’ve visited.
The OP isn’t talking about tuition only. They wrote “college costs”. That’s COA, and that is skyrocketing. It will continue because there is no downward pressure on the market.
Many due to governmental reporting requirements as well as student support necessities. I’m not saying some schools can’t cut staffing expenses but if it were straightforward, the army of consultants would be all over it…the low hanging fruit is gone.
I don’t have a third party source. I have followed COA for several schools on my own. It can be challenging to find it on many college websites- they all aren’t equally transparent- but it’s obvious if you look yourself.
If you work at a college, can’t you access data on COA at your home institution over the past twenty years, or is that information not available to faculty and staff?
From what I have seen in various university budgets available online (and working a little behind the scenes), the operating costs that are dominated by either non-faculty/non-athletic employee costs or contracted services really do not tend to have a lot of variability, at least once you control for the labor market in question. These undoubtedly went up over time, particularly during the era when health and retirement benefits got so much more expensive. But that was more or less a universal effect.
Instead, the big cost variables between colleges are faculty costs, athletic staff costs, capital expenditures on things like labs and dorms, and . . . financial aid.
And so if you want smaller class sizes, fewer grad student TAs, better faculty research output, and so on–it costs. If you want the best coaches and training staffs and so on–it costs (well, most of the time–a few colleges end up with net internal profits from athletics, but not many; I think it is like around 20 of the 229 D1 schools, for example). Modernized labs and nicer dorms and such–it costs. More financial aid–it costs.
And so yeah, there are not a lot of areas here where you could cut variable costs without angering a lot of stakeholders who value what those costs have bought.
Then your claim that ‘COA is skyrocketing’ is unsubstantiated. I am talking about net COA, not gross. Net COA is actually what people are paying and discounting is at an all time high. At many schools the large increases have been in gross tuition, not room and board.
It’s not unsubstantiated. It’s private, because unlike other posters, I don’t want to name names and my information is on specific schools.
As a parent, if I wasn’t paying attention to this while my children were in middle and high school, I would be being very foolish, don’t you think? He who fails to plan plans to fail.
There isn’t a difference between gross and net COA for everyone. At many schools, half of families are seeing equal figures between gross and net COA.
That’s true, and that seems to be the issue here…some on this thread are talking about making college costs lower for full pay families at highly rejective schools that don’t offer merit aid, while others would like to see the most needy of students be able to afford any college at all. Easy choice for me.
One more response and then I’m moving on, but the OP said for everyone, not what you said. Other posters introduced the idea of sectioning families by demographic group.
So it is true that if enough families of the students these colleges value are willing to pay the net costs necessary to get smaller class sizes, fewer grad student TAs, better faculty research output, competitive athletics, modernized labs, and/or nicer dorms–there will not be “market pressure” for universities to downgrade in those areas in order to reduce net costs.
Given that, the only public policy option would be to actually prohibit any university from spending more than others on those sorts of things in order to attract valued students and otherwise satisfy various stakeholders.
They certainly could, but that would only bring down the costs for a lucky few that get accepted into those college with multi-billion dollar endowments, certainly not “everyone”. Harvard could offer free tuition to all of its undergrads, but that will have zero impact on say, Ohio State Uni which educates a whole lot more kids every year.
But that also raises the question, why should the uber wealthy (think Bill Gate’s) children receive a lower cost of attendance at such a college? Why should teh scion of an oligarch get a lower cost to attend?
It’s so much easier to spend than to cut. There’s going to be opposition to cutting any benefits (once they’ve been taken for granted), whether in higher education or in the society as a whole. Doesn’t this problem of high cost in higher education mirror those we face elsewhere in the society?
Not to mention, that Congress likely does not have that Constitutional authority. (Congress could eliminate federal funding such as Pell grants to students who attend well endowed private schools, but that wouldn’t go over so well and woudl have nothing to do with costs.)