By Professor
Doom
Admin: “Due to cutbacks in funding, we need to freeze
pay for faculty again this year…”
--I probably hear this every other
year. The excuse doesn’t stop admin from getting raises, of course.
Tuition rises and rises, and admin is
forever spewing lies about why tuition is ever skyrocketing up. One of the most
common lies is the tuition money needs to be used to pay for all the
regulations, but this is so obvious, so intellectually dishonest and hypocritical, that it’s fun and easy to dispel.
Admin: “We’ll need to raise tuition
again, because the cutbacks will cause a budget shortfall…”
--I doubt a college student anywhere
managed to make it through a 4 year degree without hearing this at least twice.
The shortfall, of course, doesn’t stop admin from hiring more administration
and support staff.
Another
popular lie justifying a tuition raise is the ol’ “they’re cutting back on
funding” ruse. I concede a small truth to this, at least, perhaps, in one
particular year or other, but overall? No way, not even close.
Allow me to re-quote a report I cited earlier, a report written, I must add, by
administrators in higher education:
“…In 1970-71, what was then the U.S.
Office of Education awarded roughly 1.6 million grants and loans to low- and
middle-income families. In 2013-14, the U.S. Department of Education
reported nearly 20 million such awards. The amount of money disbursed grew from $1.6 billion to more than $160
billion."
--emphasis added.
Hmm, so over the course of the last 40
years, funding has increased by a factor of 100. That’s…not much of a decrease.
This is just looking at funding from the Federal government, of course, but
someone else, a law professor, has also taken the time to see that at the state
level overall funding has increased, even as admin has cried ever louder that
their funding is being cut.
Most amazing, the professor’s article made it to the New York Times,
albeit as an “opinion” piece…though his calculations are about as much opinion
as determining if water is wet:
In fact, public investment in higher
education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars,
than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such
spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in
general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today
than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are
more than 10 times higher.
--he’s referring to state legislation
here.
There really was a time when the money I
made mowing lawns would cover my tuition. I grant that I was mowing a lawn a
day, but the fact still remained I could cover the several hundred bucks of
tuition with basic work…and my professors weren’t starving, or clearly living
at the poverty level. One of my professors was even Dean for a year, making an
extra $2,000 (if memory serves, it’s been a long time)…not that I ever saw him
in that capacity while I was getting my education as a student, since Deans
really have little to do with students or education.
Today, of course, most teachers in higher
education are living at the poverty level, while Deans are professional
mercenaries that make 3x to 15x what the faculty make…and still have nothing to
do with education.
It
really isn’t that tough to conjecture where the money is going in higher
education, and that tuition increases have very little to do with “cutbacks in
funding”, at least compared to the obvious guess.
That said, there is a way of looking at
things so that ‘cutback in funding’ has occurred, despite the numbers:
While the college-age population has
not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the
population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last
20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has
increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state
legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than
inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they
were at their peak in 1990.
So, the huge growth in the student base
hasn’t quite matched the huge growth in funding…”per student”, then, the
funding has dropped, possibly as much as 25% on a per student basis. Still, this is easily overmatched
by the grotesque increase in class sizes. Factor in the class sizes of 20, from
a generation ago, to hundreds, even a thousand, that is more typical today, and
it’s hard to see how that “reduced” funding is any issue, even per student.
It is disingenuous to call a large
increase in public spending a “cut,” as some university administrators do,
because a huge programmatic expansion features somewhat lower per capita
subsidies.
--whoa, you’re calling administrators
“disingenuous”? That’s dangerous, professor, you’re using your real name here,
after all.
Having established, then, that there
is no real budget cut here, the professor does as I and many others have done,
and tried to follow the money. He looks very carefully at another institution,
and the dots are easily connected:
Even more strikingly, an analysis by
a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the
total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614
to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from
3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
Think about those numbers for a
second: in 1975, the school system operated perfectly fine with about 12,000
faculty and 4,000 administrators. Forty years later, the student population has easily
doubled and then some, increased by over 250,000 students. They still have nearly the same number of faculty, now
teaching the extra quarter of a million students in auditorium-sized
classes…but now you need more than triple the administrators. And tuition has
gone up, 20 times as much as in 1975?
Administrative pay has skyrocketed, and
skyrocketed again, just to keep pace with tuition. How’s faculty pay working
out? Let’s take a look:
Salaries of full-time faculty members
are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years
ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half
of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning
that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher
education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.
So, once again, someone besides an
administrator follows the money in higher education and learns that no, it’s
not overpaid tenured faculty, and no, it’s not burdensome government
regulations, and no, it’s not cutbacks in funding that require tuition to rise,
burdening students with ever more crushing debt. None of the things administration says are true.
It’s the administration.
The only real question is: just how many
people need to learn what’s really going on in higher education before anything
will be done about it?
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