Cost of Universities (from textbook discussion.)

(From the textbook discussion)

I am astounded at the price of a University education. I went to a University, and did not really enjoy the experience. I found it to be somewhat of a ripoff. Today, I would like to know why University education costs so damn much.

I looked up the website of the University of Idaho. I picked University of Idaho (or U of I) because it is a regualr four year University in a regular state in flyover country. I guess Idaho has some rich people in it (Sun Valley?) but most people there seem middle class. Probably because U and I has a cool nickname, Go Vandals!

The U of I’s state tuition per year is **$14,070 **per year. This is tuition, room and board and books. Nothing about “activity fees” and other hidden costs. But $14,000 a year is **$56,000 **for four years. That’s a lot of money.


I decided to break down the costs. What are the real costs? Most of my figures, especially about College professors is a bit of an exaggeration. I tried to find out how much an average professor makes and his teaching hours, but I was mostly unsuccessful. If you know, please tell.

*A class has very little overhead. What does a class need?

*A building.. A lot of buildings you see on the major campuses are very old but sturdy. The oldest building on my campus is the main adminstrative building, built in 1848. Most buildings even today were built back in the Great Depression, or later in the 50’s and 60’s. These buildings have long been paid for. but serve no useful purpose besides being a school building. Most new buildings were built either because of an endowment, a rich alumni, or through grants.

*The classroom. Other than possibly a computer, there is nothing expensive. Tables, chairs, blackboard. Other than the computer, things haven’t changed in classrooms in literally centuries. There are labs and equipment that costs money and thus, the student has to bear some of that cost.


***College professor. **Many times in Freshman courses, they will have a grad student teaching the class, which is kind of a rip, since we pay for PhD quality professors. It is also a rip to have to take what amounts to 13th Grade lit class when my major is not English, or even writing.

Let’s say the college professor makes $100,000 a year teaching.
The professor is teaching in the classroom for 25 hours a week. I know that most professors do not make $100K a year, but there are possibly some who make more than this, like possible law and medical professors at leading institutions.

This is 1300 hours per year. (Note, this is a 52 week year, not the holidays) Dividing pay/hours, or $100,000/1300=$77. (well 76.923077) per hour.

You have this professor for one hour, but you share him/her with 25 other students. At that rate, professor per student would cost $3.07 an hour, for a teacher making 100K a year for 25 hours a week. Multiply 15 hours a week, this would be $46.05 a week. Multiply that by 36 weeks (which are 2, 18 week semesters) and this comes out to be about $1660 dollars per year.

Note, I understand that a professor does other work besides teaching in a classroom. But this does not matter with the student.

The course needs to be paid for. Fair enough. The University is selling a service. What is a fair price. Double the professor’s salary divided by the mean number of students? So let’s say $3400 for the classes, again for a year.


There are other costs:

The Bursar/Records department. They are the ones who keep the records and take the tuition. They do the bulk of the administrative, accounting, and other mundane duties of a State U.

Let’s say 200 people worked there, all making a salary of $30K a year. That is $6 million dollars a year. If your school has 20,000 students, their pay would cost each student **$300 **(6 million / 20,000)

Campus Police. (Who basically is there to write tickets and collect fines for the University, especially from illegal parking. This is the reason, commuter students why there is never a parking space on campus unless you get there at 6 AM.) Let’s call it 100 cops, or 1 cop for 200 students. Each cop makes about 30K a year, or 3,000,000/20k students is $150a year. Cars, uniforms etc. would be another $50 a student, so**$200**

Administration. Usually the bloated University administrators with their salares, offices and PhD’s cost more than what they are worth. My University has, for example, a Dean of Students. Well, gee. Do we really need one? My Uni’s Dean of Students was someone named Sparky (dude is still there, what’s my University?) who has a PhD but who has never left that campus. he went to undergrad, Grad school, PhD school, and a job. Basically he keeps the fraternities and soroities in line. That’s Dr. Sparky’s job. I think one would be honestly shocked to see how many high salaried employees in Unis are redundant and not really needed.

Let’s say 20 top people, the Chancellor, Dean of Departments, other bigwigs making $150,000 a year, again, 3 million dollars or **$150 **a year (including Sparky.)

Custodial staff. They keep the place clean. Although there the building is paid for
there is maintenance, but that is not a major cost. Toilets, sinks and pipes need to be fixed. The building gets painted every couple of years. 100 people, making $20K a year, $2,000,000 $100 a year.

University health plan. How much does are several on campus doctors and several nurses? Lets say 5 doctors making 100K a year, and 5 nurses making 50K a year. That $750,000 per year. Or $37.50 per student a year. Considering that most college students only go there either because they are ill, hungover, or pregnant. If someone is really hurt, they will go to the hospital.

**Books. **Books are an outrageous cost in University bookstores. I started to post on the textbook thread, but my post went beyond that. On the subject of why books are so expensive, it because of suppily and demand, and also because the store runs a monopoly, or a near monopoly. Most teenage college students who’s parents have money are not going to give a shit about saving them money (I didn’t).

I remember having to take about 6 classes in my 14-16 class hour week. In my mind, no new, average sized textbook should cost more than $25. Anything more than that is anal rape without vasoline. But I, the college dean guy wants to make a profit, so I will sell the books for $50 dollars, and even buy it back for $10 bucks.(:mad: hey, I run the bookstore, I am a dick. So that’s $40 bucks a book times 10 classes a year, so $400 bucks a year)

Well, let’s get a rundown.

Per year, per student

15 hours of Class: 3400 Bursar and Admin. 300
Security/Cops 200 General Maintenance 100
Gen. Health Care 38 Books (10 books a yr.) 500 (including suppilies and shit)

$4,538 for a year.

Of course, my math is flawed, but how?

I think another thing that makes University expensive is how many non-degree specific courses one must take for a degree. Many business students for example took a class called Art History. Worthless class totally. The school claims it is a part of a “well rounded education” but that is bullshit.

Another thing was the “activity fee” that all students had to pay for mostly bullshit. Mostly arts, events, bands, shit like that. I knew a commuter student who never went and did this stuff or used any services, but he had to pay just the same.

Finally, food and housing…
How much does an office campus apartment cost in Moscow, Idaho? Just quickly glancing the ads, a one bedroom apartment that would rent to a college student would be about $500 a month, or about $6000 a year.

Food? Maybe $200-300 a month to eat like a human being. I don’t think food is such a big expense becuase people can go off campus to eat, also, a lot of espcecially fast food places have hit campus. It’s probably more expensive in the long road to basically eat campus food and cheap but high calorie foodstuffs than to live somewhere and have some real food in a real refreigerator.

Maybe since it is September, we can share our stories of angst and poverty dealing with the System of Higher Learning. My parents paid for mine, I wouldn’t of paid for it.

Two quick observations from a faculty perspective:

  1. your estimate of administrative costs is way off. Every college I’ve worked at pays its lowliest adminstrators much more than it pays 99% of the faculty, and every one has had a boatload of administrators. They earn the big bucks because it’s an open market, i.e., “We have to offer the president 700,000 per annum becase if we don’t someone else will.” Hell, I’d do his job for a mere $200 G, and I’d do it at least half as well, but they’re not looking to save costs here.

  2. Your view of requirements is typical freshman thinking–“If I’m not going to use it right now, then it’s useless.” I actually encourage my freshmen (in comp I classes) to voice these idiotic objections in their first few essays, so I can get a discussion going about requirements, and what function they serve. Quickly, your degree says to future employers and grad schools, etc., that this person is not only qualified to do low-level accounting, but is literate, able to absorb new and sometimes difficult material, can express his thoughts clearly. IOW, you may think you’re going to be an accountant forever (at age 20) but you probably ain’t, and when you get promoted you’re going to need skills beyond your entry-level job but you won’t have time or energy to get them at that point. And if you’re incapable of getting them, we need to find that out sooner rather than later.

Your total comes out to about $12,000 with food and housing, so that doesn’t look too different from their costs (although a dorm would be cheaper than $6k/yr).

And you mostly just included salaries. What about all the building and grounds maintenance, supplies (including those needed for classes - for the chemistry labs etc.), insurance, accounting and legal fees, marketing, travel, property taxes?

And by using salary numbers, you have omitted the costs of benefits. Add at least 20% to all those numbers.

(Where did you go - your terminology is British (“Uni”)?)

I think your numbers for the cost per student of the professor’s time are way off. It’s easier to account for this time by counting courses. A full teaching load here is seven courses per academic year. This means that each prof is paid about $14,300 for each course. If there are 25 slots per course, each slot costs about $570. A full-time student here takes nine courses per year, for a total of $5100 per year. This is three times higher than your figure.

The problem is that a professor does a good deal of stuff for the class while not actually in the classroom: preparing lectures, evaluating potential course materials, grading papers, meeting with students, etc. All of these things are needed to run a course, and if they weren’t done the students would know it. Contrary to your statement, some of the things that the professor does outside the classroom do matter to the student.

Your university doesn’t appear to have any library, laboratories, sports facilities or workshops. Also, it received its land for free and constructed all its buildings at no cost (though obviously it saves on the cost of building a library, laboratories, etc by not having any).

One big area that you didn’t factor in is research. Academic research is expensive, boy howdy. The balance between teaching and research changes from institution to institution, but the U of I seems fairly into it: http://www.uidaho.edu/about/pointsofpride/researchopportunities

Of course, there is a lot of grant money out there for research, so SOME of it comes from outside funding. This is especially true in the sciences, including medicine, where it seems fairly obvious that the research may result in practical, real world applications. But academic research happens in every field, including the arts and humanities, where sometimes the point of successful research is simply adding to the body of human knowledge. And for research to really thrive, you have to build a lot of failure into to the system – you need to fund a lot of projects with the understanding that a goodly amount of them will have false starts, backtracking, not useful results, results that aren’t immediately meaningful, etc.

There’s a whole lot you could talk about beyond this – should it be more competitive, where faculty who don’t quickly produce results lose funding and get the boot? Is quality of teaching suffering because of the desire for more high profile research? Are research faculty living large on the backs of instructional faculty? But in terms of cost, you absolutely have to to figure in the research component.

There is a lot involved in behind-the-scenes operations that isn’t obvious to the average student. Other people have touched on some of it, so I’ll focus on other stuff.

For example, the buildings may be paid for, but times change, and as times change, technology changes. Many classroom buildings have wireless Internet, and that has to be installed and maintained. They also have computer labs that have to have computers and a network, as well as physical space. Students pay for (and expect) recent technology. This not only includes the computers and network themselves, but also relevant software. Some packages cost well into the hundreds or thousands of dollars if I paid for it myself, but I don’t have to if my university provides it. For example, the Adobe CS5 suite costs $2599. I may get a student discount, but it’s still more than I can afford. (IIRC, Adobe gives students an 80% discount, but that’s still more than $500.) My tech fees go to pay for the wireless that I use in the classrooms and library, the computers in the labs, and the specialty software I need to do my classwork. I don’t mind paying for that.

You’re missing a big ticket item: technology.

Students need access to computing labs (yes, even though they bring their own computers). And the labs have to be updated regularly; having Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 just won’t do, nor will a five year old computer with 512 Megs of RAM. You need to have the latest version of software so that students can learn on something current (much better to have Word 2010 than an old version of Wordperfect that no one uses).

And, of course, the faculty and staff computers need to be updated, too.

You need to provide and manage a computer network, including devices for controlling network traffic. Nowadays, you need wireless, and the number of wireless access points needed is very high (student dorms are very bandwith intensive).

There’s also technology in the classrooms. Computers, projectors, clicker systems, learning management software, etc.

Plus you need an IT staff to support all this.

Another thing you’re overlooking is scholarships. The actual tuition amount is reduced for most students as they qualify for various scholarships. Those who pay the full amount are those who can afford it, and the money allowed students with less money to attend college.

(There is some debate that schools should drop the scholarships and just lower tuition to what the actual average figure it, but there’s no way of knowing how that would affect things and few schools have dared try it.)

I used to work for Facilities Management for the University of Minnesota. A huge cost there was the historic buildings. When your buildings are 100 years old they require a lot of upkeep. When they are historic, they require upkeep in keeping with their original build. So specialty made shingles to re roof a building a the cost of millions of dollars, plus the specialty roofers qualified to put on the shingles.

Those old buildings weren’t cheap to heat either in Minnesota. I doubt they’d be in Idaho.

Just a couple of observations:
Where I teach, tuition alone does not approach covering our budget–together with state funding, tuition accounts for about half of our operating budget. Granted, I teach at a community college, but the private university I attended for undergrad (which costs about $20k per year) the story was the same. Tuition and fees didn’t break them even.

You probably didn’t consider the cost of part-time faculty, which is an increasing segment of academic employment. In my English department, we have 10 full time instructors but something like 45 adjuncts, each of whom earns about a grand and a half per course taught, up to 4 courses per semester.

The cost of just copying things (in terms of toner/paper/etc.) is astounding, though I don’t have the number off the top of my head.

Incidentals from Wal-Mart run about $20k per year.

Each full-time faculty member gets a new computer on a 3 year rotation, so there are always expenditures for a third of the faculty.

Classroom projectors are also on a rotation, and they’re super expensive.

Computer lab computers must be upgraded incrementally.

Our coffee service is in the tens of thousands per year (this is being cut.)

The college pays for our travel and attendance at conferences, etc.

Site license fees for courses like turnitin.com, Windows, Office, GradeQuick, etc. can’t be cheap.

Library materials are expensive, particularly when you get into journal holdings (and license fees for EBSCOhost, Academic Search Premier, and so on.)

Heating and cooling the buildings adds more cost than you might have considered (this semester, facing 10% state budget cuts, we’re being asked to make sure blinds are closed, we’re trying to consolidate all night classes into just one or two buildings, etc. to save money.)

Plus, as mentioned, the administration is expensive, and so are student services. We have to staff the tutoring lab 8-10 hours per day, even if no student shows up for tutoring. Part of it is subsidized by federal student aid (work-study students) but there are other factors at play, such as the college-graduate staff that SACS want to supervise the tutors.

There’s the broadcasting equipment if your school has Interactive TV classes…smartboards to replace whiteboards…etc.

Our little community college operates on something like a $52 million budget, so I can only imagine the bigger, more prestigious schools, which, in addition to the above, have to pay the cost for a faculty of PhD’s rather than MA/MS grads.

As others have stated, it’s very likely that your numbers are off. IIRC, most colleges do not cover their costs with tuition. They usually have to rely on gifts, their endowment, government funds, etc. Here is how Exeter, the famous boarding school outlines it’s funding. While it’s not a university, I think it gives some insight to the costs of running a educational institution.

Again, I would imagine most schools do not cover their costs solely on tuition, unless they are for-profit institutions. One major reason they don’t is because universities serve several functions aside from solely educating students. Many schools have hospitals and research facilities among other things.

So while your notion that you are being gouged by your university is likely incorrect, the underlying question regarding why college costs have risen so sharply is in part to to the labor intensive nature of providing education, and the Baumol effect (cost disease).

As you mentioned, many colleges have mitigated these cost increases somewhat by using TAs, increasing class size, etc.

I can give my answer from the point of view of a professor (now retired) at McGill. I came here in 1968 as an associate prof, salary $13K. Four years later, I was promoted to full, salary $16K, and bought a small house for a hair under $32K. Now the house is assessed at $560K and I might be able to get that, but no newly minted professor is going to make anything like $280K, more like a quarter of that. So my house is out of the range of anyone but an administrator.

But ah, administrators. When I came McGill had a principal (= president) and five vice-principals, each with an office and a secretary. The VP research was also dean of the graduate school. They were paid a lot, but they were professors and went back to being professors when their terms ended. There were maybe a half dozen faculties, each with a dean who made a bit more than professors, but not that much. They also went back to being professors when their term ended. Each department had a chair, but the chair’s supplement was derisory and disappeared when we stopped being chair.

What a difference today. There are now nine VPs, each with an associate VP and offices full of staff (one of them has been renamed provost, but the job is the same). They now make all policy that had been previously left to the individual departments. The graduate faculty now regularly rejects students based on idiotic things like CGPA, when we are interested only in how they did in math. Thirty years ago, we admitted a student without a college diploma (but there reasons for this) and he turned out to be one of our better students.

Yes, there are a few more students than there used to be, but not nearly enough to justify all this administration. The growth is cancerous. We could immediately save maybe $5,000,000 a year by trimming the administration and returning governance to the faculty. Yes, we would have to pay attention more and do a bit more work, but it would be worth it. We let that power (which used to be in our hands) slip away from inattention. When I was a department rep on the grad faculty council, I noticed a power grab that was about to sail through unopposed and blocked it with the help of a colleague. Two years later I was no longer on the council and it sailed through unopposed this time.

In the US, there is also the zillions of dollars spent on sports. I can’t prove that doesn’t bring in money, but I really cannot see why my alma mater Penn charged $700 a year in 1954 and are now charging more than 50 times as much.

There is indeed some recent evidence that growth in administration bureaucracy is one of the significant drivers causing costs to rise well in excess of inflation.

Yeah, and it’s more obvious from the inside. All you need to know is that the student body whom we serve has grown about 10-20% over the past few decades, the number of full-time faculty in my department has shrunk from 27 to 16 since I’ve been at this job (20 years this week), and the # of administrators has nearly doubled. As Hari notes, much of this growth has come about because college administration has been taken over by “professionals,” rather than by faculty filling in for a few years–whether it’s gotten any more efficient is an open question.

A lot depends on what majors your college offers. The primary support cost for English majors will be in a well-stocked library, but do you have any idea what it costs to set up labs for PhD programs in semiconductor device physics, applied biochemistry, or other equipment-intensive majors?

Back when I was teaching at a junior college in California, we must have had well over a million dollars invested just in the computer labs. Computing power is cheaper now, but it takes a serious fulltime staff to maintain it. I did a guest-lecture at Berkeley in the 1990s, and there was a dedicated group of people just maintaining the Internet broadcasting and videoconferencing setups. Heck, the classroom I used for my programming classes when I taught at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana probably had $50K in technology in it (I was in Billings, but most of my students were scattered about in videoconferencing centers in classrooms in tribal colleges around the state).

You know my brother mentioned something about this. He works at a university in the Boston area in some form of admin. He told me how the building is kind pretty old and ricketty because it’s historic.(So it’s got heating problems and mice and the like.) So I’m not surprised by it. Then again when he told me of this it brought out the retort from me “Geez, in Boston when a building gets to be 50 years old you should level it and build a new one before it becomes a historic building and they won’t let you anymore.” :slight_smile:

P.S. I’ve got to agree with the original poster though. Those requirements they made me take haven’t been useful yet and almost certainly are never going to be. (Which I can say because I got out of “Good ol FU” almost 20 years ago and they were peddling that claptrap back then. If it was going to be useful it should have been useful by now.)

Except the OP’s figure of 14 grand was just tuition, not room and board. If you include room and board, the cost of going to the school increases above 14 grand.

No, the OP has it right. We only need to know how much the prof is paid per credit-hour, and how much the student pays per credit-hour. The fact that a credit-hour is not actually one hour of work for the professor is irrelevant to the calculation.

Someone else mentioned research, and that should definitely be included, but that’s a black-ink item, not red: The university gets money from research, it doesn’t pay money for it.

Likewise lab costs: A research lab will be funded from the grants of the people using it, not from the university. And a teaching lab will have lab fees associated with it, which are passed on directly to the students.

It depends. As a physics major I took lots of lab courses in my undergraduate school and was never charged any lab fees. The cost came out of my tuition.

Actually Captain Midnights figures do seem to include room and board:

Maybe it’s because I’m still in university and not looking back on a cheaper time, but $14,000 a year does not seem unreasonable to me. A basic university degree greatly increases your earning potential over your lifetime, and if you continue on to grad school that earning power is increased even more so. The first cite I turned up on this says “A university graduate will earn $1.3 million more over his or her lifetime than someone who has not gone beyond high school.” (cite). Those increased earnings more than pay for the investment, IMHO.

Of course, this is a matter about which reasonable people can disagree - some people may look at this investment of time and money and decide it’s not worth it to them, and that’s fine. The fact that some students find the cost of tuition to be a rip-off does not make it objectively a rip-off for all students.

As for the freshman basics, I do think they provide a good base for a well-rounded education. Sure, there may be parts of it that you don’t personally use, but I think overall they are useful. One of the purposes of university is to expose people to lots of different subjects and ideas, and whether or not the student finds it useful is going to depend on the individual. For example, I have taken some Art History and found it hugely interesting and thought-provoking - the subject provides context for much of what we see around us. Yet you say it is a “worthless class totally” - who is right? Should the school not offer lots of things so that everyone can find their own niche? Same with the ‘extras’ - sports, events, health & dental, bus passes at some schools, etc. Sure, there will be parts of that you don’t use, but overall they are useful services and just like any community, everyone must pay in for the greater good. It’s up to the individual student to use those resources to their own benefit.

As with many things, with university you get out what you put in, IME.

Let’s look at the opposite situation–a university that offers ONLY what each student is affirmatively willing to pay for–instruction in his own field, nothing extra.

Aside from general accreditation issues (if you don’t offer mandatory courses outside of eac hmajor, you’re not going to be able to call yourslf a university in most states), you’ll be offering all extra-curricular stuff on a fee basis, by use. Take the student newspaper: each student who works for it will have to pay a few thousand dollars extra for the privilege, as most newspapers are underwritten by student fees. Is anyone going to write for a newspaper where he has to pay? Of course not. So all students activities go out the window.

You’re taking courses in your major. Are you interested inthis major because it’s related to your job ambitions? Then you’re saying, in effect, that you at the age of 17 or so, have made an irrevocable decision for your career. This is what vocational schools are for.

Do you have any idea how many people change their minds about what they’re interested in after the time they turn 18? A lot. But they wont ever get exposed to to these possibilities if they don’t have options open to them. That’s the function of a general education, to expose to you to things that you might not otherwise spend time thinking about.