AMERICA’S
UNIVERSITIES: HIGH COSTS FOR LOW RESULTS, by Frank
Vernuccio, 2/8/17
If a key industry
dramatically increased its prices far higher and faster than the cost of
inflation, while delivering a product that was manifestly declining in quality
while company officials openly expressed contempt for those paying for its
services, there is little doubt that politicians and pundits would rapidly and
loudly call for investigations and the imposition of regulations.
That is precisely what
is occurring in America’s colleges, where tuition rates have been hiked by 74% since 1995. However, they are
escaping the scrutiny they truly deserve.
As the New York Analysis
of Policy and Government has noted, “Stunning tuition cost hikes have outpaced
price increases in just about every other area. U.S. News reported
in 2013 that “According
to data from the Labor Department, the price index for college tuition grew by
nearly 80 percent between August 2003 and August 2013. That is nearly twice as
fast as growth in costs in medical care, another area widely recognized for
fast-rising prices.
It’s
also more than twice as fast as the overall consumer price index during that
same period.” During that time period, college tuition increased 79.5%,
while the Consumer Price index increased only 26.7%, medical care, 43.1%, food
and beverages, 31.2%, and housing 22.8%. The money hasn’t gone into improving
the educational experience of students, and it hasn’t gone into the salaries of
professors.
A Washington Monthly review found
that ‘as colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not
chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources—that is, on
paying faculty. They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and
staff resources.
A
comprehensive study published by the Delta Cost Project in 2010
reported that between 1998 and 2008, America’s private colleges increased
spending on instruction by 22 percent while increasing spending on
administration and staff support by 36 percent.
Parents
who wonder why college tuition is so high and why it increases so much each
year may be less than pleased to learn that their sons and daughters will have
an opportunity to interact with more administrators and staffers… Over the past
four decades…the number of full-time professors or ‘full-time equivalents’—that
is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours
equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent.
That
percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same
time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers
employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240
percent, respectively.”
Individuals are free to
decide whether it is appropriate to overpay for declining quality, but
taxpayers are not. State colleges are clearly supported by taxpayer funds, but
so are for-profit universities.
Open Secrets notes:
“For-profit institutions derive much of their funding from the federal
government, in the form of financial aid grants and subsidized student loans.”
The Fiscal Times found that
“Between
2000 and 2010…The portion [of students] receiving federal aid skyrocketed from
31.6 percent to 47.8 percent, and the average award nearly doubled. In
addition, the percentage taking out student loans climbed from 40.1 percent to
50.1 percent, and the average borrowing rose 76 percent. The
ramp-up in loans to students has not only driven up costs but has
undermined the value of a college degree.
Some
30 percent of people ages 25 to 29 are college graduates today, up from 12
percent in the 1970s…Richard Vedder, economics professor at Ohio University,
has written that we have one million retail sales clerks and 115,000 janitors with college
diplomas. At the same time, one fifth of the country’s managers say
they can’t find skilled workers to fill job
openings.”
The Rand Corporation questions the effect of tuition
subsidies. “…almost 30 years ago,
then-Secretary of Education William Bennett warned that tuition subsidies may
also encourage institutions to raise tuition, since the government would foot
the bill. Research on what came to be known as the ‘Bennett Hypothesis’ increasingly suggests the secretary was correct.”
Comments
There are
two kinds of colleges; those who require very high SAT scores to get in and
everybody else. Our globalist companies
gobble up good engineering graduates and beg for more. They recruit at colleges
that require very high SAT scores. Some
companies, like Microsoft, select the best students when they are Freshmen and
give them summer jobs throughout college.
At the
same time, students who can’t get into the best colleges go elsewhere, where
they have their low abilities matched to a degree with little value. These are the folks who are still working for
minimum wage after graduation.
Government
subsidies and “programs” for education have all but ruined our once excellent
education system in the US. Improving the “drop out” rate is the wrong end of
the problem. The best thing we can do is to increase K-12 student proficiency
in reading, writing and math and focus on identifying student talents. We also
need to start teaching things that are actually true and end political
indoctrination in all of our schools.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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