University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics | Hacker News Reader

University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics

theglobeandmail.com

33 pointsilamont45 comments

This reads like a press release written by York University administrators, or pretty much college administrators everywhere. Some facts that offer a useful corrective:

1. Rising college costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last 2 decades [0]

2. Salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]

3. Most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts who get paid a pittance [2]

So...college is massively more expensive than it's ever been, but full-time professor salaries have not risen significantly and there are actually fewer of them overall. So where has the money gone?

In the US, I don't know that there is a complete answer on that, but there are definitely some suspects:

* offsets to deal with slashed state funding (although federal funding has risen significantly in the same time period)

* university endowments

* university administrators [3]

* building sprees and tons of shiny new facilities

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu...

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-14/bureaucrat...

Thanks for the useful information, but do you have a source for the university endowments claim? Are their schools where tuition funds go towards expanding the endowment? At my alma mater it was the other way around (endowment made billions a year and paid some of that out to operate the school) and I thought it was similar at most schools with sizable endowments.

Mostly anecdotal, which is why I said "suspects". I'd love to see a comprehensive comparison of university endowment growth over the last few decades. I suspect the data's all there, but nobody's pulled it together. I've come across a number of articles discussing large increases in endowment size and a number of universities of late, seems to be a common theme as more and more people are starting to ask why college has become so expensive. For example there was recently a story in the Washington Post about Washington and Lee University which covered how it had gone in the 90s from a school with a relatively paltry endowment to land in the top 30 overall.

These two sources are interesting:

http://www.jbhe.com/features/57_pellgrants.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universiti...

The first source leaves little question that it's happening at top tier universities, but I'm interested in the trend and second- and third- tier schools.

edit: As another commenter points out, most schools aren't sitting on large endowments. There probably isn't a single unified cause to explain rising costs. Endowments are probably part of the story for higher-profile schools, but not so much for others.

I think you're getting a bit mixed up here. For example, I went to Harvard, which has a large endowment which has grown substantially. But the endowment definitely didn't grow by moving tuition money into the endowment (it goes the other way around, with parts of the endowment helping to fund financial aid). Endowments tend to grow through donations and hedge-fund style management.

It may be the case that some universities are pulling less from their endowments to cover certain costs, covering those costs with increased tuition, and leaving the endowment free to grow more quickly, but I'm pretty confident that universities aren't just siphoning money from tuition straight into the endowment.

I think you'd have to show that universities are spending a smaller fraction of the earnings from their endowments, rather than just that the endowments are growing.

I'm not getting mixed up about the direction the money flows; see my quote down-thread: "endowments come from donors by definition"

When asking why is tuition growing, I was saying exactly what you state: that for universities that are focusing on increasing the size of their endowments, something has to cover the costs that would formerly have been funded by endowments, that "something" being tuition.

I misunderstood you; thanks for the correction. I still think the useful data here is the fraction of the endowment income that goes towards expenditures, rather than the raw size of the endowments, but I definitely see where you're coming from. I wonder what fraction of the rise in tuition has to do with this.

> at most schools with sizable endowments.

Well there's your problem, most schools don't have sizable endowments. Endowments for rich schools have performed fairly well over the last couple decades, not so much for those with smaller endowments. So if you use tuition and fee money on things that might have previously been funded through endowments while you attempt to build (or re-build), it's really the same thing.

This is particularly true for universities like York University. (For those who didn't read the article, it's a university in Toronto and is the subject of the article.) Born in a more socialist era, the University put little effort into building up an endowment fund, since the government (i.e. "the people") would simply provide all of the money necessary to run the institution. As government funding has decreased over the last few decades, they're making greater efforts to build larger endowments, however, it'll take them a long time to catch up.

The tuition and fees are being used for things that have traditionally been funded by endowments rather than for things that have been previously funded by endowments. Schools with small endowments are expanding via fees in areas where other schools have used endowments to expand in the past.

For example, Ben Hill Griffin gave money to the University of Florida [endowed school] to expand their football stadium. Down the road in Orlando, University of Central Florida used student fees to build an on-campus football stadium. It did not have one previously -- nor a football team to fill it until relatively recently (the DI team was also built largely based on student fees).

All that construction requires fundraising and together generate lots of administrative positions, and that's where rising fees and tuition go.

I know that most schools don't have sizable endowments, but I also don't think most of them are diverting tuition towards their endowments.

Can tuition enter endowments?

No, endowments come from donors by definition. The question is—for schools that are sitting on large endowments—why is tuition so expensive? And why are there so many cutbacks to things like number of full-time faculty when the school is sitting on a 1.5 billion dollar endowment?

The answer to that is very simple: most endowment gifts are earmarked, seems that donors don't grant blanket trust to to the administrators of institutions. And then there's Princeton (https://www.google.com/search?q=princeton+wilson+school+endo... and why am I not surprised Wikipedia has no coverage of the most infamous college endowment diversion case in modern history?).

Tuition is golden, for it can be spent on anything. And gifts earmarked for tuition relief....

So where has the money gone?

Baumol's Cost Disease: http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/01902141...

If it was Baumol's cost disease was the explanation you would expect the higher costs to show up almost entirely in higher faculty spending. However, the parent post (#2 and #3) show that isn't the case. It isn't that the same production factors have gotten more expensive, instead it is that the mix of spending has changed radically -- with ever increasing shares of the budget devoted to ever increasing numbers of non-instructional staff.

Briefly (for the benefit of every else) Baumol's cost disease is the idea that if many professions in a society experience large increases in productivity due to technology, but some don't, those professions that don't will face equivalent increases in labor costs (and thus much higher increases per unit productivity) because those professions must compete for new entrants with the more productive professions.

Take a look at the linked book, Why Does College Cost So Much; it appears that much of the cost increase goes to benefits, especially health insurance, and even if the superficial cost remains the same the efficiency can go down relative to other parts of the economy (which is part of Baumol's Cost Disease).

Archibald and Feldman discuss these hypotheses in-depth in the book.

Agreed. University administrators definitely have an effect. There has been a doubling[0] in the number of administrative posts in the US and they cost a lot[1]. It seems to be a continued corporatization of the tertiary sector, whereby management and administration slowly swallows the old system of a university run by faculty. A good reporting on this is in [2].

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administr...

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu...

Administrators and staff is the likely answer. From 1975 to 2005 there was no change in faculty-to-student ratios, but students per administrator dropped from 84 to 68 (and pay increased) and students per professional staffer dropped from 50 to 21. Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Faculty-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/...

Significant to massive drops in state funding is a major reason at my university (resulting in freezes, furloughs, and tuition increases over the last 5-6 years). Federal funding doesn't offset that since it can usually only be used for research staff (and small portion of faculty salaries).

Support for new buildings usually doesn't come from the same budget and in most cases, new buildings are needed to handle the increased enrollments.

There's a secondary source of government funding beyond earmarked grants to universities: the tuition assistance it offers to students, which then goes straight into the pocket of the school. Consider pell grant spending, which has grown about 8x since it was established in 1975: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2011/07/2...

Even if we factor in the number of students receiving the loans (which has grown), the average amount awarded to students roughly doubled since 1994.

It does vary a lot by school. Total cost-per-student has risen substantially at many universities, but is closer to flat at others. The University of California system is one that has had kept per-student costs close to flat, and in their case, tuition rises do seem roughly equal-and-opposite of state funding cuts. Last time I ran the numbers (2012), per-student state funding had dropped from historical levels of $25-30k/student to $13k [1], which explains where the ~$15k/student increase in tuition over that period could've come from.

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

I very often want to call BS on the research at universities, there is absolutely no link between having new insight and being a good explainer. I would gladly create teaching places without any research like there exist research labs that do absolutely no teaching. And then judge the teachers exclusively in their ability to get the students to improve their skills. No grants proposal, no publish or perish, no negotiation over authorship order, no peer review game, only how to explain stuff, how students learn, what's the best way to convey a concept.

I see a parallel in the advertising agency world. The ad agency has an interest in "winning awards" with their work to increase their prestige in the industry and win more clients. Winning awards is about innovation or art, and not tied to views, shares, or sales.

While most ads you see on TV are about increasing sales, some ads are more about being innovative and catching the attention of other industry insiders to win an award.

I see university research like that. The research part is about increasing the prestige of the university. If they can attract a big name like Dan Ariely with an offer to fund research (and teach one class per term), they can attract press, students, and prestige within their industry.

My understanding (from thousands of miles away) was that there are a lot of liberal arts colleges in the States that do little or no research. Whether this is the same in any other countries I do not know.

I'm a physics professor at a liberal arts college, and yes, we do very much value teaching here. Research is important, too, as a way for faculty to remain engaged with their disciplines. But we actively look for ways to get undergraduates involved in our research, which makes it a teaching tool, too (a bit of an apprenticeship model). I like to think that our values lead to more reliably good educational outcomes at the undergraduate level than larger universities tend to manage (but it's hard to even figure out what to measure to verify that).

(I do know, though, that I saw two fantastic teachers in my graduate department get denied tenure while I was there because (as we all gathered) their stellar research records might possibly have been even better if they'd spent less time on teaching.)

I went to a large and prestigious state university and did not feel like I got a personalized education at all. My wife went to a small liberal arts school (got a BS Biology) and almost never had more than 15 people in her classes. She knew all her professors well, was engaged, and learned so much more than I did. So what if the Dalai Lama visited my school and not hers, or that my D1 athletic teams were nationally ranked. She got a better education that better positioned her to succeed professionally.

If you see teaching as a kind of persuasion, a prof with no ability to persuade will not be bringing in the grant money, and no grant money means no work, no work means no publish, and publish or perish means you get no grad students, no possible administrator or chair post, no cool presentations leading to awards, no job offers from a better (higher paid) school... its just not looking good.

Another way to look at it is you get lots of prestige by leading the field, and you lead the field by teaching people at conference presentations. Admittedly the people being taught are fellow academics not freshmen, but still...

Finally you could survive in a tenured job with no motivation to be leaders, but given the overproduction of PHDs ranges from merely 10x to as much as 1000x as many as necessary in some liberal arts, the odds of a slacker being hired when only the top 1% can get a tenure track prof job are extremely low, so there is that selection bias against slackers indicating very few profs will be slackers.

I think you're trying to say that good researchers will tend to be good teachers. In my experience, there is very little correlation between research output and undergraduate teaching quality. (My experience being grad school at two different universities.) You are correct that tenure-track professors will not be "slackers". They will, in fact, work themselves silly. But they are primarily evaluated on their research at research universities, not their undergraduate teaching. They tend to put their energies into what they are evaluated on.

Also keep in mind that teaching and classroom management is a skill, one which is rarely taught to young professors. I had a stark realization during my second year of grad school, when we were interviewing a faculty candidate coming straight from grad school: he was interviewing for a professor position, and he did not have significantly more teaching experience than I did.

I'm surprised that you seem to think that "slacker"/"non-slacker" is an intrinsic immutable property of a person rather than a situational response to incentives. I think most critics of tenure would argue that granting life long job security can and does cause "non-slackers" to adopt "slacker" behavior since they no longer have to compete for their job. The fact that someone worked hard to get tenure does not imply that they will continue to be productive when they have no competition.

I agree with the original point. In my experience, there's such a strong selection process in who even tries to get tenure that most people simply can't turn off their drive because its so fundamentally a part of them. Do they change the shape of their efforts? Sure. They might stop trying to go for many small publications and go for a longer view, try a new subfield, etc. But the base level of effort never really diminishes.

Now of course this is not for all universities but I think it applies to almost any R1 university, top teaching college, etc. Its not competition for their job that drives them, its just competition against their self-image, competition against peers for prestige, etc.

It should also be noted that tenure does not guarantee funding. A tenured faculty member who adopts "slacker" behavior will likely see their lab/group eviscerated, more "service" obligations heaped on them, and their job progressively becoming less fun.

Additionally, "tenured"/"non-tenured" is not a single binary switch in terms of prestige. Even with tenure there's things to be striving for.

Note that all cited universities are located in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Hamilton). Tuition has gone up in Canada, but not as high as it has in the States, not by a long run, and it has stayed quite low in Quebec, at least for residents ($2750/year).

I know that at the University of Montreal adjuncts have been unionized for a long time, and they have a bit of job security; there are no multi-year contracts for a given course, but they get priority on courses they've already taught.

One issue is that adjuncts used to be mainly professionals who'd teach one course per semester on the side. That was fairly common at my engineering school back in the early 2000s. Since it was secondary income, they did not see much point to unionize or fight for job security.

But now you have a lot of people who end up trying to make a primary living through adjunct teaching, and that old model or part-time teaching doesn't really work for them.

Two things should be noted:

1. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money into the university, especially those outside the humanities.

2. For some reason, "make a teaching-focused tenure track" never gets brought up, which makes me skeptical that this is merely those pesky tenured professors and their research gumming up the works.

Surely, the age-old fight between "contract workers are cheaper than full-time employees" is at play. Easier to hire and fire a contractor, and no benefits to pay.

I don't know the numbers for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if tenured professors perhaps have one-quarter of the teaching workload at twice the price.

"at twice the price"

Its far more extreme, 10x to 20x

Ask around for people who've contract taught to get the "resume stuffer". Generally a couple thousand bucks per class. Vs $100K+/yr for a tenured prof (depending on field, etc).

On an $/hours-taught basis, yes, I'm sure! Not judging, but I see the appeal of this to the university.

At my university, it was $6000 per course. I don't know if it's gone up. Considering that a TA (in STEM courses) was about half that, it isn't much.

1. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money into the university, especially those outside the humanities.

Isn't this the case in Canada too?

It's true in the sense that at least some of the faculty members will be bringing in a lot of money into the department. In my department, I know that there's a few professors who either from large funding grants or contracts bring in the majority of research funds. The university (and consequently the faculty and department) gets a percentage of that funding for its own budget. The rest of the faculty in the department combined don't bring in nearly as much money as those few with large research grants.

My impression, talking to a few colleagues from Canada, is that their funding streams are more reliable, but far more modest.

I think this divide is only going to get worse with the adoption of edex and the like. First tier universities will continue to attract faculty and students, meanwhile second and third tier institutions will see a deterioration in their fortunes as students migrate to online education. It's not there yet by the stage is getting set. Any reprieve for adjunct faculty will likely be short lived.

So strong institutions will be on stronger and the weaker ones will lose out. Not sure what that means for the balance of hard sciences vs humanities, by my guess is that the less bankable humanities will lose out in money and influence.

Here's the latest sunshine list data for York University:

http://surlyhamiltonian.blogspot.ca/2014/04/york-university-...

Shoukri is at C$478K