Just to point out what may not be so obvious... a lot of the administrative and non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "management".
For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically... it is the department for all of the IT people at the University. It is enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that is just one of the operations level bureaucracies that the University needs. There is Facilities. There is Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.
These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. Be that as it may, honest people CAN debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the cost rises being discussed.
In my day, campus police were unarmed and called on actual police to work actual crimes, versus random disorder that did not rise to the level of crime.
Are today's college students such thugs that we need fully equipped police departments on campuses? Police departments are usually the second most expensive part of a municipal budget. How many of the "neccessary" bureaucracies did we do without a generation ago?
Universities below the elite level are headed for a massive crash. They better start the rethink soon.
As far as I know, most state universities have real police departments. The officers are effectively state police officers. I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but it is at least 20 or so years, if not quite a bit more.
Safety is a big issue, especially for parents (who pay many of the bills), so universities view law enforcement and safety spending as a competitive advantage.
It is also the case that many universities are located in small, rural communities that might not have the police resources to handle the campus population (for instance, I went to a school that had about as many students as there were non-student residents of the town).
I worked at DoIT before graduating and moving out to the Bay Area. And your characterization regarding its bureaucracy and efficiency are pretty spot on.
I worked at another Big Ten IT division. The amount of productive work per salary dollar would shock anyone in the start-up or corporate sector. Staff would roll in from 9:00 to 10:00AM, surf the web or fool around with some toys for a couple of hours, take a 90 minute lunch, go to a few meetings, and be out the door at 4:30 or 5:00PM. A lot of these people making 6 figures or close to it in a town where that is a VERY good salary. On top of that, 6 weeks of PTO and pretty generous benefits.
Every few years there would be a reorganization to create a bunch of new job titles and new useless layers of bureaucracy, since that's the only way to give people more than a cost-of-living raise.
You could fire half of them, hold the other half accountable to a reasonable level of productivity, and notice no difference. There might be a net gain.
In all of Europe 4 weeks of paid holidays and a regular 8-hour workday are the norm. And university is free or very affordable. What I'm saying is that poor working conditions and crippling student debt is a policy choice.
I agree, except that people in Europe aren't paid for their holidays, but for their work. Companies are simply mandated to give you 4 weeks+ off per year - that money is of course deducted from what they would pay you otherwise.
Not saying that is a bad thing; actually, it probably improves overall productivity vs the US model. But it's not a free lunch, and it's not the employer's charity - it's the money people actually worked for, equally distributed over working days and holi-days.
I don't know where you got this idea, but it is just wrong. Of course, employers are free to do whatever back of the envelope calculation they want to decide your salary, but the law in France, the UK, and most other countries is about "paid leave" and that's exactly how it works.
Yes, that's the part you SEE. But I'm pretty sure your boss doesn't pay your "paid vacation" out of his own money - it's part of the calculation of the total package they have to pay you (including your desk, the money they might have to pay to headhunters to acquire you, ...), mandatory state "insurances" or fees.
They only pay the value of the package - you can calculate your hourly rate on total yearly pay / yearly hours worked, or are free to imagine you get paid total yearly pay / total hours of the year, and then boom, you're also paid for the vacations, for weekends, for the nights and so on. But in fact you're only paid because your boss knows what value you provide and how many hours you'll be there that year.
I worked in the IT department of a college while I was a student and this matches my experience of the full time staff. They couldn't even be terminated because they were unionized employees. I recall one terrible employee in particular who just sat at his desk and watched Star Trek Next Gen episodes all day, working his way through the series. What a waste of money.
The student employees weren't much better, because it wasn't ever established what their behavior should be. I remember a lot of time spent torrenting, watching movies, and playing games -- occasionally breaking to reimage a computer.
It's funny that DoIT comes up because I happen to work in the same building. I generally leave around 5:00 and without fail when I open my office door the lights are out because people rolled out so long ago that the system shut them off due to lack of activity. Either everyone gets to work at about 7:30am or nobody has ever worked an eight hour day this year.
I took a look at CMU's financials and it definitely looks like the money is going towards salaries. They don't offer a breakdown between the different kinds of salaries, naturally. Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information?
A recent study by two professors of economics attempts to arrive at the ideal ratio of tenured and tenure-track faculty to administrators in order to operate effectively. Analyzing data from 137 public universities from 1987 through 2008, they found that on average the ratio was two administrators to one full-time faculty member when the most cost-effective ratio is one administrator for every three full-time faculty members. They found that an imbalance between administrators and faculty where administrators outnumber faculty is what accounts for the rise in costs. Administrators and non-instructional staff have continued to rise despite less state funding. Furthermore, more part-time faculty are being hired at very low wages to offset the costs of administrators whose salaries tend to be much higher than faculty. Critics argue that the ratio should not be applied universally, as different types of universities have different needs when it comes to instructional vs. supervisory staff. But many agree that the goal of higher education is to focus on those who are in the classroom and not those pursuing an agenda of business development.
Here are numbers for Duke and Barnard. I have no idea if they are representative, but they have respectively 10% and 5% of their total budget going to administration. The Barnard link has quite a depth of information.
That's not really true. Duke includes finical aid as a cost but that's not actual spending. So from the chart, 10/.76 = ~13% is administrative costs.
Though the Text says out of 90k in spending $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries which puts just salary's for administration at 15.5 not including their share of the building etc.
So, a reasonable estimate ~25-40% of each dollar actually spent goes to administration depending on where you draw the line. AKA is a dean Administration or Faculty.
PS: Not that facility get to actually spend anywhere close to 100% of there time on teaching.
Barnard is a special case for the following reasons:
0) It is one of Columbia University's affiliated undergraduate schools, so facilities/athletics/administration/some budgets are tightly coupled to the mothership, which has approximately more money than god and subsidizes many things
1) It is in NYC, so the cost structure is not representative of the rest of America
2)) It is a Women's college, which probably changes some stuff (though I don't know what)
Points 0 and 1 are (mostly) correct, though I don't think point 2 really has any appreciable impact on the costs.
To clarify one thing: Columbia doesn't exactly "subsidize" Barnard - in fact, Barnard maintains its own independent endowment and board of trustees. Columbia and Barnard "partner" together to provide a number of joint services (for example, Columbia students majoring in theater take their classes at Barnard, and vice versa for some other departments, but many departments exist independently at each school). Barnard retains its own independent administration for most positions; there is very little sharing of administrative roles.
Student organizations are joint-funded through student fees, and almost all are open to both Columbia and Barnard students. In fact, there was some debate a few years back about the Barnard group overseeing student organizations not contributing its fair share towards Greek life[0], which was soon rectified. It is important that fund transfers between (e.g) Columbia College and Barnard are generally not considered internal transfers the way (e.g.) Columbia College and SEAS (the engineering school) would be.
This is not unlike the situation at certain other schools like Harvard and MIT, which sometimes allow cross-enrollment, or other schools which pool resources for student activities. The main difference is that Barnard professors are awarded tenure from Columbia University, not from Barnard (which cannot grant tenure independently).
That said, I agree that Barnard's expenses are not indicative, but that's more because they share many resources with another school (Columbia) and reap efficiencies that way, not because Columbia "subsidizes" their costs. Columbia saves a lot of money from these partnerships as well, and I doubt that they would keep the current setup if they didn't feel that they benefited from it financially as well.
>Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information?
All government employee salaries in the state of Texas are public info [0], I used to check out how much my professors made. And how much my dad made. You can see salaries by employer as well. I'm not sure where to find historical salary data but it has to exist somewhere.
And don't forget sports teams. Almost all football programs, for instance, actually cost the university more money than they bring in. This includes revenue from sports memorabilia. Source: friend worked in athletics at my uni and they were extremely proud when they started breaking even.
The problem is simple. Teachers teach because they want to teach, administrators "administrate" for the money. And that's where it goes.
The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.
> because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat.
Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity.
That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.
Wow. HN really IS the reddit of a few years ago... You can have your opinion, but if you can't behave in public, please bury your ad-hominem s___ in someone else's backyard.
Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.
I don't really get what you are saying. The book I mentioned has some interesting arguments and anecdotes.
One is also in Predictably Irrational: in short parents were always late picking up the kids from day care. The day care decided to issue a fine for late parents. The unintended consequences of this were that the parents were way more late on average because they felt they were paying for it. It switched the system from one based on social norms to market norms.
At ball games everyone used to be forced into the same shitty seats. Now the well to do get a pass and have luxury seats with better food and views. Instead of fostering community it further alienates the rich and the poor. This leads to a filter bubble of sorts that prevents both groups from empathizing with each other.
Same with courts and the legal system, fasttrak lanes, free shows put on that have secondary markets.
I didn't get that you were talking about a book, sorry.
If you say that basing all interactions around money or segregating people into different groups that get different service can be a bad idea, I agree.
>Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them.
No, they're the sum of the constitutive people, minus all the parts that don't deal with property, trade, contracts, and debt, plus distortions added by institutional arrangements.
I'd say if there is a distortion or limiting arrangement, it's not a free market, and thus its participants behave differently, because they can't freely take their decisions.
If people take their decisions freely, quite often money is not the top priority, but more traditional - and human - values may be.
>I'd say if there is a distortion or limiting arrangement, it's not a free market,
Then the term "free market" is an oxymoron. By conjuring a market, which deals with money, property, and profit therein, you have already made it unfree.
And why is that? If you make a profit, you sell something for more than the sum of its parts. You add value and get something in return. Property is just stuff you kept after an exchange. Money is a medium of exchange. Where is the unfree part?
IRL, there are lots of problems (in general), most of them not from markets, but lots also because people make bad decisions in markets. I think those are communication problems, though - people not agreeing on values. So many people scream "market failure", but nobody ever screams "voter/election failure", when people make bad decisions there that cause problems.
I would say the same damn thing regarding the knee-jerk right-wing proprietarianism, except that rich Bay Area techies have had a tendency towards the less-well-considered forms of "wannabe ubermensch" libertarianism for a long time now.
If you pointed out that leftists cluster on Reddit you <i>wouldn't even be correct</i>, as Reddit was pretty unambiguously rooting for Ron Paul in the past couple of elections.
I was talking about the tone, which sounded like a personal attack to me. HN used to have a more civil conversational tone.
Reddit always seemed divided to me, lots of leftists and lots of libertarians. Maybe the Paulians were noisier and more visible. HN seems a bit more libertarian to me, maybe because people here have higher incomes.
The tone was, I admit it, meant to be harsh. The reason for that is precisely because the high-income techno-libertarians feel entitled to be blithe about it. There's something irritatingly privileged about ideologies with lots of money behind them, that by some wondrous magic they are allowed to utter assertions where others (with less money them) are required to set out extensive proofs, and the most unpopular (who have basically no money) are required to display conclusive empirical evidence.
> The tone was, I admit it, meant to be harsh. The reason for that is precisely because the high-income techno-libertarians feel entitled to be blithe about it.
Please don't. Being harsh is not a good way to argue against blithe nonsense. It's a way to corrode the discourse and ruin the community [1]. If you're patient and reasonable, there's at least a small chance that you'll evoke that quality in others. If you're harsh, the chance of provoking the same and worse is high.
1. That particular comment was actually relatively mild. This is a personal appeal to drop the harsh tone on HN in general.
This is anecdotal only. I used to be a full-time college instructor, and I still teach there occasionally part-time and interact with my former colleagues. Since I've left, the college has added a number of full-time staff to media and eLearning (e.g. maintain the LMS, setup video recording and conferencing systems, etc) and, for every dean, there is now an assistant dean to help with administrative workload.
Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.
Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.
Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what will happen...or how close we are to that point.
So we could have a startup that administers 3 day quals and hands out a degree based on passing our rigorous tests? Like passing the bar but from a private firm giving a certification, the education is on your own.
There's a bunch of testing centers owned by companies like Sylvan or Prometric and used for professional certification courses by companies like Microsoft and Oracle.
It's looking like the kind of pilot program we need to get more enterprising self-taught people into dev interviews: backed by big companies to instill faith in the smaller companies, teaching new/relevant skills, capstone project to show off and discuss in an interview.
It does cost though ($200/month), which can be significant out-of-pocket if you're in a low-paying job, and you may not need whatever service that $200 buys you. It's unclear what that goes to, but I'm assuming it's to the coaches.
Wrap a tutor contact service - sort of Uber for teaching - so that when candidates need a bit of one to one or to have a small group seminar about an especially tricky part of a given online course they can.
You then have something close to the original Universities around 1100 ad or so!
Coursera + the CLEP exams = real, tested learning, and college credit on the cheap. (Not that you can get a full degree just on the basis of CLEP tests, unfortunately...)
On their other hand it is bizarre to come into a thread about how teachers aren't getting paid despite school costs rising and present as an alternative paying teachers even less.
On the gripping hand I'm not entirely sure what you think the welfare theorems have to do with this but its worth remember that they do not and quite likely cannot actually describe reality.
The article wasn't just about the poor teachers. It also complained that students aren't getting value for their money.
But my main point is this: given that good competition exists, if colleges don't fix this quality issue, enrollment will drop and the situation for their teachers will keep getting worse.
(But professors at Coursera could get paid well for their efforts, if Coursera ends up with an effective business model.)
I think another problem (though probably minor compared to the bloated bureaucracies everyone else is mentioning) is that the teaching quality doesn't matter as much to students these days.
This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West:
I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems to be a big factor in a student's choice of a school today. Admittedly, this is mostly based on anecdote and stereotypes (I think there's a reason why "college life" is commonly associated with parties and frats). I won't say that the social aspect of education is unimportant, but it seems that rather than making the education itself more "fun", universities in the last few decades have gradually increased funding for recreational buildings, big events, frats, and sports [1], etc. Of course, I don't know how significant these costs actually are, and I'm happy to be convinced by some budgetary data if this is actually a non-issue.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y.
tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.
> Wealth does not pass three generations.
- Chinese proverb
Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party.
〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates
[I've revised this comment several times now, but I don't actually know where we disagree. I'm just leaving it as is for now.]
> Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises.
I haven't read Clark's book personally. But a passage via SSC [1] (a link which I cited for you to follow and actually read):
> efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility
which is, uh, sort of better relates to the toppish-level discussion.
SSC cited how Georgia raffled off the land they stole from the Cherokee. The white lotto-winning descendants weren't appreciably better off. This exemplifies how dynastic wealth can diminish because of a lack of some intangible value (work ethic? genes?), which incidentally Gen Y may not have inherited from Gen X and the Baby Boomers. I.e. I see no issues with my theory so far.
Also your Socrates quote is off point. The Greeks had this notion that civilization had descended from a Golden Age to a Silver Age, and from there a Bronze Age. They also believed civilization would continue to decline linearly. This is obviously silly since the Western World's economy has appreciated a wazzilion fold since the Renaissance. But the point of the Chinese Proverb was more consistent with the "Mandate of Heaven/Dynastic Cycle" meme. I.e. dynastic wealth ebbs and flows like a business cycle. This idea is incompatible with neither dynastic long-term growth nor societal long-term growth.
I would say education quality dosn't matter because, in my experience, it's universally bad. Why should you care if your useless years spent buying an accreditation is 98% useless or 99% useless? You have to self-educate either way.
It's going to pay for things that the state used to pay for.
The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.
To the taxpayers. The share of state and federal funding (both direct and through grants) has been declining steadily over the last twenty years. Your student loan debt may be crippling but aren't you glad that you get to pay lower taxes?
In America, an institution of higher learning is not respected until they have a few sports teams with coaches, athletic directors, supporting staff, facilities staff and subsidies in the form of athletic scholarships.
Generally, the cost of college tracks inflation. It's where the funding that is changing that makes it appear to increase. 40 years ago state funds paid for most state college costs (hence the name, "state" college"). Now, most states are broke and rapidly withdrawing most of the funding support from their universities, shifting costs to the students.
Administrative staff costs are rising as well, but the tenure track professors are expected to do less and less administrative work, theoretically allowing them to teach more classes. I don't know how much this works though.
People do not get paid based on how much money the business makes. On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add.
Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. I will not be surprised that a lot of college teachers teaching skills of no use are finding it hard to make enough money.
> On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add.
Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create.
> Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes.
You seem to be awfully certain of that. Unless you meant to assume what you set out to prove (French lecturer is poorly paid => there isn't demand => poor pay is justified) I don't understand your argument. Clearly there is demand: sum up the price paid for the French credit by all the students in the class. There's just a middle man that skims a tremendous amount from the tuition paid for those credit hours before the money reaches the teacher / support staff.
> Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create.
That is rubbish, mostly the left liberal hippy logic. If a person is valuable there is always another competitor who will hire him for a higher pay to get the competitive advantage.
Well, there is a huge surplus of PhD's in every field, and there is less industry demand for certain fields (French Lit, for example). This seems like a classic situation where certification in a professional association should be required to teach college, so there can be better collective bargaining at a national scale.
I doubt executive salaries make up a significant portion of any school's budget. Overpaid non-executive administrators are a much larger cost in aggregate, because there are so many of them.
"compensation of a single person like Zimmer now approaches the reported inflation-adjusted $3 million annual operating deficit that ended a community resource benefiting both medical students and trauma patients."
UChicago spent $446M on academic salaries, $889M on staff salaries and $338M on benefits (not broken out into academic vs non-academic) in the the 2011-2012 fiscal year that Zimmer's compensation temporarily spiked to $3M. It is safe to say that over $1B was spent on non-academic salary and benefits (administration), which dwarfs both Zimmer's compensation and the $3M operating deficit.
Research is typically a profit center for the university. The standard cut (known as "overhead" in the biz) is 30% of research grants. Capital equipment (typically defined as stuff costing more than X dollars) is taxed at a lower rate (usually 10%). Research assistantships are also charged 30%. Also, any modification to lab facilities (electrical or carpentry for example) is usually required to be performed by university staff at a cost (to the grant) of around 2 to 3 times union rates.
In the private university I work for (in research) the University keeps all patent revenue, keeps a portion of all grants, and requires the lab to pay for space- I was really surprised to find out how much went towards that. There's also a lot of really annoying charges, like costing $180 to reactivate ethernet jacks that they deactivate when a device hasn't been plugged into a port for three months.
For everyone else... I'm pretty sure sports COSTS money.
That said... keeping a few young ladies running track can't possibly be the cause of the imbalance people are talking about. I'm pretty sure the money is sucked up by administrative and non instructional staff. But without the spreadsheets it is difficult to say anything with certainty.
Not usually. Most colleges don't have popular enough teams to turn a profit. And at the ones that do most of the profit ends up being spent on the sports teams (popular teams need big, modern, expensive stadiums). Almost no money flows from sports to education. At best there's an argument that sports helps drive enrollment and helps drive alumni donations. Though even then because of the cost of most sports programs it's questionable whether or not they break even on average.
