Yup, I didn't look at your source only what information you posted. The "(2018 dollars)" on only one line implied to me the other numbers were unadjusted.
Two biggest drivers are 1) massive declines in public support (for public universities, obviously) and 2) more administrators.
Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad--it's the cost of complying with things like disability laws, Title IX, etc--but they require collecting and reporting significant amounts of data, and that isn't free.
There's other stuff too; some colleges do have the lazy rivers and fancy dorms, many colleges lose money on their football program, etc. But those aren't the fundamental drivers.
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the money is definitely NOT going to faculty salaries. Salaries for full-time faculty have been stagnant for decades even though an increasing percentage of classes are taught by poorly-paid adjuncts.
> Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad
Similar things happen in healthcare. My SO works in pharma and the amount of red tape they are required to navigate significantly increases the complexity of their administrative work and decreases the cost-efficiency of their business, partially passing on the costs to the price of drugs.
Again, like you said, the regulations are not bad (like regulating the types of communication they can have with doctors), but there is a price to pay to keep them.
> These things probably could actually be resolved by governmental regulation.
They could, but I wonder if it would actually improve the state of things. We would then need to increase the size of the bureaucracy (in the government and in each institution that does any of these things) to meet these regulations, and given that a bureaucracy becomes less efficient with size it may not actually make things any cheaper.
No, I think public prices would definitely make things cheaper. It would also incentivize keeping bureaucracy lean, there is little to no price incentive to do so now.
Armies of administrators, shiny new amenities to attract more students (competing on quality of education is too difficult / more expensive). There's probably some good that it goes towards too, but its hard not to be cynical about it.
I was a one of two developers at a small relatively unknown private college (costs over $70k and wasn't even top 5 in this state) in a communications (see: marketing B team for admissions, mostly PR and crisis response) department of around 15. I cannot emphasize how inept and slow everyone was. Simple tasks took 10x longer than they should. There were 3-4 people dedicated solely to managing contractors for the bi-annual magazine that likely gets tossed by 90% of the recipients, then people whose sole job was to manage an ad agency in a committee with at least 4 other people. They were in the 6 month process of launching a 5 page WP site for the newly funded careers institute that had ~15 employees to try and help graduates find jobs paying more than $15/hr with their newly minted liberal arts degrees when I finally left. Their solution for making soon/new graduates more employable? Linkedin courses for specific skills like digital marketing, Excel and microcertificates through external resources.
Then there are other leaks, like $50k/yr hosting bills for a CMS serving under 200k pageviews per day, or other ancillary a11y compliance tools that cost nearly as much. If there is budget, it has to be spent.
In the past, people with sinecures could just go home and spend their time painting or composing poetry or inventing scientific disciplines or something else not-entirely-useless. Now they’re managing contractors by committee! How soul-deadening.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy at play again.
At this point, my feeling is that the local maximumizations that have driven us to this point are irrecoverable. There is no “fixing” this system. It will carry on for a while yet out of momentum, but something disruptive will dethrone it eventually.
A lot of it is going to the administrative staff. They have massive departments, many buildings, and many unnecessary staff members with high salaries. Meanwhile, a lot of the teaching faculty is making a pittance.
Buildings are traditionally paid for by a benefactor who gets their name on it. And the school often ends up with higher costs as a result (and one less parking lot or green area). Such donors are kind of a mixed bag.
Some percentage of tuition dollars are effectively cross subsidizing other students (e.g., masters candidates subsidize PhD students, wealthier undergraduates subsidize other undergraduates receiving institutional grants or discounts, etc.), but the biggest factor in private education has to be the increase in administrative staff and facilities.
The one place is almost certainly not going its faculty salaries. The industry's shift to adjuncts has been great for university endowments but terrible for those who got their PhD in the last couple decades
Can't speak of all schools, but at my local state school (which I attended) - which as far as sports teams is way down on the list of being considered important (i.e. you'll never see them on TV), they constantly bringing in coaches making $1M/year, who then hire a bunch of assistant coaches making $200K a year etc - and then when the teams don't do well - like losing 80% of their games - they fire the coaches (paying out the rest of their contracts) and hire the next million dollar coaches, rinse and repeat - and this is at a state-run school; I would imagine at private schools with top tier teams, its even worse.
There is so many overspending problems its not even funny - and yet the people actually teaching the classes are TA's, probably getting $20K/year, while the professors work on their 'research' and are rarely available to students.
Starting to think the whole higher-education model is hopelessly broken.
Sports are generally separate from the rest of the university budget. It's not tuition dollars that are paying the coach, it's season tickets, TV contracts, and donors. Men's football/basketball makes obscene money for the big schools, and the little schools get paid to be beat up by the big schools. The reports that sports don't make money are like how movies don't make money, it's largely creative accounting not actual losses.
Hollywood accounting only works because the producers are taking the profits out by spending the money on outside firms that they get a piece of. That does not work in college sports: they are just plain losing money... except for the coaches and he staff who are making it hand over foot (even on the small schools with horrible records).
The vast majority of college sports programs in the U.S. are losing a lot of money for the school. They are operating at a detriment to the school's main goal of learning.
They "lose" money because they offer more than men's basketball and football. Those two sports finance everything else, it's easy to document millions in losses for swimming, soccer, track, field, baseball, softball, tennis, golf, and everything else.
Also a Universities goal of learning is research, not teaching, especially not undergrad teaching.
This has always seemed like a weird defense of college sports to me, because college swimming, soccer, etc. are still an elite cadre of extremely physically fit young people.
Maintaining physical health is huge, but the demographic that needs to be targeted is lower performance level that club sports. Even THOSE are quite competitive. Even the (very fit) people who participate often cease physical activity and healthy eating soon after graduation.
On the other hand, subsidizing college gym facilities does tend to reach most of the student body. Required athletics classes is even more effective and pays long-term dividends (if they haven't been canceled due to COVID by now). But even more-so than that, consistent physical activity for grade school and high school would be even better from a whole society perspective.
this is a conscious calculation to attract alumni donations — people who are into their college teams donate more than others, and even more when the teams do well
It's going to the facilities and the staff needed to support them.
When I was an undergrad in the mid 1990s, the dorms were square rooms with cinderblock walls, concrete floors, metal frame beds, and a simple desk, the cafeteria was like an oversized high school cafeteria, and the gym was a basic weight room. A couple of years ago I received a brochure from my alma mater asking for donations and showing the modernized campus - the dorms were now luxury apartments, the cafeteria was a gourmet eatery, and the gym looked like a Lifetime.
Room and board is entirely separate from tuition though. That said, when I was leaving college in 2002 it was essentially a giant construction zone as they were building facilities all over the place. This was not unique- there was something of an arms race to make the glossy brochures even better than the competition. This was a large state school with a good but not really elite reputation and was trying to change that.
The guy probably did donate all of that but keeping these buildings open running and maintained with university maintenance workers is expensive as heck
> Are Colleges and Universities pocketing the money?
They are. Why wouldn't they? Kids and parents can get massive loans from the government, it would be silly for universities and all their admin staff to pass up the opportunity to enrich themselves.
Universities have started to compete on which ones have more gyms, clubs, luxury dorms, various interest groups. Well, the basket weaving club needs an instructor, a secretary, a janitor, a new facility, a maintenance person for it etc. Some of them may be friends and cousins of the existing administrators, but you're not supposed to notice that too much.
I couldn't stop laughing when I visited my alma mater, a decade later and seeing how they had build a brand new gym with a huge lazy river around it. In my head I could hear the enthusiastic tour guide "Your child can type their homework while floating around in a lazy river, isn't that great!". But then, of course, I realized that it was my tuition that has paid for the lazy river.
The answer I get from my friends in the higher ed business are that the costs are covering decreased investment by state level government in colleges and universities.
On one hand, I am not sure I agree. My son is going to the same state university I went to, and it's substantial more expensive, but they 've also built a ton of infrastructure that I find questionable.
"Deep state cuts in funding for higher education over the last decade have contributed to rapid, significant tuition increases and pushed more of the costs of college to students, making it harder for them to enroll and graduate."
I feel like it's a bit of a Pandora's box. Once the student loan box got opened and administrators began to realize the incentives at play (for the lenders, e.g. most student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), they saw dollar signs. It's easy to justify tuition hikes when you know most of your students are already taking out loans which they'll basically always get. And since each student is usually only there for about four years, the increases while they're there don't seem significant because their frame of reference is so small. And even if they do realize the highway robbery taking place, what are they gonna do, transfer half their credits to somewhere cheaper and spend even more time in school to finish their degree?
> The answer I get from my friends in the higher ed business are that the costs are covering decreased investment by state level government in colleges and universities.
I’d take that with a big grain of salt. They love to play up this angle but I just don’t see where funding has been cut at the same rate as tuition has increased.
I remember back when I was in school, one year the state government asked for some belt-tightening, to the tune of a 2% budget cut. Y’know, asking the school to go back to the budget they had like two years prior. The admin started going nuclear, “there’s no fat in our budget, these cuts will go straight to the bone!”, saying they’d have to cut the entire music department, 10% of all class sections, etc. Even got the students riled up enough to march on the capitol building. Even at the time, being significantly less jaded than I am now, I knew this was complete BS. Ever since I’ve been very wary of this narrative that colleges are driving up tuition because of state budget cuts. And it didn’t help shake my belief when I went back to campus a few years later and saw that they did a complete renovation of the library to include multiple gaming kiosks (!) and other such creature comforts.
Simply put, the schools can basically charge whatever they want and students will pay because any 18 year old with a pulse will get approved for unlimited money so long as it goes toward college. Put limits on student loans and you’ll see the situation change quickly.
On a related note - who in their right mind thinks donating to their college is a good decision? I don't understand why rich people keep donating buildings rather than donating parks to their communities. When I begin to donate money for serious, colleges are getting exactly $0. The money will go to places and people that actually need it.
When you have an organisation full of people creating worth that you can cream off, you've bought a few houses, yacht, fast cars. You get to a point where you realise you're not leaving anything of value behind and think "if I pay for a university building then I've created a legacy of education for generations to come".
TL;DR it's like a shiny name plaque for billionaires.
I get it - and I agree with the reasoning - but I want to leave a shiny new park with my name on the plaque, not a building in an overpriced university.
As far as where it goes, I think a ton goes into new buildings and amenities. I went to Auburn a decade ago and the campus looks completely different. Everything is new and shiny. I assume there are also a ton of administrators.
I remember when my public college was banned from starting new building projects due to state wide budget restrictions. The year the ban was lifted, half a dozen projects immediately kicked off.
Endowments. They are lining their pockets with it. A lot of Unis are becoming investment firms that happen to supplement their income with a school attached to them.
Sports team boondoggles are a popular way to spend tuition money.
there's been a proliferation of administrators in colleges. the ratio of administrators to professors/instructors has been steadily climbing since the 70s.
Where the hell is the money _going_?
Are Colleges and Universities pocketing the money? Are they publicly traded and distributing dividends? Are they building rockets?
I know some of it goes back to financial aid, and some goes to football coaches...
But we're talking about so much freaking money, and I just can't visualize where it's going.