Study: Cut College Tuition 50% with More Teaching Hours

Paying for College
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<p>Richard Vedder writes in the Wall Street Journal:

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...tuition fees at the flagship campus of the University of Texas could be cut by as much as half simply by asking the 80% of faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach about half as much as the 20% of faculty with the highest loads. The top 20% currently handle 57% of all teaching.

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<p>He suggests that a modest increase in the teaching loads of profs who teach minimally now is what's needed to rein in budgets. And some profs are already teaching significantly more hours than he's suggesting. But will this approach tank research?</p>

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[quote]
Faculty will likely argue that this would imperil the university's research mission. Nonsense. First of all, at UT Austin, a mere 20% of the faculty garner 99.8% of the external research funding. Second, faculty who follow the work habits of other professional workers—go to work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and work five days a week for 48 or 49 weeks a year—can handle teaching 200 hours a year while publishing considerable amounts of research.

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<p>Read more: Richard</a> Vedder: Time to Make Professors Teach - WSJ.com</p>

<p>Vedder even has the temerity to suggest that a lot of research that faculty members conduct is inconsequential, obscure, and benefits neither the university nor society. Just 20% of faculty members generate 99.8% of external research funding at UT. Vedder, by the way, is from Ohio University.</p>

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<p>Roger, we have to log in to see the whole article. However, from what I have seen, I think the writer is correct. Even many professors admit that much of the research that goes on is irrelavent and usually is published in magazines that no one reads. If we could cut college costs by 50% simply by raising some teaching loads for those currently with the fewest loads, I would be greatly for it.</p>

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<p>This would save money, but UT Austin would no longer be a great university. This is essentially a proposal to gut the non-STEM side (those are the faculty without much research money) while increasing teaching load on everybody and magically maintaining research production and funding.</p>

<p>What makes UT Austin and many other universities great is the depth and breadth of their research. You can save money doing less, but you have to decide what you want.</p>

<p>As for most research being irrelevant, most research has always been and will always be irrelevant. There is no magic formula for picking the winners.</p>

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<p>spurster notes,“What makes UT Austin and many other universities great is the depth and breadth of their research”</p>

<p>Response: What’s wrong with being a great university by being known for its great classes and good teaching?</p>

<p>Also, How about using online courses to cuts costs.</p>

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<p>The great research universities in the United States are one of few remaining categories where we still lead the world. If you do not wish to attend a research university, you have alternatives. The corporatist at the WSJ (owned by Rupert Murdoch) will not rest until America is number 1 at NOTHING.</p>

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<p>It seems to me that this discussion conflates two issues:</p>

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<li><p>Should tax money be used to subsidize research at publicly funded universities?</p></li>
<li><p>Is it a good idea to force academics with neither talent for nor interest in teaching into the classroom?</p></li>
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<p>Whatever your position is on 1, it seems to me the answer to 2 is a clear “no.”</p>

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<p>A second rate prof from a second rate college is going to tell UT and other top publics how to operate? Hmmmm–what’s wrong with that picture. It ignores the world outside UT where other competitive schools will continue to offer the more standard teaching load of 2/2 plus advising PhD students and other academic activity plus research time. So there is no way UT could impose this without losing most of the people who bring in the research money–and many who do research without the money aspect like most profs in the liberal arts areas.
All these great ideas that ignore both the culture and competitive implications are hogwash. Not to mention what happens to UT when that research money and related overhead are removed from the budget?</p>

<p>I’d suggest they start with Ohio U to see if this works but it’s not good enough. Very few profs there would get a sniff from a major research U.</p>

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<p>Professor Vedder suggests that colleges can save money “by phasing out tenured positions over time” and complains that too many articles are published in obscure journals. This, from a long-time tenured professor who’s published over 200 scholarly articles. :rolleyes:</p>

<p>However, he garners raves from students on ratemyprofessor. They say that he’s tough and the class is hard, but that his lectures are wonderful and he has hilarious stories. </p>

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<p>Yet teaching is part of their job. The vast majority of academics at research U’s are hired with the expectation that they will teach and do research. That’s the quid pro quo. If someone is a lousy teacher, why should they get a pass on part of their job? It’s unreasonable to expect that their teaching burden falls on their more pedagogically gifted colleagues. Especially as tenure decisions rest most heavily on research.</p>

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<p>Because putting them into the classroom affects students who are paying (in many cases, a lot!) for the benefit of a good education. </p>

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<p>That’s the crux of the problem, or part of it anyway.</p>

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<p>Barrons, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It would seem possible to shift those profs whose research activity is less productive into a higher commitment to teaching. A prof whose research is in high gear (metrics could be revenue to the university for some areas, prestige of journals published in for others, breakthroughs/innovations, etc) could opt to reduce their teaching hours if they wanted to.</p>

<p>The kind of pointless research the author was talking about was some obscure dissection of Shakespeare that gets published in a journal that nobody reads and that serious Shakespearean scholars would greet with a big “meh.” Do we need to fund that kind of activity so that the “good research” gets done, or could a more goal-oriented approach work?</p>

<p>The current business model employed by most major universities is going to have to be fixed at some point - tuition and total cost of attendance can’t outpace inflation every year for three decades and keep on going. Excellent state universities that used to be very low cost alternatives to private colleges are now themselves becoming costly.</p>

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<p>Nothing wrong with that at all. The US has many colleges like that, starting with Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, etc. I don’t think you get cheaper doing that, though.</p>

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<p>There’s nothing wrong with that either, but I thought you wanted great classes and teaching.</p>

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<p>“How about using online classes to cut costs”</p>

<p>I’ve completed a graduate level online program, and I just don’t see the savings.</p>

<p>Which costs? Building maintenance? The library still needs to be stocked, and if the students need materials that aren’t available online then the library has to mail them out. The instructors still need to be paid - or do you propose to off-load all of the responsibility onto a bunch of underpaid adjuncts who are working for multiple institutions? Not to mention that for a lab-based course (which includes the entire ultra expensive STEM field) if there are no lab sections that the students actually attend in person, they will learn just about zip, and will not graduate with the skills that they are expected to have.</p>

<p>Yes, some programs can be converted relatively easily to a distance-ed format (the graduate certificate program that I completed was one), but this won’t work for everything. In my experience, distance-ed works best when the students are highly motivated and need little interaction with the instructors, i.e. when they are fully capable of teaching the subject matter to themselves.</p>

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<p>The state U’s used to be less expensive because being a prof was a calling and they did not expect to get paid nor did they leave very often. That has changed and now their are bidding wars all the time for top talent with the privates setting the bar.<br>
Who is going to be the research arbiter to decide what was good and what was meh? Generally English profs are not making that much nor do they get much time off for research as no research money is available for most such areas. 90% of it goes to sciences, engineering and medical related. A top science prof will often have a lab employing 20 people with over a million $$$$ in annual grant funding. They can “buy” out of their teaching load if they want. But these guys make the place work financially. </p>

<p>If there are people sitting around not getting grants and not teaching that’s a mgt issue they need to fix. But I doubt it’s that widespread at most publics.</p>

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<p>So ready, this tenured prof here was forced to teach a class that I was a TA for, because he was not bringing it enough funding. Not only was it a miserable experience for him to be forced into teaching this class, but it was much worse for the students being subjected to it. I always picked my classes based on who was the best prof. Forcing more people to teach is just going to produce bad teachers, and the amount of time profs put into their jobs as a whole means that the only reason why it is worth it to the researchers is because they don’t have high teaching loads. You know what else could cut tuition 50%, making all intro classes have 500 students like they are here at UVA (and most other big schools?). Everyone would object to this immediately because students don’t like being in 500 person classes (well, I did, but parents would think it means their child would learn less). However, this is no different than the proposed solution, once you understand how poor the instruction would be by these professors who would rather not teach over research. And how poor the instruction is in their 1 class they already teach. I’ve had math profs who show up late, don’t prep, bull their way through some proofs, and that’s their idea of teaching. Having them teach more classes is clearly a poor decision. The ones who are teaching so much are doing so because they actually care about teaching… Anyways that is my 2cents.</p>

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<p>I haven’t been able to read the article, just summaries of it, but assessing teaching “productivity” in terms of numbers of students taught is likely just to lead to giant classes, no? The former dean of the college at UVA (now president of U of Richmond), Ed Ayers, told me years ago that UVA was very aware of the different economies of various fields, and that in the past they had accepted students and developed the faculty with those facts in mind. For instance, you can effectively teach kids economics, politics, and business in large lecture classes and at minimal expense, while the sciences require expensive labs, and the arts require both studio space and tons of, basically, one-on-one instruction. So UVA had traditionally given preference to smart kids with “cheap” interests. In the past decade UVA has much beefed up its arts programs, and has started to seek out the kinds of kids who will excel in them, but it’s very expensive to do so. I don’t see any way around those differences, at least if you want to provide a quality education. You are also going to have fewer students in the less popular subjects–German, for instance, has lost a great deal of ground over the course of my career, while Spanish classes are packed. One reaction, for instance at SUNY Albany, has been just to fire the whole German Department, but to me, that seems like a diminution of the academic enterprise. Let the department get smaller–yes, that’s appropriate and inevitable–but don’t eliminate it entirely. </p>

<p>I also wonder whether the author is generalizing from UT, an ambitious, research-oriented university, to the whole system of higher ed. It’s true that at the most elite schools (the Ivies, the highest ranked state flagships) teaching loads, even in the humanities, are pretty light. That’s partly because there are serious research expectations, and partly because in a department with a PhD program, a lot of one’s teaching is “off the books” because dissertation supervision, which can be hugely time-consuming, is not counted as part of one’s course load. But also, even in a horribly overcrowded field like mine, if you’re picky enough, there is a shortage of major talent and offering a light teaching load is one of the main ways to secure the top people. As soon as you get outside the top 25 or 30 universities and LACs, however, teaching loads go up sharply. The less-fancy places already do care a whole lot more about teaching than about research, and they’re not competing for the top research scholars in a field anyhow, so all that’s reflected in how jobs are structured.</p>

<p>A third point I haven’t seen addressed in the summaries of the article I’ve seen: the reason we sometimes have reduced teaching loads is that we’re doing administrative work for the university–for instance, chairing a department or running a graduate program. If you had “sampled” me when I was a department chair, I might have looked like a woman of leisure, teaching a single class per semester. In fact, I was working my tail off, and unfortunately, not on some obscure but gratifying monograph. I wonder how many of the “unproductive” senior faculty in this survey fall into that category.</p>

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<p>Cutting tuition 50% especially at UT will not cut cost of attendance 50%. The UT website says resident tuition is 8986-$10,326 per year and total cost for resident of TX on campus is $23596-$24936, so cutting tuition seems like it would be about a $5,000 per year savings.</p>

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<p>President Powers (UT’s president) clearly wasn’t happy with this article as he sent out a response to all students and staff essentially saying that the author doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.</p>

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<p>Sorry that the WSJ link isn’t accessible, I got it via Starbucks and didn’t realize it wasn’t shareable. &%$#! paywalls. Here’s a link to the reference document itself, so feel free to have at it:
<a href=“http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/Faculty_Productivity_UT-Austin_report.pdf[/url]”>CollegeLifeHelper.com;

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<p>Upon reflection, I think some of you have made some good points. Why should someone who is a fantastic researcher be forced to teach more and do less research especially if teaching is their forte?</p>

<p>Perhaps a better suggestion is to require introductory courses be taught through online or video streamed lectures. This way, for example, we won’t need thousands of professors teaching the same introductory courses such as economics, psych 101 etc. Everyone can win this way. Schools can get access to top notch, well known lecturers in these fields while cutting costs enormously. Students benefit by gaining acess to the top lecturers in the country or even the world. Frankly, lectures are lectures and it shouldn’t matter how it is delivered. There can be grad students answering questions about the lectures ,which would substantially reduce teaching costs. In addition, less faculty not only reduces the need for less salaries but less overhead, health insurance, retirement etc.</p>

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<p>This single equation at the end of the preliminary report undermined the entire report for me:</p>

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<p>First note that the units don’t work out ($*$ - number = $ ???). Then take note that $2.12 should really be a 3.12, the multiplier you need to get from instructional expenses to operating expenses: “we calculate that for every $1 spent by The University of Texas at Austin on instruction, $2.12 was spent elsewhere by the university.” </p>

<p>The content of the equation is even more lackluster than the arithmetic. </p>

<p>The (teaching salary x overhead) part of the equation assumes that cutting faculty members would reduce the overhead proportionally. That’s not true at all: having a smaller number of professors teach the same amount of classes won’t reduce the need for libraries or teaching assistants or plant maintenance. </p>

<p>The (research funding / overhead) part suggests that the author believes that faculty research grants should not only fund the faculty itself, but pay for all of the overhead costs of running a university as well. … Seriously!?</p>

<p>Translating between faculty expenditures and operating costs like that, I am not surprised that you can come to the conclusion that cutting a few faculty would have dramatic effects on tuition.</p>