On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 12:29 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
> what is the drive behind higher tuition? i see a few things going on but
> don't really know. someone correct where i've got it wrong:
>
> 1. the decline of research grant funding from government/NGO sources
> (started in the 80s with the waves of retrenchment shutting down what were
> once well-funded research programs sponsored by NIH, for instance.)
>
The biggest thing is that, in 1977, most public universities got 75% or more of their funding from the state budget and now it is almost universally around or below 25%... also, the vast majority of public universities had very little in the way of research demands - they were usually publishing more than grant-earning, anyway - most were simply not Carnegie/Research I schools.
There has actually been an increase, once steady - now incremental - in the amount of federal, foundation and private research dollars available... the issue is that there is ever greater competition from ever larger numbers of university faculty for those dollars. Of course, MOST of it still goes to Research I labs but more and more gets more and more dispersed across more and more schools in need of more and more overhead (even though studies show that, especially w/r/t large projects, cost recovery/overhead does not cover - much less exceed, as Uni Presidents tell legislators it will - the actual infrastructural and administrative costs of the research itself.)
>
> 2. unis have been dealing with the pressure so far first by retrenchment,
> offering early retirment, cutting costs, shuffling off burden of teaching
> load on to adjuncts and TAs. they've reached their limit.
>
This is true, but they have also frozen salaries and forced benefits buy backs... and continue to do so. On-line teaching - most of which, even at a place like CMU that has a national reputation as a leader in this stuff - is cheap, makes a boatload of money but also has really high drop out rates and a perpetual push to dumb down the material. Jeffrey is right that on-line teaching CAN be really really good at teaching/discussing but it takes a massive effort up front - rarely at all well remunerated - to set a class up for this to occur.
>
> 3. decline of gov grant monies
>
Again, not really true, just more of an increase in competition for grant monies not increasing as fast as competition for them.
>
> 4. rise of student loan market (and all the tertiary products)
>
Not sure how this increases tuition, though there has been an explosion in the number of often high paid administrators and the amount of usually under paid administrative staff to "service" students in these areas and others.
>
> 5. demand to run uni like a business - started in early 90s -- to deliver
> profits. used to be that the competition meant that unis would try to offer
> more "value" such as "student centered research university" to justify why
> they were charging so much tuition. No longer possible? Must raise tuition
> even more?
>
I don't think it is to run public universities like a profit-making business, it is to run it like a fiscally-efficient business so as to make cost-cutting all that more reasonable
>
> 6. demand - status competition?
>
This does come out in the competition to provide students with the most infrastructural amenities/buildings. Along these lines, Michigan used to fund 75% of all new building and building renovation costs... now that there is more and more competition over students/tuition, there is more and more building happening on all campuses but the state only pays 25% now - and fundraising has been a nightmare since 2008 (and many administrations are incompetent at it - or sell the university's soul to get it.
>
> 7. recent surge - decline of revenues due to burst of real estate bubble
>
This is right but leaves out the perpetual increases in benefits costs independent of revenue.
>
> 8. unis paying for idiotic expansion into real estate where they once
> bought and built as investment, used "equity" for funding - no longer
> possible with real estate crash
I could see this more as an issue with private universities than with public given that the public sector seems hell bent on privatizing its land holdings rather than in buying up more.
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