{"id":6616,"date":"2013-09-08T12:42:54","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T16:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=6616"},"modified":"2013-09-08T13:18:37","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T17:18:37","slug":"six-realities-of-public-higher-education-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=6616","title":{"rendered":"Six realities of public higher education spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

With President Obama’s speech last month in Buffalo, and Dylan Matthews’ Tuition Is Too Damn High’ series in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>‘s Wonkblog, institutional and student costs have been at the focus of higher-ed policy debate at the start of this academic year. Late last week, Matthews concluded his series with a list of ideas<\/a> to reduce student costs. He correctly separates research universities from public community colleges and masters-only public universities. I think Matthews fell prey to the Last Chapter Problem for historians, or in his case the last-article-in-a-series curse, wherein everything is supposed to lead up to a logical set of recommendations, and in his case, they are more than a little scattered.<\/p>\n

In Inside Higher Ed on Tuesday I laid out what I hope is a set of\u00a0practical policy choices for the Obama administration<\/a>, and this week, I have some advice for state legislators. I am splitting these into six basic realities and then (later this week) some policy suggestions. If there is an overarching principle to keep in mind it is this: political and institutional ambitions always translate into long-term spending commitments.<\/p>\n

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  1. Public higher education spending is political, public research university spending doubly so<\/strong>. Dylan Matthews is correct to note that the segment of public higher education where tuition and spending have risen without the same tuition-appropriation relationship<\/a>\u00a0as in community colleges is in research universities, so state legislators need to understand why public research university spending often increases more than spending at public community colleges, four-year colleges, and masters-focused universities. First stop: the mirror. When education is considered a public good and tied to citizenship, there will always be pressures on state legislators to fund economic development in the guise of projects at local colleges, to fund a vanity project at the House Speaker’s alma mater, to shoot the moon on some grandiose goal, and in general to look after whatever is the pet project of powerful legislators that session. Every special earmark is money taken away from the general educational needs of the state. Yes, yes, I know,\u00a0your<\/em> earmark is a good investment. That is an irregular verb in political English: my<\/strong> earmark is investment, your<\/strong> investment is an unjustified earmark, and his<\/strong> boondoggle is nothing but political vanity.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. The balance wheel is usually combined with shiny-object syndrome<\/strong>. About 15 years ago,\u00a0Harold Hovey argued<\/a>\u00a0that state legislatures treat higher education financing as a “balance wheel,” with much greater swings in public funding for higher education than for other areas in a state budget. In down years, higher education budgets are often cut much worse than other areas of state budgets. And in up years, the extra funding is also disproportionate… with a big but<\/strong>. Yes, there is extra funding, which\u00a0often goes to dedicated projects rather than operational foundations. If you wanted to generate incentives for operational inefficiency, I cannot think of a better way to do it than hire very ambitious people with a long memory and then give them uncertain funding and a competition for politicians’ attention in good times. That is exactly what happens in public research universities, which will happily grab extra resources for speculative projects because, well, you never know when those resources are going to disappear down a legislative black hole. That does not drive the entire dynamics of a university, but if you accumulate enough special-project funding, the institution has large long-term commitments without reliable funding for the basic job of educating students.<\/li>\n
  3. Public boards of regents or trustees frequently hire ambitious, overconfident presidents and chancellors for research universities<\/strong>. I challenge you to find a public governing body that will want to hire a research university leader to keep the institution running as it is with a goal of extraordinary institutional competence, but no major change in scope or direction. University governing bodies tend to hire ambitious leaders because they tend their institutions in an ambitious manner. That collective ambition in public research universities has consequences on the spending side: the expansion of spending on athletics, colleges of medicine and university hospitals, and doctoral programs. Whether the goal is to join the elite American Association of Universities or to rise in\u00a0U.S. News<\/em> rankings, presidents and chancellors like to make a mark, and usually that involves increasing spending — and not necessarily in undergraduate instruction.<\/li>\n
  4. Somebody has to pay for a residential college experience<\/strong>. This is the corollary to #3, though I am phrasing it here for the specific case of student housing. If a university heads towards a residential model of the student population rather than serving a mostly commuting population, somebody has to pay for buildings, upkeep, and supervision of students. If the legislature does not fund dorm construction, then a university will go into debt and need to find a revenue stream for bondholders. And once you have students living on or near campus, the university’s security expenses increase, as do the expenses of student affairs and residential-living staff, and these are expenses that become long-term commitments. Repeat for athletics, health care, and doctoral education. ((Let me put this point in a broader context: a\u00a0great doctoral program is a significant public service of a research university, both for the specialized expertise of its graduates and the different level of research a great doctoral program can conduct. But once you start a doctoral program, you are also committing an institution to a certain model of faculty workload, and faculty correctly perceive an ethical obligation to the doctoral students they bring in.))<\/li>\n
  5. Tenure is cheaper than institutional ambition<\/strong>. As many have observed, faculty salaries are not a primary driver behind increasing costs of research universities<\/a>. An important reason for this is the fact that over the past half-century, colleges and universities have shifted instruction significantly away from full-time, tenure-track faculty and towards either part-time teachers (adjuncts and graduate students) or non-tenure-track instructors. But even when you look just at full-time faculty, ambition trumps tenure. Several associate professors in English or anthropology collectively cost less than an associate vice chancellor for health innovation initiatives (or similar positions). When one runs a large research university, ambition-related commitments add up in sometimes strange ways: a former CFO of my institution told me years ago that it cost less to house a faculty member in her or his office than to keep a lab animal alive. But so-called comparative-medicine facilities created a long-term commitment my institution made for the sake of winning large grants in health and medicine. They have become a permanent speculative commitment.<\/li>\n
  6. Do not expect that higher education can get significantly less expensive than what community colleges spend<\/strong>. Community colleges are the Dollar Store of higher education. We can debate (or even better, research!) how community colleges could work\u00a0better<\/em>, but it is largely unrealistic to expect that some magic wand (such as MOOCs) can somehow make a college education much less expensive for society than a community college and still move a broad range of real human beings through a program. Look elsewhere to economize.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As an historian of education, I know this looks like an impossible set of realities if the goal is to prioritize spending in public higher education, since most of the cause of our woes is tied to institutional and political ambitions. Good luck restraining those ambitions! A little later this week, I will present some practical suggestions for reprioritizing public higher education spending and squeezing some more value out of investing in good public higher education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With President Obama’s speech last month in Buffalo, and Dylan Matthews’ Tuition Is Too Damn High’ series in the\u00a0Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, institutional and student costs have been at the focus of higher-ed policy debate at the start of this academic year. Late last week, Matthews concluded his series with a list of ideas to reduce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-1II","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6616"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6656,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6616\/revisions\/6656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}