So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??
Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...
https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...
Duke: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-...
Barnard: https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_boo...
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.
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)
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.
[0] http://columbiaspectator.com/2011/04/26/inter-greek-council-...
Here's a summary of the conclusions
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.
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.
[0] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
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.
[Edited for grammar]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That's because you're thinking like a market rather than a human being.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If people take their decisions freely, quite often money is not the top priority, but more traditional - and human - values may be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.
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.
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.)
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.
Still better than American university prices
You then have something close to the original Universities around 1100 ad or so!
This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788
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.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...
- Chinese proverb
(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.
[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...
[2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html
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.
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
> 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.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-th...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...
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.
"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."
I guess we can argue about the meaning of the word "significant" now.