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Instructors are not really that large of a budget item at collages. Administrative overhead has continued to grow due to a wide range of factors including such things as the new demand for IT at all schools.

Administrative overhead is growing, but you can't cut there - you need functional infrastructure. So you cut where you can, and that is at the teaching end.

By the way, part of the growing infrastructure is because universities are trying to attract non-traditional students, such as first-generation students, minorities and non-Western students. You can drop a middle-class US guy into a US university, and he will do just fine. But a minority student may need tutoring (because his high school plainly sucked), someone from China will need help with cultural adjustment, and a first-generation student may not even know how to study (his family is of no help). All this is motivated by the need for more bodies paying tuition.

Are you sure that admin overhead couldn't be cut? Does the president really need to make 7 figures?

University presidents are fundraisers and marketeers. I suspect the talent pool is small, there are not that many people with good connections to donors and proven ability to attract outside money. And the need for external funds is rising.

Here is a particularly lurid example, but the idea is the same everywhere: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/nyregion/a-quick-descent-f...

Wow...reading that story and seeing that picture, I think I might have gambled on the same table as her on blackjack once about 6-7 years ago, either in Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods (I forget). That is chilling.

> Administrative overhead is growing, but you can't cut there - you need functional infrastructure.

A college needs gardeners, programmers, network admins and secretaries; does it need Vice Presidents of Student Diversity and football coaches?

Football coaches pay for themselves.

As for vice presidents of student diversity, I think they get a bad rap. As college expands to include more than just the children of the rich, you need additional support infrastructure for students: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gr...

Or perhaps colleges simply need to stop admitting students without adequate preparation in the name of "diversity". I'm also uncertain what "diversity" has to do with "children of the rich". Maybe you could explain?

According to the article you link to, the "diverse" students have SAT scores 200 pts lower than average and perform even worse than that SAT gap would predict. It seems a bit unfair to charge students who study for exams extra money simply to pay for extra help to those who don't (e.g., "Vanessa" in the article you link to).

Here is the relevant statistic:

> If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

We're talking about students with similar SAT scores displaying dramatically different graduation outcomes based on parental income. The function of college, especially state colleges, isn't to reward people for being on the ball earlier in life, especially considering how much that has to do with parental education and income. It's to educate the populace, and enable upward mobility within society. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish to not spend money helping lower-income students graduate at the same rate as higher-income students with similar SAT scores. Every low-income student with above-average SAT scores that doesn't graduate college is a huge missed opportunity for the state to put a capable and educated person into the workforce.

The article suggests later on that Vanessa is atypical: To get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records...almost all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.

A 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections (one of them being the "we won't call it remedial" section) is also discussed.

Also, take a look at why Vanessa needed help, at least as per the article's implication: "She failed her first test in statistics...At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying."

You also seem to believe that putting heroic efforts into teaching students thing will somehow help them become a capable worker. That might be true for a few rote fields - perhaps Vanessa's nursing career might be one of them [1]. But except for fields where college is mere rote training in procedures, that's not actually producing capable workers. When I hire, giving me a person who can only learn new things if I invest heroic effort and personal attention is useless - I need my employees to figure things out on their own.

[1] I know little about nursing - from the outside it appears fairly rote, but I'm open to being corrected on this

It's useful to quote the part that comes after that:

> Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.

Individualized help took these students who were scoring 200 points below the rest of the students, and got them to the point where they were scoring comparably to everyone else on exams and graduating at above the average graduation rate. That's a huge success from the state's perspective.

So what if these students came in under-prepared? These kids are often first-generation college students, whose parents have no experience with the whole process and don't inculcate the right values in their kids. The kids from more privileged backgrounds, even ones who aren't any smarter (going by SAT scores), have a leg-up going in due to factors that are mostly in their favor as a result of the parental lottery. Why should that entitle them to a perpetual leg-up?

Near as I can tell, he's devoting more than 10x the resources to this class. Instead of 1 lecturer + 500 students, it's 1 lecturer + 50. Plus 2 hours of extra instruction, so maybe it's 16x resources (assuming chem is normally 3 hours of instruction/week, (5/3)x10 ~ 16). Plus advisers tracking these students, peer mentors, etc.

It's hardly clear that graduating additional marginal students is worth 16x what graduating a normal student is worth. Can you explain why you believe it is?

Lets put the numbers into perspective. Instead of teaching 1 remedial 50 person class, this guy could teach a second 500 person class. 450 additional students could be educated at UT. Why is Vanessa worth more than 10 better prepared students?

It's a calculated expenditure with the expectation of creating future benefits, not just for UT, but for society in general. They're investing in a high-growth segment of the market. We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a first-generation student. Furthermore, by graduating a first-generation student, it's possible that a new college-going tradition is started in their existing family or any subsequent families they interact with.

If it's a calculated expenditure, what's the calculation? Something concrete please, not platitudes.

We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a first-generation student.

This means we get the most bang for our buck if we focus on the good students, and only consider devoting resources to the bad ones after we exhaust the supply of good ones.

That seems to contradict your idea of a "calculated expenditure".

football programs only pay for themselves at a small number of universities, almost all subsidize them.

http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar... http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/ncaa...

Your comment is about football but your links discuss subsidies on entire athletic programs. It is well known that more popular sports offset expenses for less popular ones (especially those satisfying title IX) and many times the schools have to subsidize even further. I think you are confusing the expense/revenue ratio of college football with college athletic programs as a whole.

You can cut a lot of fat from University administrative budgets. Just as an example outsource email. There are plenty of reasons this does not happen, but mostly it's a question of politics not cost savings.

A lot of universities already do outsource email. Some University of California campuses use Google, for example. The big growth in administrative expense isn't really the IT department, though, but more on the high end, the vast array of Deans and Associate Deans and Office of the Provost, with their staff and consultants and travel and such.

> you need functional infrastructure. So you cut where you can, and that is at the teaching end.

what is the point of the infrastructure if there is no one to teach?

The obvious solution here is to separate education from credentialing. Have the government create uniform credentialing standards and allow anyone to attempt to achieve them for a small fee - e.g., $250 to take the exam for "US Govt. English B.A.".

Quality of instruction drops...

How do you know this?

What does suffer is the idea of a university.

Why should anyone (besides people looking to become non-adjunct professors) care?

There are already accreditation groups such as ABET that review and score programs - http://www.abet.org/about-abet/ There's absolutely no reason to get the government into a system that already works.

The government is already involved in determining which groups are allowed to accredit colleges. Those accreditation groups tend to require things that prevent a college from simply selling the credential without the education.

The fact that the system already "works" does not mean it cannot be improved.

Also, if you want to argue that credentials and education should NOT be separated, should we merge them in cases where they are currently separated? E.g., should stock brokers be required to go to Series 7 school before taking the Series 7 exam? If not, why not?

I agree. Although ABET does not score, you are either accredited or not.

>Salaries are the biggest expense at a university, you can easily cut those by shifting to more adjuncts. With the shape the academic labour market is in, that is easily done. Quality of instruction drops, but the students don't mind, they are there for credentials, not for an education. (Emphasis not in original)

Citation needed. I can see why academics would like me to believe that but whether it's true or not is an empirical question, not one that's immediately obvious on its face.

I'm not sure hiring more adjuncts would hurt the quality of (undergraduate) teaching. In my own experience adjuncts were far more dedicated to teaching than tenured professors who focus on their research without caring how low their teaching ratings sink.

This may be superficially true, but the long-term health of the institution and the educational system are not served. Hiring underpaid adjuncts as teaching labor may allow for some good classes--either through the adjuncts' idealism or their hunger to keep their job--but it's only a sort of local maximum. Those good adjuncts came up through a system which valued teaching & knowledge. It's not clear the succeeding adjunct-taught generations will maintain this faith in their fields.

See the case study of Schlitz in the 70s (e.g. http://www.beerbusinessunplugged.com/?p=130 for a short version): desperate businesspeople go for short term gains by cannibalizing their traditional ways of making things.