This scare story about the price of tuition has a lovely graph detailing how overblown the rise in tuition has been compared to the housing market. The article muses that secondary education is encountering a bubble itself.
Now there are the obvious questions about what a secondary education burst bubble would look like (no more degrees? colleges shutting down by the dozens? everything online?). But I'm not into telling the future.
What I would like to know is: where does this money go these days? I know it isn't to profs. Most schools rely on ever-growing armies of underpaid adjuncts. My R1 graduate school didn't give its profs a raise for 8 years from 1998 to 2006. Then it went on another freeze in 2007 that (as far as I know) is still going on. New tenure-track profs still seem to start (for the Humanities) in the $45,000 zone and slowly rise to the $80,000 zone. IF you are lucky enough to get tenure.
Sure, there's the odd tenured prof with a $120,000 annual pricetag, but as far as my colleagues go, such cases are rare and have almost a mythical quality to them.
So, CM, please tell me. Is all this money for the increased buildings? The super-keen dorm features? A bloated administration? Millionaire college presidents?
I know I'm way too eager here, but I'm weight down from unbridled interest.
I'd guess all of the above, plus new technology and the people to keep it up and running. Mind you, I like library databases, and computer classrooms, and the concept of online course delivery platforms (though not always the particular example thereof which we use -- Blackboard), and would hate going back to teaching without them. And I very much appreciate the hard work of our IT professionals, and realize that what seems to a humanities professor like a slightly-too-frequent hardware replacement cycle is probably just about right for those with heavier-duty technology needs. I'd much rather get rid of an extra administrator or two(if there really are any once all the forms certifying that we're compliant with various federal and state requirements are filled out, and all the parents and snowflakes informed, appeased, talked down off of high buildings, etc.), or one of several nearly-new gyms, or some of the constantly-updated dining options (since when do college students "dine"?), or the athletic program (okay, now I'm really dreaming -- but that's one thing that for-profit universities universally skip, which has to tell you something).
ReplyDeleteBut it's almost as hard to disassemble programs as it is to disassemble buildings once they are there, and people have come to depend on them, and I'm sure that some of the things that seem expendable to me seem essential to someone else (and, any way you look at it, cutting programs means cutting someone's job). I really think we're at an impasse: students (and/or their parents) can't afford to pay more (or even what tuition costs now), but there's less to cut that one might think, and it certainly can't be professor's salaries (in fact, I don't think the present reliance on low-wage, contingent workers is sustainable in the long run).
The other, and probably more important, part of the picture is that the rise in tuition is higher than the actual rise in universities' operating costs, because states are no longer subsidizing public universities to the extent they used to (I'm sure there is a comparable mechanism at private universities, but I'm not sure what it is).
Like Cassandra said, there is less state subsidy of higher ed. I did a decent job in planning for my offspring's (state) college current costs, but this is way above the projections.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot more administrators and regulations (that those folks have to be there for); that's a state and federal problem.
AND... don't get me started about many IT folks (who should just be plain out fired).
I'm in a state that "de-regulated" state-school tuition in the mid-90's. We've seen massive jumps in tuition because it was so low before.
ReplyDeleteHow low, you ask? Try $17/credit hour for in-state.
You want lower? I knew a guy in grad school that came here from out of state for his undergrad because it was cheaper to pay out of state rates here with a full room and board plan than it was for him to live at home and commute to the state university across town in his home state.
Since then tuition has come more "in line" with the rest of the country. But where did the money go? The state kept it because they didn't have to fund the state schools anymore like they were because now the schools could make their own money with tuition. And the savings got passed along to the student! (Sorry, "customer")*
That's where the money goes here; it never gets here to begin with.
*Just because I'm in student services, don't think I'm one of "those" student services-types. I was a daily reader of RYS (RIP) and even had a piece posted once there. I joke about keeping anti-aircraft weaponry to shoot down helicopters. I'm the office "bad guy" because I know the word "No," which makes me a "good guy" with the academic side of the house.
At my school, most of it seems to go to the president and building projects. Gets kind of annoying to have constant construction on campus, actually- I've been here for five years now, and I have yet to see the campus without construction on some building somewhere.
ReplyDeleteAt the R1 where I got my PhD, they have incredibly high tuition, a multimillion dollar budget deficit, yet they keep on putting up new buildings. I guess that whoever owns the most physical plant when the bubble bursts wins.
ReplyDeleteI used to teach at a small, private, engineering school in the southeast. Where the money went there was a complete mystery. There was no accountability from the administration whatsoever: of course, this was the kind of place where the faculty were treated like serfs. There was no tenure for anyone. Faculty were openly refusing to serve on the faculty senate, because the administration had flatly stated they wouldn't be listened to, multiple times.
ReplyDeleteI am now at a mid-size, public university in California. Tuition has gone up sharply in the past couple years because the state isn't subsidizing us as much anymore. Still, it's a big improvement for me, and for my students: we charge $4k/year, as opposed to over $25k/year.
Even if the bubble doesn't burst, it will be armeggedon for higher education when the boomers' kids run out and baby bust generation's kids are filling (or rather not filling) the seats. I remember when I was in college in the late eighties they were converting doubles into singles.
ReplyDeleteThe money goes to the ever burgeoning staff positions, it subsidizes your athletics program, alumni association, IT, blah, blah. It goes everywhere except your paycheque.
ReplyDeleteWhat the fuck are you willing to do about it? You (and me) are fucking sheep. Go on strike. Shut your campus down on week 15 until you get a detail budget. Where does the money go? Then demand that all budgets must be approved by senate faculty.
We control the goddamn university. It is time to take back power from the fucking idiots in administration. They are not mission critical. They exist to prevent us (the faculty) from delivering the mission critical.
Throw off your chains or quit bitching about your employment situation.
The local University, not the CC where I work, just announced something like a $500,000 bonus for the president. Also, one professor makes somewhere up near $200,000 a year because of some deal he had when he was a provost or something at sometime.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the damnedest clue what a provost is or does, but I like to think of them as if they are Emperor Palpatine's guards in Star Wars. Basically, useless guys in red robes. Everybody knows that university presidents wear robes all the time. So, naturally, the provosts would do the same.
Mathsquatch *pulls his lightsaber* out.
@texpat: I'd watch your sentences with the words "fucking" and "sheep" next to each other. You don't want the ASPCA and PETA coming for you, after all.
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch *giggles like a middle school boy* out.
Well, my school has a fairly new athletic complex and some other fancy buildings in the pipeline. But I suspect that's not where the money is going (since we have some loans and bequests covering those).
ReplyDeleteI think that people dramatically underestimate the cost that a college incurs. Energy costs have more than doubled in the last ten years. All those spiffy electronic thingies that host our websites, blackboard, banner, and email costs lots of money to keep running smoothly. Benefits costs have sky rocketted (my school doesn't have masses of adjuncts and those we have are primarily semi-retired or married to a full timer, at least in my dept).
Then there are the masses of students flocking to colleges who perhaps shouldn't be here. My school has an entire office dedicated accomodating those with learning disabilities. And there is the Diversity Office, I'm sure what they do (my grad school had an office for just about every ethnic group). We also have an office through which all grants are administrated. Those are offices that just didn't exist 15 years ago. They all have non-trivial payrolls and they need office space.
Minimum wage has also dramatically increased over the last 10-15 years. It really surprises me that people don't understand that if the baker makes $50/hr then the bread must be sold for a high enough price that the baker can get paid. And that when the price of bread goes up we "must" raise the minimum wage. Rinse, repeat.
All of those little things add up.
California is somewhat of an exception because the tuition prices have been unsustainable low for so long. For instance, at $20/credit hour a three unit course of 30 students doesn't even pay for the adjunct teaching it. That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard. California needs to triple its current tuition to make up for 40 years of stupid business model.
I am probably one of the few people in this world who thinks that a student should be responsible for the bulk of the cost of his or her education. I suspect that means upwards of $25000 to $30000 for a public school education (oh, and I'd do away with the in-state/out-of-state tuition difference).
A large portion of the students who attend my school receive financial aid and could not attend without it. Government and private student loans have increased significantly ovet the years. That is contributing to the subsidizing the increase in tution. Why not charge more if students can pay more?
ReplyDeleteWell, physical plant and energy costs are one of the biggest lines on any school's budget. And of course the arms race towards newer dorms and bigger athletic facilities also factors in (although they always try to hit up some big donors for that shit). Athletics at any Div I school is just a money-eating machine. I used to teach at a DIV I powerhouse in a major conference, and despite the big conference TV contracts, bowl games, NCAA tourney appearances, and a crapload of money from a major shoe company, the athletic department still had to dip into the CAS till to balance its budget at the end of the year. At least they weren't disguising their priorities.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that makes me laugh about the post is how out of whack your salary numbers are. I know we went through this back on RYS with the big thirsty on salaries, and I posted a rant about it then, but if you think humanities profs are topping out in the 80s, you are smoking some serious crack. I know that there is a big difference between major private R1 salaries and the rest of the world, but when I started out as an assistant proffie more than ten years ago I was offered a salary in the 50s. Today I'd guess that more than half my current department makes north of 90K, and I would wager that at least half a dozen of my colleagues are north of 150K with at least a couple breaking the 200K barrier. And we are not out of step. At major private R1s assistant profs in the humanities start in the high 60s now, with some places starting them in the 70s.
And lest you think this is just my Archie elitism showing itself again, at the community college up the road, humanities faculty with a PhD make a minimum of 80K, and more with seniority. I know this because Mrs Archie teaches in another university hereabouts where several of her PhD students have been faculty from that CC who were doing the degree for no other reason than the salary bump. And, oh yeah, in Mrs Archie's humanities department they are starting new assistant proffies off in the high 60s too.
But even though your numbers are off, your essential point is correct. The money isn't going to the proffies. Mrs Archie's university has a long-standing agreement with the faculty senate that salaries have to stay at or above the 80th percentile nationally by rank and discipline. This means occasionally substantial bumps for an entire cohort when it falls behind the national numbers. Last year the admin tried to renege on the deal, pleading pain and suffering due to the economic crisis. One of the economists on the faculty senate did a back of the envelope calculation and figured out that a pay freeze would save the university all of about 250K, which shamed the admin into restoring order.
Archie, you must live in Cali or NYC or some other incredibly costly place for everyone out there to be paid so well... right?
ReplyDeleteOr Boston, or DC, or Baltimore, or Philly, or Chicago, or Atlanta, or Durham, or New Haven, or Princeton, and I could go on... Sure, location matters, but lots of people at private unis all over the country make that and more. Of course many, if not all such schools are in higher cost of living areas, but the point is that when you start to tally them up, there are a lot of those schools, and they are all paying within a similar range--for entry-level as well as for senior hires. I know at least two literature professors who have parlayed outside offers into 250K+ salaries, and no, neither one is named Fish. There must be others.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, Mrs Archie's university pays at or around the 80th percentile by rank and discipline, which makes it a useful gauge in this area. Since entry-level assistants in her most humanistic of the humanities departments now make in the mid to high 60s to start, it follows that there are a pretty fair number of assistant proffies in her discipline at other schools who make even more than that (especially given the number who make less). And not to insult Mrs Archie's fine employer, but it isn't even really an R1.
My point is that there is a huge range of incomes among the professoriate, and you don't have to be at my university or in an economics department to make a decent middle-class wage. But because of the vast sea of shamefully (or is that shamelessly?) exploited adjuncts out there, as well as the substantial number of lower paying second-tier state schools and small private schools in rural areas, people in our profession imagine that those numbers are the norm. They aren't, and it makes the treatment of adjuncts all the more shameful. But that's another issue.
Archie, you're the one who has no idea how little your colleagues make. Stop pretending to be an expert on the topic. All you're doing is screaming out ignorance.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I believe your numbers for R1s and a few elite schools, but many non-adjuncts at everyday (non-elite) colleges are happy-skippy to start out at $45K in most humanities and social sciences. That's the going rate nowadays, which basically means there has been no cost of living increases in some disciplines in 10-20 years. And this is in Philly and Boston (and their environs), which is where most of my contacts settled after grad school at a respected R1 (and a nearby Ivy).
Paul Fussell's "Doing Battle: Making of a Skeptic", although marketed as a memoir of a WWII vet, he was a university prof and he had some good gems to share about how universities have changed over the decades: about how, when he spent a year abroad in Germany, the university staff basically consisted of a registrar and a bursar, while these days there are buildings full of offices on Alumni Relations, Career Development, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf you ever befriend someone in the university's Facilities or Planning department, they have plenty of stories that explain where some of the money is going...one story I was told was that a library was being renovated, the Dean of the faculty that the library was associated with came in and said "I want the entry ramp in the main lobby to curve left instead of right." Just because. Badda bing, badda boom, add $150K to the renovation cost, just like that, no process or oversight involved.
Fuckin' A, Archie, after 10 years and at Full Prof in the Humanities at in a top-tier public R1 system, I am not at 80K yet. This is in part because I could not/would not play the "retention offer" game while it was still good, because I have a problem wasting the resources of other institutions whose jobs I have no intention of even considering. Now, we are downsizing so retention offers are a no-go, my pay has been whacked, our pension contributions are going up to 10% while the payout is going to be less than 50% of our salary with Social Security factored in as part of that less than 50%, and in several years I will be making LESS than I was at Associate. All this in an area of the country with one of the highest costs of living. And my family situation limits my mobility.
ReplyDeleteBitter, Party of One?
Archie, you're making huge generalizations based on very limited data. What a craptastic example you're setting for any of my research methods students who might stumble in here! Gah.
ReplyDeleteIf your spouse's uni pays faculty equivalent to the 80th percentile or higher, then by definition, the kind of money she earns is significantly above average...and the above-average-ness of that pay is correlated with the cost of living in the uni's region.
In short, Academic Monkey's numbers are fine. Stop trying to school him/her.
My numbers come from 4 years on the job market and lots of time spent perusing the state schools whose faculty salaries are public records. R1 state schools even, and they started really low (again $40-50k) with a big $20k jump at tenure, and on from there. The average was around $80k and a small handful (usualy post-provost or the Chair) had a $120k salary.
ReplyDeleteOne school where I interviewed made their incoming grad students do a research project on this very subject so that they were aware of the risks of going into this business. I thought that was smart.
Great question. A selfish anectode:
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is now a senior at a small, private liberal arts school. While it has opened her eyes intellectually and socially, it also a rather inflated opinion of itself.
During each the three years since her freshman year, we've enjoyed a mewling letter from the bursar each spring telling us how much they know the cost of education is painful...and that they simply couldn't help piling on a little more pain for the following school year.
My kid's achievement-based scholarship level has flat-lined at her freshman rate, of course. I only wish my own salary increased with such regularity!
Wow Snarky. I guess my point went right over your head. So to put it more clearly, I never, not once, said that the salaries at a school that pays in the 80th percentile were average. That would be the hasty generalization you accuse me of, and innumerate to boot (I'd have to return my mathematics degree).
ReplyDeleteIf anything you and the original poster are committing the hasty generalization based on publicly available salary data at state schools. I'd point out two things there. State universities may represent a plurality of institutions of higher learning in this country, but they are not a majority. So taking their salary numbers and saying that's what the way it is in the profession is exactly the kind of sloppy shit you accuse me of. Second, the 80th percentile is high, but it ain't the tail of the gaussian distribution either. And that percentile is based on the data made available by schools. Some schools, especially those secretive private institutions at the higher end of the scale don't make their numbers available in any form at all, so the presumed national averages for rank and discipline are skewed, and very possibly skewed slightly low, but I won't state that as a fact here.
But your snarky accusations of hasty generalizing are beside the point. The main point I was trying to make is that even at a school that pays in the 80th percentile the total savings realized through a salary freeze is in the neighborhood of 250K. That's chump change. They probably spend that on energy in an average winter month. So freezing salaries, or rolling them back like they are doing to Marsha, is bullshit. But since they can't return the new student fitness center for a refund, and they don't have the testicular fortitude to get rid of the football team, all they can do is realize some shit savings on Marcia's back and then say they are just trying to balance the books. That's the point. That's just the truth, not some fucking generalization.
As for Monkey's assertion that there is a big jump at associate at state schools, that strikes as just flat out false. I taught at a flagship state school, and the problem was the opposite: compression. Some assistants made more than long-time associates, and new hire mid-career people were brought in at more than long-time fulls. This lead to a lot of bitterness, and it is part of the reason I moved to another job.
Basically, I think there is an overriding, and completely false, assumption that we all make the same or similar salaries, and we can't expect things to be different. That then allows fuckstick administrators and state legislators to demand that Marcia give back part of her salary. It also skews the salary negotiations in ways that are incredibly favorable to the administration. Since monkey is on the job market, and hopefully will have to negotiate at some point, it would behoove him to know this. So if I was schooling him, in your unfortunate phrase, it was only so that he might have the balls to ask for more when the time comes. Because if he thinks that 40 is what he can get, you can bet that some dean is going to be grinning his way to the provost's office, singing "I fucked another sucker" all the way. This is the stuff of a longer post, so I'll leave it there.
But Snarky, you get an A+ for righteous and way-too-fucking-earnest indignation, but a much lower grade for reading comprehension.
Archie out.
Academic Monkey's numbers sounded a bit low to me, too, but I'm in one of those expensive areas (coastal state, suburban portion of a major metropolitan area, definitely experienced the real estate bubble). As the (tenure-line) faculty is fond of reminding the administration, their wages may be average to high for our cohort of comparable (R2, public) institutions, but they're way at the bottom of the scale if you factor in local cost of living. Last I checked, tenure-line profs in the humanities started in the low 60s, and we definitely have humanities profs making in the low 100s (in my department, this seems to be especially true of those who have served as chair at some point -- a difficult job which they have done well; I don't know whether they've also had outside offers).
ReplyDeleteTo give you an idea of the local cost of living, for someone moving to the area, 60K is enough to rent a decent one-bedroom apartment, or -- if you have the down payment and the credit score and not too many student loans -- maybe buy a small condo. Since real estate prices have declined a bit, one or two single profs in my department have managed to buy small, older town houses or 1/2 duplexes, but I suspect they had some help with the down payment, as well as the first-time-buyer credit to draw on. Single family homes in a good school district require at least two mid-tenure-track incomes, and those built after 1960 or so require a TT income plus a non-academic income (or the income of two well-established TT profs who bring some equity to the deal). In short, those fairly high-sounding salaries are high enough to keep new hires who've done a bit of research from turning the department's offers down flat, but only just (we do regularly lose promising assistant profs to areas with more reasonable costs of living, and some members of the department have very long commutes from more affordable areas).
What the tenure-line profs prefer not to think about is what the non-TT faculty -- full-time contingents like me, and part-time adjuncts -- can afford. 8 years after I finished my Ph.D., 10 years after I was hired at my present institution, and 20 years after I began teaching as a TA, I'm making just over 40K, or about 2/3 of what an entry-level tenure track professor in my department makes. The largest raise I've ever had was when someone decided that paying PhDs 30K was indefensible, and raised the minimum to 40K -- a change for which I'm profoundly grateful, but it does undermine the concept of merit raises or rewards for seniority/experience, since the great majority of us -- new hires and long-timers alike -- are now clustered tightly just above that 40K mark. We can boost our incomes with summer teaching, but it's still a stretch to rent a one-bedroom apartment; most of us are in shared situations (either with roommates or with a better-paid spouse/partner -- the situation for which the pay scale seems to have been originally devised). We have good benefits (health insurance and employer-paid retirement contributions), and some job security (multi-year contracts for some of us who've been on board longer, but there's a cap, so noone else will get one until someone else leaves, or dies). We've even got the beginnings of a promotion system: one can (in theory, and sometimes in fact) become a non-tenured associate or even full professor. But those titles don't bring a higher salary, or, as far as I can tell, any other tangible benefit, so there's no real career track, and no guarantee that the value of our salaries won't erode to the point where it no longer represents a living wage.
[Continued from above due to character limits] The part-time contingents/adjuncts, of course, are paid even less, and receive fewer, if any, benefits (some can buy into health insurance). I frankly don't know how some of them manage at all (although I managed for several years on adjunct wages -- my memory of that period is pretty foggy, partly due, I'm sure, to the effects of stress and sleep deprivation. I had pretty much decided I had to stop -- both because I couldn't make it financially and because I felt I was selling my labor short -- right about the time I got my present full-time job; I'm getting close to that point again). As far as I can tell, even for those who have fairly regular gigs at several institutions (an approach which is made possible by the relatively high concentration of institutions of higher learning in our area), it's not a viable long-term employment strategy for the primary wage-earner in a household.
ReplyDeleteAll of which makes me wonder whether a system that is so dependent on contingent labor can survive. At the very least, it seems to me that universities have a perverse incentive to keep churning out new M.A.s and Ph.D.s (or at least ABDs), since those of us who are middle-aged and stuck in the contingent rut have to seriously consider finding other work. After a few decades of watching that happen, one would think that the newly-minted grads might just go straight on to the other work. But perhaps I'm underestimating the lure of academic life -- after all, I haven't left yet.
texpat76 said...
ReplyDelete> Throw off your chains or quit bitching
> about your employment situation.
Hey, I did something just as effective, less risky to me, and probably much quicker: I voted with my feet, by getting myself a tenure-track position at another university. Serves the fuckers that ran my old university right: living well is the best revenge. Didn't I say this in my post? Don't worry, it's in a conservative part of California.
> College Boy said...
ReplyDelete> Even if the bubble doesn't burst, it will
> be Armageddon for higher education when the
> Boomers' kids run out and baby bust
> generation's kids are filling (or rather not
> filling) the seats. I remember when I was in
> college in the late eighties they were
> converting doubles into singles.
Isn't demographics a major cause of the decline in standards that profs started noticing in the '80s? Henry Bauer's 1997 article, "The New Generations: Students Who Don't Study" discussed this, and so did the 1996 book, "Generation X Goes to College," by Peter Sachs. That's all we need: more pressure to keep those seats filled, because of declining enrollments. If you count the Baby Boom officially ending in 1964, this means we can expect this in 10-15 years. I can hardly wait.