<p>A recent article in the Chronicle sheds some light.</p>
<p>My favorite part…</p>
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<p>Faculty members have been saying this for years. Not only are faculty salaries flat, full-time tenure-track faculty are by and large being replaced by part-time adjuncts, who make on average $3,000 per class. But your kid’s college’s Vice Vice Provost of Student Sleep Quality Development probably makes close to six figures. I worked in student affairs at my university and while I really enjoyed the work, it can be a sprawling administrative behemoth.</p>
<p>The article makes clear that much of the “administrative bloat” is expansion in student services. IMO, this is largely consumer-driven. Students and their parents–maybe especially the parents–are shopping for the best ancillary services. Career services. Psychological counseling. Disability services and accommodations. Study abroad programs. Campus security. Academic writing centers. Tech support. Recreation and fitness programs. Support for student activities and organizations. And in a competitive market, colleges are responding to consumer demand by beefing up these services and competing for students on that basis. If you take a college tour these days, practically all they want to talk about is student services, very little about the academics. Student services are the top priority for new programs and initiatives at many colleges, because they feel they need to spend there in order to remain competitive or to steal a march on the competition.</p>
<p>All of these services may be desirable and even necessary at some level, but in the aggregate, ancillary student services consume an increasingly large share of the college budget while faculty salaries and direct spending on colleges’ core instructional mission remain flat. There’s just no comparison between the level of support services students receive today and what we had 30 or 40 years ago. In some ways that’s a welcome development, but it comes at a price. Colleges were much leaner on student services back in the day, but they were much cheaper, too.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree that services have gotten better. However, based on the rate of administrative growth, I can’t help but feel much of it is simply administrative bloat. :-/ </p>
<p>Agree with bclintok. Consumer driven. You’d have to, so to say, be there to see it. And in the background, there are other cost-shearing efforts not usually reported in the media. Thermostats notched down a degree (or more in off hours,) no more catered lunches during meetings, long term admin or support staff who had accrued higher salaries and benefit costs nudged out, maybe the library is now closed on Sunday after midnight, when few were going. Even Harvard cut back on admissions travel budgets. The list goes on.</p>
<p>"The article makes clear that much of the “administrative bloat” is expansion in student services. IMO, this is largely consumer-driven. "</p>
<p>That’s right. There are countless CC threads discussing which institutions are doing a better job of facilitating roommate changes, preventing and treating sexual assault, serving students who are LD/on the spectrum/mentally ill, etc. etc. That’s great, but I wish there were some schools distinguishing themselves by offering old-school education, room and board at an old-school price.</p>
<p>I’d have to agree with bc wholeheartedly. Parents and students demand, colleges provide (and charge for), but sometimes colleges have no choice. An institution could choose to offer a bare bones education but will still need a disabilities services officer because the ADA requires it. I imagine growth in the fin aid office may also be the result of the need to comply with ever increasing regulations.</p>
<p>I suppose one way one way to address the issue of the ever ballooning student services departments is to stop charging everyone a small fee and start charging fees to those who use the services. While it might be reasonable to assume all students will avail themselves of academic resources (IT, the Library), maybe student services like health and activities should be pay as you go. </p>
<p>But you can’t build half a climbing wall or maintain half a swimming pool. Ordinary- I agree in Pay as You Go conceptually, but the types of hotel/spa amenities that colleges have built require spreading the costs out over the entire population.</p>
<p>Student centers that look like Hyatt hotels. Sushi bars. Career Services offices with all the bells and whistles (no more big black binder with a couple of job postings in it- now you can have your interview style critiqued from a fake video job interview, take a plethora of vocational and personality tests, have access to jobs in China and Dubai.)</p>
<p>I don’t know if you can put that genie back in the bottle. When my kids hear about how we propped electric fans in the window sills (dorm built in the 1800’s so not wired for A/C, they think it sounds like camping!</p>
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<p>Not sure the fake video job interviews or vocational/personality tests in career offices is a recent phenomenon. They were already well established when I started college in the mid-'90s and older HS alums and friends ahead of me in college advised me to take advantage of them. </p>
<p>While my LAC didn’t have the videos, they did offer the tests and I took my first full MBTI test there. </p>
<p>Some of the better amenities might be better without being more expensive than before. Examples would be information-based amenities, where distribution by internet is much faster and cheaper than printing them on paper and distributing the paper copies (things like scheduling and course registration, career center information on jobs and employers, etc.).</p>
<p>However, stuff like luxury suite-style dorms (e.g. Yale’s new dorm at $600,000 per bed) compared to plain old dorm rooms off a hall and other enhanced student services certainly do add to the cost.</p>
<p>An embedded cost that has been rising much faster than general inflation is the cost of medical care for employees and students.</p>
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<p>At least Yale can argue that the new dorms will be used to ease overcrowded conditions within the house system.</p>
<p>OTOH, Amherst can make no such excuses. On a campus covering 1,000 acres of largely undeveloped land, they can apparently find no other place to shoehorn their proposed new science center but the middle of a major student residential complex built in the 1960s, necessitating the bulldozing of five different dormitories (one was razed mistakenly before the blueprints for the new complex were changed), and their reconstruction on a different part of campus. Once the dust has settled it will involve moving a fifth of all the beds on campus a few hundred feet away:
<a href=“The Amherst Student”>http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2014/01/29/architect-selected-new-dorms</a></p>
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The Annual Association of University Professors report at <a href=“http://www.aaup.org/file/2012-13Economic-Status-Report.pdf”>http://www.aaup.org/file/2012-13Economic-Status-Report.pdf</a> lists a 58% increase in average salary for continuing faculty and 37% overall increase between 2000-2001 and 2012-2013. This 37% increase is a 3% higher increase than the listed CPI for the same period. Perhaps by “essentially flat” they mean only increasing slightly faster than inflation, rather than staying in proportion with tuition? If so, I think the article is missing some obvious causes of this relationship between tuition, faculty salary, and inflation in recent years.</p>
<p><strong>Looks at piles and piles of expensive looking junk-mail and is not surprised by wasteful non-academic practices leading to increasingly burdensome and unfair costs for what is supposed to be a valuable social service.</strong> </p>
<p>Haha. Half a climbing wall. True, can’t be done (and thin age of it makes me chuckle)</p>
<p>I’m not sure why a climbing wall is such a big symbol of excessive spending. It may actually be one of the cheaper things that a gym can put in and maintain, compared to other popular items like treadmills, ellipticals, etc… Yes, colleges have had gyms for student use for ages.</p>
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<p>Data’s a lot like baloney–there are many ways you can slice it. I’d say if faculty salaries have increased at about the same rate as the CPI over a 10-year period (just 3% more), while college tuition has increased much faster than the CPI over that same period, it’s a pretty safe bet that faculty salaries aren’t a big driver of tuition increases. </p>
<p>The “37% increase” in faculty salaries you cite amounts to annual increases in nominal salaries ranging from 1.2% to 3.8% per year–hardly the stuff of wild inflationary pressures, even in a period of low- to-moderate inflation. And if you look at just the last 9 years, faculty salary increases have been equal to or less than the CPI increases in 7 of those 9 years–the big outlier being 2007-08 to 2008-09, when the bottom fell out of the economy and drove inflation to virtually zero, after colleges and universities had already set their budgets and payrolls for that period. In short, in the real world occupied by working academics and tuition-paying parents, faculty salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, while tuition increases are vastly outpacing inflation. Of course, you can always select some other period to support a different argument.</p>
<p>Faculty salaries aren’t keeping pace with inflation, they aren’t keeping pace with tuition increases, and more to the point, they represent a declining share of college and university budgets.</p>
<p>The AAUP study you cite also has some other revealing figures. Between 1975 and 2011, full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty declined from about 45% of total instructional staff, to about 25%. Meanwhile, part-time faculty went from less than 25% to more than 40%. </p>
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It’s true that 7 of the last 9 were equal or under, but most of the under years had only a slight difference from inflation, so the overall salary increase over the past 9 years was slightly greater than inflation. I agree that the salary changes are not causing tuition to outpace inflation, but I think there are several notable contributing factors beyond the ones that have been discussed. For example, earlier this month I looked at how tuition + room & board changed at Stanford since 1999 (the period for which CDS reports are available). Stanford’s sticker price increased by 72% during this period, far outpacing the inflation rate of 40%. However, the CDS reported average inflation adjusted tuition + R&B revenue received per student only changed by 0.2% between 1999 and 2013, essentially no change. The sticker price outpaced inflation, but so did the degree of FA given by the university. The cost of the improved FA offset all of the increase in sticker price beyond inflation, leading to no change in inflation adjusted average cost. Stanford is far from the only college that offers more generous FA now than they did 15 years ago.</p>
<p>Is all the FA coming only from endowments and gifts? Or is it the case that, with increased FA offers, the sticker price of tuition for full pay students has gone up because the full pay students are subsidizing the FA students?</p>
<p>A chunk comes from the endowment, no question. It’s been said that full tuition doesn’t cover the actual cost per student, even full pays. Some colleges offer detail in their annual reports or press releases.</p>