For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate?
While none of those reasons are necessarily off the table, consider this article by Tamar Lewin in today’s Times:
Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.
During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.
Support staff! And what kind of work are they doing?
The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors, and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements colleges face.
This explanation seems satisfying (intellectually, at least, if not emotionally). But it’s probably also important to consider how much money colleges have been putting into student amenities as well. When I visited my undergrad alma mater a few years ago, the chancellor pointed out that three buildings had gone up in the past decade or so that were each larger than any existing building on campus. There was a library, a convocation center (a multipurpose arena), and a huge student gym. The gym, he said, was a top priority because parents and prospective students increasingly think of themselves as customers, shopping for the most amenities for the best price, and the colleges that didn’t come to grips with this would soon see their customers going elsewhere.
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I can’t emphasize enough how misleading the “cost of college” is for elite universities, where students rarely actually pay the sticker cost of tuition. More than likely the cost is cut significantly by grants, scholarships (internal and external), and financial aid.
I am a graduate student at an expensive private school. The sticker price is wild, but the President always reminds the students that 51% of tuition returns to the students as financial aid. Insert snappy comment from Joe the Plumber about Barack Obama. It cannot help the price mechanism for allocating goods and services…
I agree with the comments who talk about the availability of money to pay the tuition and the the posters who talked about the need for it. The blog post has confused cause and effect. The effect of more money for college and increased money available for it (via loans) has caused the swelling of admin staff and extraneous buildings. Not vice versa.
Does anyone believe that the enormous bureaucracy of the university can run a gym at a lower cost than the local health club?
In the two years I’ve been at Stanford, the tuition has increased for a lot of programs that are beneficial to students like increasing staff at the Student Health Center. However, I don’t understand how this can’t be covered in the 50 grand students pay or in the huge endowment.
I do have a question on this issue. Why isn’t tuition tax-deductible? After all, most if not all colleges are non-profit organizations and it provides a great benefit for millions of American families paying so much money for the betterment of their children. From an economic perspective, there has to be tons of dead weight loss in paying those taxes to the government where it goes into obscure programs rather than directly educating students.
Just like government subsidies for healthcare, ethanol, sugar, and even government jobs (which have gone from half private sector wages to double), government subsidies in education drive hyperinflation.
George Stigler was right.
And yet my son takes classes from TAs who cannot speak intelligible English.
They are required to teach. I bet if they didn’t have to, they wouldn’t. They university exploits grad students because it can. As a practical matter, the university can’t be blamed if it can’t find enough Americans interested in doing a post-graduate degree. It already pays their living expenses and tuition. What more do you want? Well it appears most grads seem to want that high paying Wall St. job as a parasite on society rather than a scientist or engineer working for our collective betterment. Until we find students with the patience for scholarship, you are going to have to put up with foreigners leading the classroom.
I’d like to see a study on whether college is even a worthwhile investment anymore.
For elite students, there is certainly a value to investing in a college education, but what about the marginal student? Wouldn’t it be better for many potential students to spend the four years earning income and learning a skilled trade rather then spending four years building up $100K in debt in pursuit of a degree of dubious productive value (pretty much any liberal arts degree).
Every time I meet a waitress or retail store manager with a college degree, I have to think that time and money was wasted for both themselves and society.