Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304017404575165730979629178.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTThirdBucket

by grellas • 16 years ago

63 50 16 years ago

online.wsj.com

Forgive me for my bitter cynicism (or don't), but I couldn't help but feel that the thesis of this article boiled down to the following quote: "My alma mater, Oberlin College, provides financial aid for as many as 70% of its students."

I have a sneaking suspicion that the author wrote this entire article to assert that Oberlin is a "top college." (I am agnostic / do not care at all on this matter.)

He does claim to answer the question of what your tuition money is really spent on: (a) he notes that salaries for tenured professors has increased, and (b) he addresses the fact that colleges are building fancy new dorms/athletic facilities/etc to increase student demand. Without evidence, asserts that your tuition pays for these. Without evidence, I would be inclined to believe that these are more likely to be funded by named endowments from private donors. Again, I feel that this thesis is merely ostensible, to justify his assertions about his alma mater.

BigZaphod• 16 years ago

And the reason is.... drumroll Supply and demand! Wow. Insightful.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

Tempered with a big fat dose of price discrimination (oh, wait, I meant "financial aid").

jimbokun• 16 years ago

Or you could call it "price segmentation" like Joel does:

"All from the power of segmentation: separating your customers into different groups according to how much they are willing to pay, and extracting the maximal consumer surplus from each customer."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

barnaby• 16 years ago

"Given the nonprofit, tax-exempt status of colleges and universities, and the powerlessness of the market to control higher-education costs due to limited supply"..

Sounds like sub-optimal supply/demand to me. If we dropped the charade that universities are anything other than for-profit corporations then we might get more supply and/or less demand. If there were more market _competition_ then I suspect we'd see prices drop significantly.

albertsun• 16 years ago

Why do you think that's a charade?

wallflower• 16 years ago

> If we dropped the charade that universities are anything other than for-profit corporations

Is Harvard really a big hedge fund? However, even if they were a Corporation, they might still dodge corporate taxes.

http://www.theamericanscene.com/2008/05/12/is-harvard-just-a...

roc• 16 years ago

"Supply and demand" doesn't explain anything until you recognize that what universities sell, is prestige.

That's the key point of the article.

nazgulnarsil3• 16 years ago

I'd generalize this further: economics doesn't explain anything until you realize that money is only one sort of accounting of wealth and status transfer.

kokofoo• 16 years ago

I can see the opposite side too. Prestige isn't worth much if nobody willing to pay for it. But the fact is there are people willing to pay for it. EDIT: I guess that's what you're saying as well.

bradbeattie• 16 years ago

I won't deny that prestige is part of the package, but I feel I got my money's worth out of the education portion. YMMV.

dantheman• 16 years ago

Universities need to be conservative and guard their wealth. They outlast countries. It's important they be stable, many schools aim for cheap and fast which is fine but at the first bump in the road they hit serious problems.

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

Why do they need to outlast countries? At that point the only relationship between University("today") and University("100 years ago") is the bricks in the building. None of the professors or students that made a university whatever it was 100 years ago remains; "greatness" is then a happy coincidence.

Why not have throw-away universities?

lincolnq• 16 years ago

Because prestige is what they are selling, and prestige takes lots of time to produce. The greater the prestige, the more good professors want to teach and do research there, and the more good students want to learn there. This does influence the next generation, and so on. If the quality of people stays consistently high, the prestige remains.

pw0ncakes6• 16 years ago

But senior, tenured faculty at elite schools are firmly entrenched in the well-compensated professional class (top salaries at elite schools often exceed $150,000; and for scholars in economics, business and law schools, earnings can be substantially in excess of that) with superior benefits, such as university-subsided housing, lifetime heath care and seven-figure retirement accounts. Once tenure has been achieved, generally after less than ten years of work, top college teachers face no professional risk and, by and large, teach three or fewer courses a semester.

3 courses per semester is a lot of work if you're doing it right, especially when you consider the amount of time research can take. 8-10 hours per week is a good estimate of the amount of time each class takes.

Also, very few professors make $150k-- those are the stars-- and they tend to be in their late 30s if not 40s. Academic pay is 1/5 to 1/10 of what it is in other industries (and yes, it's harder to become a tenured professor than to make $1 million/year on Wall Street).

American tuition is ridiculous, but overcompensation of teaching staff is not the problem. With tuition at $40,000/year for 10 classes, that's $4000 per class. If average class size is 25, that's $100k for 150 hours of the professor's work ($667/hour). So a professor is bringing in $500+k through teaching alone. For that professor to be making $65k (more realistic than the $150k figure) is not overcompensation.

tokenadult5• 16 years ago

Your source to show the accuracy of any of these estimates is?

sigstoat2• 16 years ago

which estimates are you contesting? as someone involved tangentially in academia, none of these even raise an eye brow. you might as well be asking for sources that the sun will rise tomorrow.

if you really want hard numbers, pick your favorite public university. poke around. their faculty salaries will be public record. also, the student feedback on faculty will be public record. you should be able to figure out the average number of courses taught, and the average salary in about 10 minutes after you find the relevant excel spreadsheets.

a 3 credit hour course will involve at least 3 hours of work per week (you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in). a minimum of 1 office hour per week. you've got to come up with homeworks, and grade them. even if you look at 25 students' homework for only 1 minute each, that'll take about half an hour. so it takes 4.5 hours each just to do the bare minimum possible work for a class.

google for "average college tuition" to cover that part.

what's left?

glen2• 16 years ago

How long will it be until recommendations from trusted others and work examples are accepted as better predictors of competency and success over degrees from elite schools?

I love that some fields have already overcome this bias. I'm also glad that our globalized world is quickly making this more and more of a reality.

marciovm1232• 16 years ago

Exactly...my startup has some funding from a great seed program to work on this. Any suggestions on what a great social recruiting web app would look like?

cj• 16 years ago

http://www.groupereye.com/

orborde• 16 years ago

This article reminds me once again why I am determined never to donate any money to the school I went to.

blahedo• 16 years ago

Even if these things are mostly "obvious", it's good to hear them said and it's good that it's in something other than, say, the Chronicle of Higher Ed. But he draws some odd conclusions from his supply-and-demand argument. People grumble about the high cost as if it's greedy, overpaid professors (sometimes explicitly blaming tenure), but many if not most could make a lot more money elsewhere. I hold a PhD in computer science, have been teaching computer science at a four-year college (non-US read: "small undergraduate university") for 7 years, and my salary is $52,000 a year. I don't need to tell anyone here that I could make a lot more than that working in industry.

It's plenty to live by and I have no complaints, because I'm certainly not in it for the money; I'm stating an actual number because I want to be quite clear that tuition rates that have gone up faster than inflation for most of my lifetime are not due to professorial salaries. In fact, it's hard to get a clear answer on what they are going to, although my money's on ballooning administrations that perform tasks once performed by members of the faculty but are much better-paid.

cdr• 16 years ago

One thing a lot of it may go towards is infrastructure and expansion. I know my alma mater has always had to constantly come up with big new construction projects (new stadium, new academic buildings, new apartments, etc) because they needed something to do with all the money they were taking in. The construction seemed very clearly driven by the need to spend money, rather than the tuition being driven by the need for buildings. Providing value to students was definitely not a concern, because whatever tuition is it'll get paid - plenty of applicants were being rejected.

gamble• 16 years ago

This may not apply to private institutions, but public schools are subject to boom-and-bust cycle of generous government funding in economic booms and budget cuts during recessions. It's easy to justify almost any project when you know that leaving money on the table means it may not be there when you do need it.

pw0ncakes6• 16 years ago

On the supposed professor "overcompensation": I know a couple of well-respected professors' kids who had to turn down their first-choice schools because they couldn't afford to go. So even these supposedly overpaid professors can't afford these outlandish tuitions.

At any rate, professor pay has never been going up at 3-5 times the rate of inflation, and the viability of the career track has been crumbling. Overall teaching pay has been going down relative to inflation, and quite possibly in absolute terms.

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

For most universities over the last 20 years, the number of "staff" has doubled or tripled while the number of "faculty" has remained about the same. (source: a tenured professor at a big state university). Whether this is just bloat or not is another question, but does support the argument that most tenured professors are not fat cats raking in cash from exploited college students' families.

korch2• 16 years ago

You can't talk about college costs and not also mention the enormous impact the college sports industry has had on transforming colleges from their academic role in society to that of being prestigious "mini-corporations."

Where is all the money going? Who's the top paid guy at university X? Oh, it's the football coach. Well why does he get to make $3 million a year while we just raised tuition 8% across the board, and cut financial aid by 20%? And that fat new sports arena which the university board of regents approved and just built for $100 million? Well, it doesn't count, because free market capitalism still applies to academic institutions—our true revenue source is selling and catering to sports fans. Professors, students, research, those are of course net losses, we just pay to keep them around in order to justify the existence of the sports team.

In a way, a University's brand, physical grounds, and costumed staff is a Disneyesque facade for the real money maker: football. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much into my Jean Baudrillard...

pw0ncakes6• 16 years ago

Maybe one day, instead of college football being run and supported by universities, people will take courses at football teams.

Speaking of which, I want my CostCo law degree.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

Football coaches are paid well because college football is a net money maker for the university--especially since they don't have to pay the athletes. If you want universities to be even more broke, by all means cut the athletic programs.

korch2• 16 years ago

Is it a good thing that universities, who hold an implicitly benevolent, non-profit societal role, should also have such high profit margins on their "student"-players?

If the football team is bringing in the dough to fund a big chunk of the operating expenses, but aren't being fairly compensated, then the universities are exploiting those students for profit. What I don't see is how universities can use this same logic to justify using their sports teams to fund their academic operations.

This pattern sounds familiar, where else have I seen it, oh yeah: the rich should pay for the poor, because they are lucky enough to have more. (I actually believe this, and I'm just using parallel logic). A few student athletes will win the lottery moving into the pro's, so colleges "tax" athletes by not paying them, and substitute the incentive of "you might be the next Lebron." (Do s/Lebron/Google/ and doesn't it sounds eerily similar to VC startup logic?!) Then the rest of the student body benefits because the football team just paid the salary of the Poetry professor.

It might work this way, but I doubt it, although I'd love to see a study confirming how much money trickles back into colleges from their sports teams. We can just look at the larger macroscopic view for how efficient trickle down economics really is: of all the hundreds of billions given to the rich elites, how much of it trickles down to the poor? I bet the football team is keeping most of its profit, and in fact on average is a net loss to its attached college.

Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry

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