Equity in College Admissions

MWolf
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:40:04 +0000

It isn’t that I disagree regarding reducing administrative bloat, btw. College administrations have become their own entities which think that they are the college, and that the faculty work for them. In fact, the opposite is true - the faculty are the college, and students are one of the two purposes of the college. The administrators are there to make sure that these two missions get accomplished.

Faculty work for the public, and the administrators should support the faculty and the students.

However, once the administrators started thinking of themselves as the center of the university, they started upping their salaries, and created an entire new set of jobs of administrators for the administrators.

It is clear that the amount of money that colleges spend on faculty salaries is not increasing, as tenured positions are being replaced with underpaid adjuncts, who not only get paid less per hour, but also usually do not receive any benefits.

However, I do stand by my claim that the services that parents and students want are far more extensive that what there used to be available at colleges.

Happytimes2001:

Here’s the first article I found.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/#4f298ed9456a
From the article:
By the 2014-2015 school year, total instructional costs had climbed to $148 billion, while the same grouping of administrative expenses had risen to $122.3 billion.
( Even I’m blown over by that number, I would have guessed the useless staff was about 25%)

When you consider how much administration is actually needed, $122.3 billion is about 25% useless staff and unearned bonuses for the higher administration. There is also a bad distribution of the resources - while departmental faculty are wasting their time photocopying finals, the second vice president for architectural quality will have two secretaries.

However, despite these amounts, we are talking about 3%-6% of the part of the institutional budget for the instruction part of the college’s mission. Instructional costs do not include academic support (which is usually twice as much), student aid, student services, upkeep of facilities, etc, all which come from tuition. So administrative bloat will account for about 4%, maybe 5%, of the tuition bill. However, 75% of the tuition bill is what students are paying more than their parents (in today dollars, 1970s tuition would be about 25% of what it is today), so administrative bloat only accounts for about 5% of that increase, at most.

The largest chunk of increase is the loss of state funding. After that, it likely depends on the college. For some, it is spending on the bells and whistles which I mentioned above, while for others is is things like state-of-the-art teaching facilities, like labs, IT, etc, which, arguably are required if we want to train students really well.

Administrative bloat is likely the last on the list, though 5% is nothing to sneeze at either.

Happytimes2001:

It’s a large reason why costs are so expensive and won’t come down until people agree that classes are the most important things.

It’s a very American thing - “the college experience”. You can see a lot of it here, with many people arguing about the “quality of the experience”, with a lot of that not being academics.

Again, if people were willing to pay the taxes to support a state education system with all of the bells and whistles, it would work.

OOS tuition would still need to be high, though, since asking the residents of a state to have their taxes subsidize kids from families who can afford to pay taxes, but are not, is an issue.

Alternatively, support could come at the federal level.