College Has Gotten 12 Times More Expensive in One Generation

[Axulus]

What you should really be wondering is at what point colleges will start decreasing their prices and their spending.

Is that what I really should be wondering? How has college spending been doing over that same time period that tuition to students has been skyrocketing?

Is there some reason why you believe unlimited funding would not simply be matched with increased spending?

Maybe because historically more government funding has resulted in lower tuition costs to students? Why would that change? And if it was in danger of changing why can't government put strings on their continued funding with progress in lowering student tuition costs?

I presume you can demonstrate that the states with the highest funding levels for colleges also have the lowest tuition costs, based on your above assertions?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Is this another one of your "I really haven't thought this one through and am just going to complain" threads without actually demonstrating much other than a cost increase?

What is there to demonstrate? You provide the evidence that they can't scale up since you are the one proclaiming that they can't, not me.

I suggested it wasn't quite as simple to scale up.

Please also include in your analysis how a 50% increase in the student body requires a far higher percent of their budgets be spent on administration, fancy rec centers, expensive modernist architecture on new buildings, satellite projects 20 miles away to demonstrate how environmentally innovative they are, among other things.

Oh, I understand. You don't have any numbers and need someone to make your case for you? It appears a number in here have noted admin costs are an issue, increased student attendance is an issue, and decreased state funding is an issue.

What is your point?

 

[J842P]

Here is an interesting article on the subject that seems pretty balanced to me:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/o...ition-costs-so-much.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

 

[Axulus]

Here is an interesting article on the subject that seems pretty balanced to me:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/o...ition-costs-so-much.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

Important point from the article:

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

To the "just increase state spending to make college free" crowd, your simplistic solution doesn't seem to have worked so well in the past.

 

[ksen]

Is that what I really should be wondering? How has college spending been doing over that same time period that tuition to students has been skyrocketing?

Is there some reason why you believe unlimited funding would not simply be matched with increased spending?

Maybe because historically more government funding has resulted in lower tuition costs to students? Why would that change? And if it was in danger of changing why can't government put strings on their continued funding with progress in lowering student tuition costs?

I presume you can demonstrate that the states with the highest funding levels for colleges also have the lowest tuition costs, based on your above assertions?

Is there some reason why you believe unlimited funding would not simply be matched with increased spending?

I presume you can demonstrate the the states with the highest funding levels for colleges also have the highest increases in spending based on your above assertions?

 

[Axulus]

Is that what I really should be wondering? How has college spending been doing over that same time period that tuition to students has been skyrocketing?

Is there some reason why you believe unlimited funding would not simply be matched with increased spending?

Maybe because historically more government funding has resulted in lower tuition costs to students? Why would that change? And if it was in danger of changing why can't government put strings on their continued funding with progress in lowering student tuition costs?

I presume you can demonstrate that the states with the highest funding levels for colleges also have the lowest tuition costs, based on your above assertions?

Is there some reason why you believe unlimited funding would not simply be matched with increased spending?

I presume you can demonstrate the the states with the highest funding levels for colleges also have the highest increases in spending based on your above assertions?

Given that a 380 percent increase in state spending on college education in the 80's vs the 60's did not result in lower tuition costs; tuition costs in fact increased during that time period (they about doubled), does not give much support for your assertions that state funding levels is the cause of the problem and the solution is to just increase state funding levels.

 

[Trausti]

Important point from the article:

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

To the "just increase state spending to make college free" crowd, your simplistic solution doesn't seem to have worked so well in the past.

This I think is the key issue. The more money public universities get, the more they will spend. There will always be an excuse for more spending. If universities really wanted to teach students a valuable life lesson, they'd slash their spending as an example of living within your means.

 

[ksen]

Important point from the article:

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

To the "just increase state spending to make college free" crowd, your simplistic solution doesn't seem to have worked so well in the past.

And yet before Reagan Revolution started chopping at public higher education funding tuitions were going down.

http://trends.collegeboard.org/coll...oom-board-time-1974-75-2014-15-selected-years

- - - Updated - - -

Given that a 380 percent increase in state spending on college education in the 80's vs the 60's did not result in lower tuition costs; tuition costs in fact increased during that time period (they about doubled), does not give much support for your assertions that state funding levels is the cause of the problem and the solution is to just increase state funding levels.

I don't take that as a given since I just posted a table showing public tuition was decreasing in the 70s.

 

[Axulus]

In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance.

The number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is not enough work to keep all of them busy. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. This includes endless rounds of meetings, mostly with other administrators, often consisting of reports from and plans for other meetings. For example, at a recent “president’s staff meeting” at an Ohio community college, eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings. At a gathering of the “Process Management Steering Committee” of a Midwestern community college, virtually the entire meeting was devoted to planning subsequent meetings by process management teams, including the “search committee training team,” the “faculty advising and mentoring team,” and the “culture team,” which was said to be meeting with “renewed energy.” The culture team was apparently also close to making a recommendation on the composition of a “Culture Committee.” Since culture is a notoriously abstruse issue, this committee may need to meet for years, if not decades, to unravel its complexities.

When they face particularly challenging problems, academic administrators sometimes find that ordinary meetings in campus offices do not allow them the freedom from distraction they require. To allow them to focus fully and without interruption, administrators sometimes find it necessary to schedule off-campus administrative retreats where they can work without fear that the day-to-day concerns of the campus will disturb their deliberations. Sometimes these retreats include athletic and role-playing activities that are supposed to help improve the staff’s spirit of camaraderie and ability to function as a team. For example, at a 2007 professional development retreat, Michigan Tech staffers broke into teams and spent several hours building furniture from pieces of cardboard and duct tape. Many staff retreats also include presentations by professional speakers who appear to specialize in psychobabble. Topics at recent retreats included “Do You Want to Succeed?” “Reflective Resensitizing,” and “Waking Up the Inner World.” In all likelihood, the administrators and staffers privileged to attend these important talks spent the next several weeks reporting on them at meetings with colleagues who had been deprived of the opportunity to learn firsthand how to make certain that their inner worlds remained on alert.

Administrative budgets frequently include travel funds, on the theory that conference participation will hone administrators’ skills and provide them with new information and ideas that will ultimately serve their school’s interests. We can be absolutely certain that this would be the only reason administrators would even consider dragging themselves to Maui during the winter for a series of workshops sponsored by the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Given the expense and hardship usually occasioned by travel to Hawaii, it is entirely appropriate for colleges to foot this sort of bill.

Another ubiquitous make-work exercise is the formation of a “strategic plan.” Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. This is typically a lengthy document— some are 100 pages long or more—that purports to articulate the school’s mission, its leadership’s vision of the future, and the various steps that are needed to achieve the school’s goals. The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs.

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts and sciences strategic plan in the last fifteen years. No one can remember much about any of these plans, but another one is currently in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America’s colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the ongoing growth of administrative power.

There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as a class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?—more administration.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ma...inistrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

 

[ksen]

Here is an interesting article on the subject that seems pretty balanced to me:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/o...ition-costs-so-much.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

A rebuttal . . . or clarification

College tuition is getting more expensive. Here’s who’s actually to blame.

 

[ksen]

In particular, administrative growth may be seen primarily as a result of efforts by administrators to aggrandize their own roles in academic life. Students of bureaucracy have frequently observed that administrators have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase its staff and budget. To justify such increases, they often seek to capture functions currently performed by others or invent new functions for themselves that might or might not further the organization’s main mission.

Such behavior is common on today’s campuses. At one school, an inventive group of administrators created the “Committee on Traditions,” whose mission seemed to be the identification and restoration of forgotten university traditions or, failing that, the creation of new traditions. Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones, unless, of course, their home was in a war zone. But perhaps the expansion of university bureaucracies is best illustrated by an ad placed by a Colorado school, which sought a “Coordinator of College Liaisons.” Depending on how you read it, this is either a ridiculous example of bureaucratic layering or an intrusion into an area of student life that hardly requires administrative assistance.

The number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is not enough work to keep all of them busy. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. This includes endless rounds of meetings, mostly with other administrators, often consisting of reports from and plans for other meetings. For example, at a recent “president’s staff meeting” at an Ohio community college, eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings. At a gathering of the “Process Management Steering Committee” of a Midwestern community college, virtually the entire meeting was devoted to planning subsequent meetings by process management teams, including the “search committee training team,” the “faculty advising and mentoring team,” and the “culture team,” which was said to be meeting with “renewed energy.” The culture team was apparently also close to making a recommendation on the composition of a “Culture Committee.” Since culture is a notoriously abstruse issue, this committee may need to meet for years, if not decades, to unravel its complexities.

When they face particularly challenging problems, academic administrators sometimes find that ordinary meetings in campus offices do not allow them the freedom from distraction they require. To allow them to focus fully and without interruption, administrators sometimes find it necessary to schedule off-campus administrative retreats where they can work without fear that the day-to-day concerns of the campus will disturb their deliberations. Sometimes these retreats include athletic and role-playing activities that are supposed to help improve the staff’s spirit of camaraderie and ability to function as a team. For example, at a 2007 professional development retreat, Michigan Tech staffers broke into teams and spent several hours building furniture from pieces of cardboard and duct tape. Many staff retreats also include presentations by professional speakers who appear to specialize in psychobabble. Topics at recent retreats included “Do You Want to Succeed?” “Reflective Resensitizing,” and “Waking Up the Inner World.” In all likelihood, the administrators and staffers privileged to attend these important talks spent the next several weeks reporting on them at meetings with colleagues who had been deprived of the opportunity to learn firsthand how to make certain that their inner worlds remained on alert.

Administrative budgets frequently include travel funds, on the theory that conference participation will hone administrators’ skills and provide them with new information and ideas that will ultimately serve their school’s interests. We can be absolutely certain that this would be the only reason administrators would even consider dragging themselves to Maui during the winter for a series of workshops sponsored by the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Given the expense and hardship usually occasioned by travel to Hawaii, it is entirely appropriate for colleges to foot this sort of bill.

Another ubiquitous make-work exercise is the formation of a “strategic plan.” Until recent years, colleges engaged in little formal planning. Today, however, virtually every college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. This is typically a lengthy document— some are 100 pages long or more—that purports to articulate the school’s mission, its leadership’s vision of the future, and the various steps that are needed to achieve the school’s goals. The typical plan takes six months to two years to write and requires countless hours of work from senior administrators and their staffs.

A plan that was really designed to guide an organization’s efforts to achieve future objectives, as it might be promulgated by a corporation or a military agency, would typically present concrete objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget. Some university plans approach this model. Most, however, are simply expanded “vision statements” that are often forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts and sciences strategic plan in the last fifteen years. No one can remember much about any of these plans, but another one is currently in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America’s colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the ongoing growth of administrative power.

There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as a class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?—more administration.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ma...inistrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

tl;dr

 

[ronburgundy]

What all the claims comparing funding now to the 60's tries to hide and/or lie about is that the rise in funding ended in the 1990's and have been declining since, down 30% over the last 25 years, which (as shown in the OP graph) is the same period in which the steepest rise in tuition has occurred.

The blue line shows the 50% increase in students enrollment in just the last 30 years, while the orange line shows that the per student state funding peaked in 1990, then went down 10% from 1990-2008, then down 25% during the recession, and has not been increased hardly at all during the recovery.


This National Science Foundation report reaffirms this fact, focusing on the major large Universities.

Over the decade [2002-2010], per-student state support to major research universities dropped by an average of 20% in inflation-adjusted dollars. In 10 states, the decline ranged from 30% to 48%.

Not surprisingly, students' tuition went up about the same % in inflation adjusted dollars during that same period. IOW, students are now paying for what the State's stopped paying for since 1990, and that is an undeniable fact.

In addition there are increases in per student costs that are completely ignored by the OP and other cited links and their blind followers.
As I mentioned before, there is the cost of new land and new construction and major renovation that are all caused by the increase in the number of students. These are new costs that simply did not exist a generation ago. Thus, they add to per student cost.
There have also been skyrocketing health insurance costs per employee and per student (The University subsidizes student health care beyond the fees that students pay). Also, the tech boom since 1980 has meant massive increase in non-teaching specialists and professionals, such as the army of IT people needed to set up and maintain computers and networks in every classroom, office, and lab. Plus the costs of all this tech hardware itself and the software licenses.

Sure, there are administrators with largely useless jobs, and some with bloated salaries. But they account for a tiny % of the increase in per student spending at Universities. For each one of them there are 100 highly trained and costly tech and computer specialists that are vital to modernizing classrooms and research in ways that simply were not an issue the period prior to 1980 to which current costs are being compared.

 

[ksen]

And to add one more thing to Ron's list: skyrocketing textbook costs.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

And to add one more thing to Ron's list: skyrocketing textbook costs.

You got something against a new edition every month?

 

[ksen]

yes . . . deez nuts

 

[AthenaAwakened]

There is more than one reason for the increase in the college tuition, and those reasons did not spring fully formed from the mind of Zeus.

Plus there are other things to think about.

Would the increases in tuition matter if wages had not been stagnant or experienced anemic growth for over three decades for 70% of wage earners.

Low-wage Americans are not the only workers affected by stagnant wages and rising inequality. The middle class has also experienced stagnating hourly wages over the last generation, and even those with college degrees have seen no pay growth over the last 10 years. Since the late 1970s, wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution. Even wages for the bottom 70 percent of four-year college graduates have been flat since 2000, and wages in most STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) occupations have grown anemically over the past decade

http://www.epi.org/publication/causes-of-wage-stagnation/

Exactly what kind of an education are we getting for the money spent? (Please note I asked about the actual education, not what the sheepskin says or the cache connected to the degree)

Why not fewer classes and more paid apprenticeships? Why law school when you could "read law" in an actual law practice? Why not the same for accounting? Finance? Business in general?

Why are we wedded to and industrial model of education?

Talk to a professionally successful person and at some point, not matter how much they may praise their education, they will tell you there are things you just can't learn in a traditional school, pieces of knowledge that made the difference in succeeding and failing.

Rising tuition is only a problem if college is the only game in town.

 

[ronburgundy]

And to add one more thing to Ron's list: skyrocketing textbook costs.

Yeah, the textbook industry is sickening and unethical (and not surprisingly very much for-profit).

Cost per book is often $150, which means $2000 per year. When I teach, I try to cut that in half by selecting the least expensive soft covers when possible, old editions, and free on-line articles whenever adequate.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Blame Reagan and movement conservatism according to this guy.



Sounds like undeserved conservative bashing to me.

It sucked for me because I couldn't get any aid during those times, but it was a boon for Bill Clinton who ran on restoring student aid. Once aid became uberavailable that's when tuition began its march to the top.

Note that this is exactly the opposite of what would be expected, thus the increase in tuition is likely unrelated to the reduction in student aid. (At public colleges it's at least partially related to less money being provided to the schools, a fellow traveler with the cuts in student aid but not caused by it.)

 

[Underseer]

And this is at the same time some nations are moving to make college free.

This clearly shows a nations priorities.

Some nations would seek to educate as many as possible to the greatest extent as possible.

Some would try to saddle their youth with great debt and deny many the opportunity for advanced education. The diseased societies working on destructive principles would do this.

Yep, the other industrialized nations make it clear through their policy that they don't think enough of their citizens have advanced educations, while America has made it clear that we think too many of our citizens have advanced education.

The "free market" has spoken.

 

[ronburgundy]

It sucked for me because I couldn't get any aid during those times, but it was a boon for Bill Clinton who ran on restoring student aid. Once aid became uberavailable that's when tuition began its march to the top.

Note that this is exactly the opposite of what would be expected, thus the increase in tuition is likely unrelated to the reduction in student aid. (At public colleges it's at least partially related to less money being provided to the schools, a fellow traveler with the cuts in student aid but not caused by it.)

Federal Student aid does not directly impact tuition, because it is merely where the student get their money to pay their share of the bill, not what determines what their share of the bill is. That is determined by how much the per student costs the University can get from other sources, like the State budget (and they have gotten less every year since 1990, which is the #1 reason why the student's share has gone up in those years (As I detailed in my above posts).

However, student aid does have some indirect impact, and the actual and expected impact is to increase tuition. Lots of Fed Aid means more students wanting to attend college because they don't have to pay for it. This increased demand allows schools that are struggling to meet their costs to raise tuition. Also, increased applications and enrollments create increased per enrollee costs. For every enrollee, there are many more applicants. Evaluating those takes time and money. Thus, enrolled student tuition must cover the costs of evaluating the applications for students that are rejected and those accepted but who went elsewhere. Thus anything that increases the number of applications, increases per enrollee costs. Also, large increase in actual enrollment requires massive cost increase in purchase of lands and creation of buildings, which are not the kinds of costs that are part of a routine per student costs when the existing infrastructure can handle the number of students.