interesteddad

JohnWesley:

Wesleyan was nice enough to provide detail on allocation of plant operations in their financial report.

They have $43 million in physical plant expenses as follows:

Physical plant operations $ 19,392
Major maintenance expenses & non-capitalized costs 5,815
Depreciation 9,063
Interest expense 8,979
Total expenditures to be allocated $ 43,249

Instead of putting this money in the Institutional Support bucket as Swarthmore does, they allocate it as follows based on a square footage of building space formula:

Instruction $ 12,910
Research 4,325
Libraries 3,153
Student services 904
Institutional support 1,246
Auxiliary activities 20,711
Total allocations $ 43,249

That's fine. Perfectly reasonable. But, you then can't compare the Institutional Support category as "bloated overhead" versus "lean overhead" when one includes all physical plant operation expenses and the other only includes $1.2 million out of $43 million in actual expense. They are both spending the money on the physical plant. It just a question of looking at the buckets where the money gets allocated or not. IPEDS makes no distinction.

You really have to look at the totals to avoid these pitfalls. Otherwise you are counting lawnmowing and electricity as a bloated "instructional expense" for one school with an offsetting lean "institutional support" overhead versus a school with the same expense showing a lean "instructional expense" without lawn mowing and a bloated "institutional support". It all comes out in the wash when you look at total dollars divided by total students.