ACTA's Must-Reads
« Higher ed straight talk | Main | Yearning to know that they don't know »
Tuition hike ABCs
One of the points ACTA emphasized in our recent testimony before the Louisiana Postsecondary Education Review Commission was that nationally, increased administrative spending seems to be one cause of skyrocketing college costs. Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute expands on that point in a wonderful new paper entitled "Where Does All That Tuition Go?" While the whole thing is excellent, here is a particularly enjoyable excerpt:
[T]uition, fees, and overall student costs of attending college are increasing far faster than inflation and most people's salaries. In turn, students take out more loans, and many work long hours even while enrolled full time. Further, graduation rates at far too many institutions are mediocre at best, in part because colleges and universities are not engaging in the practices that keep students engaged and enrolled.[14] So who is benefiting from rising tuition?Let us look at an interesting pattern of growth in personnel over the last decade. Figure 1 shows that when it comes time to hire, colleges and universities are stocking up more on executives and administrators than on faculty.[15] This helps explain one of the key findings of the Delta Cost Project's recent report Trends in College Spending....Its recent report found that in recent years, the average college or university has increased its institutional support--which includes general administrative services, executive management, legal and fiscal operations, and public relations--faster than it has increased its instructional expenditures.[17]...
In short, students seem to be a lower priority than administrators when it comes to allocating revenues.[19] This is part of what Jane V. Wellman, director of the Delta Cost Project, calls "the higher education funding disconnect: spending more, getting less."[20]
Even more interesting is the pattern of increases in salaries documented in the Almanac of Higher Education, a compendium of trend data in higher education issued yearly by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Combining salary data from the most recent edition covering the 2008 academic year with earlier data from the 2004 academic year, as reported in the American Association of University Professors's faculty salary survey, we see the tyranny of the alphabet.[21]
Figure 3 shows that if your title leads with a c--as in "chief" of almost anything--you win, with average salary increases of close to 30 percent. For more detail, consider data recently reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education: presidents at research universities had a median income of $627,750, which was an increase of 15.5 percent over the year before.[22]
Not everyone can be a chief of something; some must settle for being a dean. And just as d follows c in the alphabet, if your title starts with a d--as in dean of arts and sciences or dean of education--you lag behind the c's. For the set of deans displayed in figure 3, salary increases were in the 18-25 percent range. And sure enough, if you are an f--as in faculty--you fall behind your more alphabetically privileged colleagues, with salary increases around 15 percent.[23] Moving to the end of the alphabet, if you are an s--as in student--well, you get to pay for these salary increases that exceed inflation. There is one notable exception: professors in two-year colleges found that their salary increases were lower than the growth in the CPI.
Read the whole thing. And if you are a trustee, don't just read: Take a close look at what your institution is spending on administration, and what your students are getting for that money.
Posted by Charles Mitchell on December 22, 2009 at December 22, 2009 12:51 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/711