"Who Subsidies Whom" report says that tuition may pay university research bills

<p>Per the Center for Affordability and Productivity's new report, calculations of cost to educate students as distributed by some colleges are not properly calculated. The calculated cost includes many activities that are not related to educating students. Tuition bills may, in fact, be greater than the actual cost to educate a student.</p>

<p>Report:</p>

<p>Who</a> Subsidizes Whom?</p>

<p>Summary in The Chronicle:</p>

<p>Colleges</a> Spend Far Less on Educating Students Than They Claim, Report Says - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education</p>

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<p>I always knew that this had to be true, and that the idea that my kids’ $52K education was being subsidized is (excuse the language) complete BS.</p>

<p>There is absolutely no way that it costs $52K to house and feed a 5’4", 100 lb woman and teach her in a class of 15 -100 other students for 3-4 hours a day, for 8 months. No way.</p>

<p>Could Dartmouth really thrive on $14,000 per student? My high school spends more than that.</p>

<p>Yeah, I never bought that line, anyway.</p>

<p>uh, High Schools meet what six hours per day? College? three. Number of kids in a class? HS? - 25 College???</p>

<p>Add to that many freshman/soph classes are either large, or taught by TAs, who are poorly paid.</p>

<p>I think a lot of parents want more transparency and more honestly. I also suspect a lot of reserch is driven by “publish or perish” and not meaningful, even to the researchers. </p>

<p>We need trustees with integrity and involvment. Not just rubber stamping a Chancellor’s actions.</p>

<p>Would it be surprising if teaching in science and engineering (costly labs) and research in humanities (fewer outside research grants) were the things that get subsidized by the university?</p>

<p>Of course, other things add to costs, like impressive nice campuses and buildings (compared to the typical falling-apart high school), lots of additional administration (some questionable), non-revenue producing sports (i.e. not Division 1 football and basketball), etc…</p>

<p>It is not easy to allocate the money clearly to different activities or cost centers.</p>

<p>Tuition $$ that support research may:</p>

<p>a) be an unfair use of your undergraduate education payment
b) a component of the cost of getting good professors to stay at that university
c) part of the cost of an infrastructure that provides opportunities to students
d) a ‘profit’ from teaching that the university can use any way it wants</p>

<p>Also the cost per student is complicated. Obviously the incremental cost of adding another student is not $52K, but at some point adding too many students will impact quality.</p>

<p>20 to 25 years ago, the cost to attend a university as an undergraduate was (after adjusting for CPI inflation) probably about 40% to 50% what it is now, for similar universities.</p>

<p>So what has changed since then? Or is it just that increased demand for a university education meant that universities could increase prices much more than inflation?</p>

<p>A lot of subjects have become economically valuable. Maybe 25 years ago you could get a dedicated ‘botanist’ to teach a lot of students about biology, and get paid a pittance. Now that same type of person would be a ‘plant biotechnologist’ who without a fat paycheck and great research infrastructure would just move to industry and get paid even more.</p>

<p>I’m the last one to defend the crazy high price of tuition, and you will find me ranting about this crazy industry often, especially the way they investing in marketing, and basically con parents into paying huge fees for a special brand that isn’t any different than the next. But having said that I would like to add a few points to the discussion: </p>

<ol>
<li><p>The labor cost for me to teach a class is not 3 hours a week. Good lord, I only wish. The preparation is easily as much, if not more, and the other aspects- meeting with student groups, one-on-one meetings with many of my students, answering emails until 11pm, written and oral feedback, grading grading grading, creating exams, writing letters of reference, providing career guidance, involving undergrads and training them in research, serving on awards committees, participating in ‘major’ events, talking to employers, meeting with prospective students, serving on curriculum committees, coaching case competitions, revising curriculum, reviewing textbook options, and creating whole new courses…adds up to far more than anyone can appreciate.</p></li>
<li><p>The whole “freshman classes are taught by TAs” is completely overdone. Yes there are TAs, no doubt, but it is simply nowhere near the degree that say LACs insist you believe. And it does vary quite a bit by school. And I will add that in our big research university, our PhD students do teach their own class in their last year of the program, but they are in training and heavily supervised and directed by faculty. They do as well as more senior faculty in terms of teaching eavluations, and often win awards. And future professors have to learn somewhere. It is no different than going to a teaching hospital and having residents overseeing your care. </p></li>
<li><p>The connection between research and teaching is so very often missed. Everything we teach in the classroom comes from… guess where? Research! It is the knowledge from research that fills our textbooks, guides our knowledge, shapes our opinions, and not to mention, many of us incorporate our research into the classroom (hot off the presses). Without research, your kid would not have material to learn. </p></li>
<li><p>There are so many common expenses that simply have nothing to do with the variable cost of your particular child…but without them your child would have no university to attend. As but one example? Our new building, with smart classrooms, many study rooms for students, new student lounges, new career centre, two amphitheatres etc- $125 million. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>Of course none of this justifies the crazy high tuition now charged. No way. And I so wish universities were more honest and transparent too (they are not). But I still wanted to add a few things you might not have considered (especially if you are stuck with a gigantic tuition bill that seems hard to justify).</p>

<p>I never said TAs are not qualified. I think many are great. But I do not think they are paid much, and I question how much “supervision” time is allocated to them. I think that saying without research, our kids would not have anything to learn is overstated. And I also question the value of some research.</p>

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Seriously, how much “research” is necessary to teach english or calculus or chemistry at the undergraduate level? </p>

<p>One big problem leading to higher tuition is faculty-to-student ratios getting lower, meaning faculty teaching few classes, thus more faculty needed. They’re not teaching since they’re doing “research”. Also, lower ratios help with rankings. So schools instead of trying to be efficient with their tuition dollars are using it for research. 95% of undergrad classes could use the same materials & textbooks from 5 years ago, no need for unnecessary research. Let the research be done at grad level at fewer schools and have it then disseminated to the undergrad schools.</p>

<p>There can be a lot of cost savings, but schools have no interest in doing that as long as there’s parents willing to pay $58K/yr now which will grow to $70K/yr in 4 years. Higher education system is becoming very inefficient.</p>

<p>No one has even mentioned the use of adjuncts that schools do their best to hide. Adjuncts are often even lower paid than TA’s who may be unionized and thus get a more reasonable stipend.</p>

<p>Okay, Im no expert on college cost analysis, but I did spend a significant portion of my life doing railroad cost analysis</p>

<p>Q:What does it cost to move that boxcar from Chicago to Atlanta? A: well it depends.</p>

<p>Marketing dude - hey we make money charging a dollar. The track is there anyway, the train is running anyway, we already own the boxcars. </p>

<p>Operations dude - if they dont cover all the costs, including all my operating overhead, we are gonna go bankrupt.</p>

<p>Its all a question of whats marginal, which depends. Do you have a base of shipments captive to the RR covering your fixed costs, and this is truely a unique extra shipment? or will this represent a big step up in volume? Is this short term or long term? Lets say we have surplus boxcars that we are going to scrap anyway - then we just have to worry about the foregone scrap value - but what if you keep the business longer, and we have to replace the cars? How much extra fuel does an already running train need? at what point do you add a locomotive? At what point an extra train? Does it matter if we are in hiring mode (all operating labor incremental) or firing mode (special payments made to laid off employees, which we can avoid with new business). How do we account for capital costs - what depreciation? What cost of capital? </p>

<p>Some would say - whats the cost - well what do you want it to be? One can try to bring objective standards to it (and we did) but its not a simple answer. As I always liked to say - its not a piece of business that has a cost - its a decision - tell me the decision thats being made, and I can tell you whats incremental, and over what time frame, and THEN i can tell you the cost.</p>

<p>“95% of undergrad classes could use the same materials & textbooks from 5 years ago, no need for unnecessary research. Let the research be done at grad level at fewer schools and have it then disseminated to the undergrad schools.”</p>

<p>Im pretty sure there are schools, from Community colleges, to private for profits, to lesser LAC’s, that already follow that business model. Whether that impacts quality of teaching is something you can try to judge.</p>

<p>Ive skimmed the report, and to the extent I understand their methodology, I find it unconvincing.</p>

<p>Research is frequently paid for separately. The University of Washington, for example receive about $1 billion a year in research grant support. When an investigator applies for a grant, between 50% to 100% more than what the research costs is requested for “institutional overhead.” In some cases junior faculty are provided starter grants, thereafter, in most research universities, grants covering the research and indirect expenses are required if one wants to keep one’s faculty position.</p>

<p>Ive skimmed the report, and to the extent I understand their methodology, I find it unconvincing.</p>

<p>" I never said TAs are not qualified. I think many are great. But I do not think they are paid much, and I question how much “supervision” time is allocated to them."</p>

<p>Ive had friends in Phd programs who worked as TAs. My impression is that the faculty spent a lot of time on them.</p>

<p>"I think that saying without research, our kids would not have anything to learn is overstated. And I also question the value of some research. "</p>

<p>Then you might want to send your kid to an institution where no research is done.</p>

<p>“Research is frequently paid for separately. The University of Washington, for example receive about $1 billion a year in research grant support”</p>

<p>I wanted to see if the issue was non grant funded research, or the (frequently disputed) issue of overhead coverage (for example maybe they think any charging of overhead to instruction at a research U is wrong) but I found the document to opaque to figure that out. though they did specificallymention unfunded research</p>

<p>I’m always suspicous of anything colleges claim or report. When D1 was born, I remember the headline Harvard costed $18,000 per year and now it’s almost 3 times that much in 20 years.</p>