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<p>Is she? Exactly what sort of disinformation are you talking about?</p>
<p>Your German friend is more in the minority. Historically, more of the foreign PhD students prefer to stay here and work. They used to refer to this as “brain drain”.</p>
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<p>Let me also express my keen interest in the source for this figure.</p>
<p>Most of them also engage in research and train PhD students - and indeed that is the primary task of many universities, with undergraduate education being a secondary consideration at best. = sakky.</p>
<p>Well, that would mean that the 27,000 undergraduates at UNC are funding a few thousand Phd candidates there? I find that hard to believe. </p>
<p>As for the German student at Berkeley, I would say the taxpayers in California should have something to say about that, and demand that people give back/pay back their ‘gift’ by working there for say, five years and paying full taxes. Just like ROTC students have to serve in the Army/Navy/Airforce to pay back their scholarships, ditto the service academy graduates.</p>
<p>The funding for most PhD students’ tuition is paid either out of research or training grants that they help work on or though being a TA in classes and labs. As TA’s they are low cost for what they do and they earn experience dealing with teaching undergrads. Some may be paid out of general university funds but that number is a small percentage at most state U’s. It is probably most common in depts without large research grants–ie the humanities. If the research money ebbs the number of grad students is also reduced as few will actually pay their own way.</p>
<p>sakky:</p>
<p>while your theory maybe correct, it is devoid of facts. Please post the details on where/how the UC system cost averages both grads and undergrads into the same pool. But, regardless, the numbers still don’t pass the smell test: it cost at least $6-8k per student for California high schools or Cal State system (no future German doctors)…surely, a University HAS to be more.</p>
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<p>You’ve got the economics of this exactly backwards. At major research universities, research doesn’t come out of the university’s general fund, much less out of a surplus generated from student tuition. Research is supported almost entirely by outside research grants which help to pay a substantial fraction of faculty salaries and support graduate research assistants (and sometimes undergrads as well). A substantial fraction of those grants are diverted into the university’s general fund through an accounting device called “indirect cost recovery,” which allows the university to assign a fraction of its total overhead to each research grant. In short, research funds the university’s general operations, not vice versa; and in so doing, research effectively subsidizes undergraduate education as well. Some schools also support a smaller fraction of the overall research budget with internal grants, but these typically do not come out of general fund revenues. Often the university will create an “enterprise fund,” for example, recycling royalties and licensing fees on university-owned patents and other intellectual property into supporting additional faculty research.</p>
<p>If it only costs $7,000 to educate an undergraduate, then all those LACs that charge around $40K in tuition and don’t support substantial faculty research and don’t have graduate students must be rolling in dough, right? That’s a $33K/student/year “profit,” right? Well, no. Actually, the top LACs can’t educate their students even on $40K/year in tuition. They spend substantial additional sums to support undergraduate education out of returns on their very substantial endowments.</p>
<p>^^following on bc’s point: Prez. Shapiro at Williams (an economist by training?) published a report a few years ago that indicated that their cost to educate one student was (then) $70k+ per year. Perhaps they have some German grad students hiding out on the dole. :D</p>
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They have freeloading German undergrads who aren’t hiding. The school is need-blind for international. The US taxpayers are subsidizing for the Germans education. Outrageous!!!
Perhaps we need to auf them Germans.</p>
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<p>No doubt there are plenty of foreign PhD students who opt to stay in the country, just like plenty of foreign undergrads opt to stay in the country. Nevertheless, the point is simply to question why the undergrads should have the entire costs of the university ascribed to them, whereas the PhD students have none. </p>
<p>Besides, even if foreigners do stay in the country, that’s not to say that they stay in the particular state of the public university in question. Take the University of Michigan. Let’s face it - many, probably most, newly minted PhD’s from UM, whether foreign, OOS, or instate, will leave the state of Michigan immediately upon graduation, as the state’s economy has been depressed for years due to the travails of the auto industry, prompting a mass exodus of all sorts of people out of the state. Heck, I know quite a few Michigan PhD’s myself who left for jobs in other states immediately after they graduated. Some of them even said that they liked Michigan and wanted to stay, but the state economy is sundered. So while they’re still benefiting the United States, they aren’t benefiting the taxpayers of Michigan who had been ostensibly supporting them.</p>
<p>Without the grad students there are no GIs to help with undergrads, no research assistants, etc. Professors would not want to work at UM without having top grad students to train and work for them. It’s very much a symbiotic relationship and given the samll amount of money the state gives UM, I don’t think the state is getting a bad deal.</p>
<p>Geez, I didn’t realize the NSF grant I got came out of Michigan state budget. Perhaps I should have felt a bit guilty about leaving to work in Texas.</p>
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<p>And surely in response to that, the German guy would have simply chosen Stanford or some other PhD program where he would not have had to deal with such requirements. And that’s the problem: all other PhD programs provide support for their students without strings attached. So if Berkeley starts implementing onerous requirements within their program, then Berkeley will lose many (probably most) of its PhD students, as the competitor schools, especially the private schools, won’t follow suit. </p>
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<p>Not directly. See below. </p>
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<p>Uh, no, it is the counterargument that I am questioning that is devoid of facts. I never said that the UC system pools undergrad and graduate costs into the same accounting pool. Nor did I ever say that I know what the average cost is to teach an undergrad, and I never said I did. In fact that’s the point - nobody knows!. Undergraduate teaching is a joint product and it is meaningless to talk about an average cost of a joint product. You can’t meaningfully talk about the average cost of producing bacon for a pig is used to produce a wide variety of foodstuffs, not just bacon. </p>
<p>My point simply is that there is no logical reason to ascribe all of the costs of the entire university onto only the undergraduate population, which is what some posters on this thread have done. {In fairness, they did so only because many school administrators have perpetrated the same falsehood, conveniently ignoring the aforementioned fact that undergraduate education is a joint product, probably in an attempt to convince undergrads that their school is a bargain.} That would be like ascribing the costs of the entire pig to the consumers of bacon, conveniently ignoring all of the consumers of pork, ham, and rinds. </p>
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<p>Let’s leave the CalStates aside (for they still have grad students, just not PhD students, and, more importantly, the faculty at the CalStates still do some research), and talk solely about the high schools. High schools provide a singular product: a high school education. If they don’t provide that product, then there is no reason for high schools to exist.</p>
<p>Research universities, on the other hand, produce a joint product comprised of many different components of which undergraduate education is only one, and, in the case of the top research universities such as Berkeley, only a relatively minor product. Let’s face it: The faculty at Berkeley spend far more time researching than they do teaching undergrads. Many faculty teach undergrads only one semester a year, and even during those semesters seldom will teach more than 2 undergrad classes. Plenty of faculty hardly ever teach undergrads at all, teaching only graduate seminars. Berkeley professors also don’t gain much professional benefit from teaching undergrads. Tenure decisions and professional status is to be gained from research output. A Berkeley junior faculty member who teaches undergrads atrociously, but produces a string of publications in top journals is far more likely to win tenure than one who provides excellent teaching but only mediocre publications. </p>
<p>What that then means is that, unlike a high school who would have to shut down if they had no students, a school like Berkeley could be perfectly functional and successful if it had no undergrads, just like a pig farmer could successfully cope with a world where bacon became unpopular by continuing to sell pork and ham. Heck, I suspect that many Berkeley faculty members would secretlyprefer that Berkeley have no undergrads - similar to how Rockefeller University and UCSF have no undergrads - because that would allow them to devote more time to research and less time to the relatively unimportant task of teaching undergrads. Berkeley would be able to carry on as a momentously successful research institution and graduate school.</p>
<p>But the bottom line is that undergraduate education is a joint product. Even at the LAC’s, where by definition no grad schools exist, the professors are still engaged in research, despite the fact that most students at those LAC’s don’t care about research. There is no necessary reason to ascribe the costs of an entire organization to a single member of a joint product.</p>
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<p>Your premise here is flawed. The state of Michigan subsidizes in-state undergrads, but the amount of funding supplied by the state doesn’t even cover the very substantial tuition discount the University gives to in-state undergrads. </p>
<p>Graduate students are charged tuition, too, but most Ph.D. candidates get fellowships at the rate of tuition + stipend + benefits. Some of these fellowships are awarded from endowment funds designated for that purpose. Some are part of a package of benefits in return for working as GSIs and/or Research Assistants. This is not money that is coming from the state in the form of a subsidy.</p>
<p>Your premise about Michigan exporting Ph.D.s is wrong, too. Sure, a lot of Michigan Ph.D.s leave the state for employment elsewhere; so do a lot of people with undergrad degrees. But that’s true everywhere. In fact, the state of Michigan as a whole is a net importer of Ph.D.s, with more moving in each year than move out. That trend is strongest in Ann Arbor and surrounding Washtenaw County. The University hires some, but mostly they’re attracted to a growing high-tech sector that in turn is drawn to Ann Arbor by its highly educated workforce, urban amenities, quality-of-life, and tie-ins to University research. Ann Arbor has been hit by the recession, too, but less badly than the country as a whole and far less than the rest of the state, and business analysts expect it to rebound strongly and resume the growth trajectory that has made it the brightest spot in an otherwise bleak state economy for the last several decades. In short, the state of Michigan gets a very strong positive return on the relatively modest sums it invests in the University each year. Bottom line, the University subsidizes the state more than the state subsidizes the University.</p>
<p>[Ann</a> Arbor and Warren: A Tale of Two Economies - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329299105252505.html]Ann”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329299105252505.html)</p>
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<p>Not everybody gets an NSF grant, as I’m sure you know. Those who don’t are going to be supported, at least indirectly, through Michigan taxpayers. </p>
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<p>You would then have to ask the question of why you need research assistants or professors who need people to work for them in the first place? The answer to that is obviously so that UM wants to produce top-quality research, but that’s the point. Research is the other member of the joint product, and at the top universities, is probably the most important member. Like I said, profs at the top schools spend far more time researching than they do teaching undergrads. This is entirely different from K-12 education in which the teachers are tasked with a single job: to teach students. It would be scandalous indeed if some K-12 teachers were found not to be spending much time teaching at all, but were instead spending most of their working hours conducting research. Taxpayers would legitimately gripe that that’s not their job. </p>
<p>The point simply is that it is entirely legitimate for undergrads to ask why they are supporting a large research apparatus, when most of them don’t care about research. {Let’s face it - many undergrads at schools such as Berkeley or UM don’t really care about research. They’re never going to read the academic literature, they’re never going to work as researchers themselves. They just want to finish their bachelor’s and get a decent job.} Furthermore, most research is arguably useless: the vast majority of research papers are never cited more than a handful of times even decades after publication. </p>
<p>But the other point, which I have been making throughout this thread, is that there is no reason to believe that undergrads ought to be ascribed all of the costs of the university, when undergrads receive only a single product, and a relatively minor one at that, of the entire joint product set. You can ascribe the entire costs of a pig to me if I were to truly buy every product of the pig. But if all I am buying is the bacon, then why should I be ascribed the entire cost of the pig?</p>
<p>I think this might be an interesting addition to the conversation, given the direction that it is going. </p>
<p>There are some years when Michigan uses formula funding to distribute appropriations. The most recent weighting gave 1.00 to a bachelor’s degree, and .25 for a masters or doctoral degree. So the State itself considers its funding to be primarily in support of undergraduates. Taxpayers may complain about how they’re paying students from Germany or Ohio to get degrees, but as far as the State is concerned, taxpayers aren’t supporting them anywhere near as much as they are supporting undergrads.</p>
<p>Speaking generally, I don’t believe it’s accurate to say that undergrads are “supporting a large research apparatus;” nor are they ascribed all the costs of the University. Of course the money from tuition (at all levels) and state funding and things like ICR end up commingled in the GF, but the simple math of the budget does not bear out that undergrads are shouldering the cost of research. Nor does it bear out that non-resident undergrads are “paying the bills” in the way that the OP implies.</p>
<p>You do top quality research becasue it is very profitable. UM just announced they did $1 Billion in research last year.The amount is could skim from the research money to support other areas is circa $300,000,000 or as much as the state funds the UM. We can debate the value of individual research but they certainly produce many things of value from Vitamin D to WARFARin to stem cell technology. The UM profs are no different from their peers at Harvard or MIT in that producing significant research is a major part of their life. In many cases so is teaching others.<br>
Resarch money is also paying for many of the beautiful new science and engineering buildings you see going up at top schools all over the US. Even undergrads benefit from nice new buildings and labs. Also a large number of undergrads are now doing research. I recently spoke with a UW senior who has been doing psychology research for three years and that helped her get into a great grad school program. At least in science and engineering the typical top big U undergrad now does some research work.</p>
<p>Dividing up the accounting is an impossible task as many undergrads also take grad level classes.</p>
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<p>Uh, no, this premise is inherently flawed. While I agree that the university provides a substantial tuition discount to its instate students, you then have to ask why are the costs of the university so high in the first place such that a tuition discount is necessitated? It’s like if I were to tell you that a soda costs $20, but then giving you a $19 discount. Instead of feeling gratitude for the $19 discount, you should be asking why was it reasonable for the soda to cost $20 in the first place. </p>
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<p>And therein lies the key. Fellowship money comes from a kitty that might have been devoted to research purposes, but if that kitty did not exist, then the state would have to provide subsidies for that research. GSI/RA money is provided in return for that PhD student producing research himself, or so that he teaches and thereby relieves the faculty from performing the teaching, which therefore means that the faculty has more time to do research. </p>
<p>Hence, any way you want to look at it, the bottom line is that PhD students are brought in to support a research apparatus, and that is the other key member of the joint product set. It is therefore entirely appropriate to ask why undergrads (or state taxpayers) should be ascribed the entire costs of supporting that research apparatus. </p>
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<p>Then if that logic is true (which I doubt), then the same logic ought to apply to undergraduates as well. Why charge undergrads anything - even OOS undergrads? After all, one could easily argue that many UM undergrads choose to stay in the Ann Arbor area, thereby improving the human capital of the region and boosting the local economy. So just like the UM PhD students are charged nothing, perhaps the UM undergrads should be charged nothing too.</p>
<p>On the other hand, such a notion would surely instigate quite a row among the state taxpayers. All Michigan state taxpayers, including the poor, and including those who can’t get into UM, still have to pay to support UM, yet the R&D and entrepreneurial jobs that are created are high-paying jobs. Hence, the state is effectively taking from the poor to subsidize the rich. Granted, if that’s what the state taxpayers want to do, then that is their concern. But I rather doubt that that would pass political muster if proposed openly. </p>
<p>But in any case, nobody is denying that a university research apparatus does provide some benefits, although I suspect those benefits are often times exaggerated. The key question is how to ascribe the costs of that apparatus, and in particular, why the undergrads should be ascribed the totality of the costs.</p>
<p>It’s not a public school problem. It’s a problem. Harvard, Yale, Princeton continue to be tax-exempt organizations and still take needy international students.</p>
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<p>That’s right, it’s not accurate to say that students are supporting research, and that’s my point: nobody should assume that they are. It is therefore incorrect to say that it somehow ‘costs’ $40k (or whatever the figure is) to educate a single undergrad on average. Like I said, undergraduate education is a joint product for which average costs are by definition meaningless. That $40k a year figure inherently includes research. </p>
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<p>Exactly - it is an impossible task. That’s my point. It is therefore unfair to ascribe the entire costs of the university to the undergrads. </p>
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<p>For those valuable research products, one could argue that those parties who actually benefit from it should be the ones to pay for it. Invoking again the pig example, if I just want to eat bacon but I don’t want to eat ham or pork, why should I be ascribed the costs of the entire pig? </p>
<p>One could also argue the other way: if research truly is so profitable, then why not do much more of it, and then just provide undergraduate education of charge - both to the students and to the taxpayers? That would mean ascribing all of the costs of the entire university onto the ‘research customers’. That is certainly no more unfair than ascribing all of the costs onto the undergrads.</p>