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Free association test: Soaring costs and unnecessary expenditures. What?
Your answer was probably health care. But before health care reform became a front-and-center issue, the immediate response might have been higher education.
So it is with deep horror that I read in today’s New York Times about the reason college tuitions seem to keep going up. Not because colleges are hiring more professors, or putting in fancier computer labs. Because they are vying to have the best gyms, the plushest club houses, the nicest accoutrements. And, of course, they are hiring a lot more administrators to keep track of the money they are wasting — oh, sorry, I meant spending, Freud grabbed my fingers.
The basic story wasn’t about that, of course. It was about the ever-increasing gap between what elite colleges like Harvard spend per student, and what state and community colleges spend per student. Specifically:
Community colleges, which enroll about a third of students, spend close to $10,000 per student per year, Ms. Wellman said, while private research institutions, which enroll far fewer students, spend an average of $35,000 a year for each one.
Tuition, on average, increased more rapidly over the decade at public institutions than it did at private ones. Average tuition rose 45 percent at public research universities and 36 percent at community colleges from 1998 to 2008, compared with about 21 percent at private research universities.
Percentages, of course, are misleading — if tuition goes up $5,000, it’s going to be a much smaller percentage increase at a university that was already charging $50,000 than one that charged $10,000. And hopefully (an unrealistic hope, probably, but work with me here) scholarships and loans are helping middle and working class students get by.
But here’s the part that really got me:
On average, spending on instruction increased 22 percent over the decade at private research universities, about the same as tuition, but 36 percent for student services and 36 percent for institutional support, a category that includes general administration, legal services and public relations, the study said.
At public research universities, spending for student services rose 20 percent over the decade, compared with 10 percent for instruction.
Even at community colleges, with their far smaller budgets, spending on students services increased 9.5 percent, compared with 3.4 percent for instruction.
Look, I’m not a total curmudgeon. Of course colleges should have sports programs and student lounges and all kinds of extra-curricular things that make college a socially rounding experience (and let’s face it, a blast).
But skyrocketing tuition has been bankrupting people. Student loans hang over people’s heads for decades — and in an economy where graduates outnumber career-track jobs by a distressing number, paying them off becomes ever more problematic. And private college endowments have been battered by the stock market, while public college budgets have been hit hard by government’s fiscal woes. So there’s less money to go around for everything.
You can’t make do with an outdated textbook. But an old student union building, or a shopworn football field? C’mon!
We keep bemoaning the fact that American students so often seem to underperform their foreign peers in math and hard sciences — something that certainly does not bode well for future innovation. Isn’t this where we should be putting our money?
One professor put it beautifully:
“This is the country-clubization of the American university,” said Richard K. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education. “A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities.”
So, of course, it follows as the night the day that public relations (and probably advertising) expenditures are going up, too. The report documents that fact. Makes sense — how can you use recreational amentities to woo students if you don’t brag about having them>
So let’s recap here. Colleges across the board are spending fortunes to promote their reputations, to spiff up their campuses, to otherwise woo students. But to do so, they are sending tuitions skyrocketing, so fewer and fewer students can afford to come, meaning that competition for the affluent students ratchets up even more. Which means even more attention must be paid to tennis courts and lounges and…
Talk about a vicious circle.
new bottom line 