Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/our-universities-outrageous-reality/

by casus • 11 years ago

11 2 11 years ago

cafard• 11 years ago

"2010, private nonprofit universities, whose students tend to be relatively affluent, spent on average nearly $50,000 per student—with the wealthiest colleges spending nearly double that amount. At public four-year institutions expenditure per student was $36,000, while community colleges, where minority and first-generation students are concentrated and which stress vocational training and offer associate rather than bachelor degrees, could spend just $12,000 per student."

Two questions occur to me: First, how much of the discrepancy between private, non-profit schools and public schools goes into matters related to instruction, namely faculty salaries, labs, libraries, academic support? Second, is the community-college difference adjusted for the largely part-time status of the students?

sageabilly• 11 years ago

I think the key here is this statement from the article: A deeper cause is the dual purpose of universities—to create new knowledge while transmitting what is already known. New fields of inquiry arise (pursued in new departments by new faculty), while old fields are rarely relinquished—at least not at the same pace. Thus costs almost always grow faster than savings.

Community colleges are going to have a narrower scope of subjects that they teach, and those subjects probably aren't going to expand very much (thinking of CC either being pre-university courses which are going to be rather standardized or courses to get an Associate's degree, which are a much smaller subset of degree types than you can get with a Bachelor's.) Add into that the fact that CC's don't have to maintain dorms or cafeterias or common spaces and that they probably have much less real estate and square footage to maintain. And yes, part time students might account for some of that monetary gap, but to me it seems more likely that CC's are much more focused on student needs, in a "OK you're here for 2 years here's exactly what you can take and exactly what we offer and that's it" kind of way, whereas universities are more "Here's your dorm and here's your meal plan and here's your gym pass and here's your 100+ different choices of major and minor and here's the bus schedule to get to East campus and West campus and here's where the four cafeterias are and the six food courts and oh by the way your adviser is in a building 2 miles away and only has office hours every other Tuesday which is when you're taking your underwater basket weaving elective."

Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality

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