I have just cracked open Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It
As inspiration, the very first chapter has some awesome calculations. A professor at Kenyon College earns $242 per hour (based on actual classroom and office hours); his or her counterpart at Yale? $820 per hour. “We readily acknowledge that [professors] do something outside their classroom and office hours. But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research, the utility of which we question in a later chapter.”
The authors point out that professors often aren’t on campus at all: “At Harvard, even untenured asssistant professors get a fully paid year to complete a promotion-worthy book. Thus in a recent year, of its history department’s six assistant professors, only two were on hand to teach classes. In Harvard’s department of philosophy that same year, almost half of its full-time faculty were away on sabbaticals. Of course it was the students who paid. Many of their undergraduate courses were canceled or given by one-year visitors unfamiliar with the byways of the university.”
“At the end of the day, this strange little world [of academia] often alienates the genuinely smart and idealistic. Many of the best people find it intolerable, clearing the path for careerists.”
Combined with Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
Update: I’ve completed my review at http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/higher-education
I don’t know whether I’m among “the genuinely smart and idealistic” – I’m skeptical of such labels – but I’m among those familiar with academia who’ve chosen to do other things with our lives. I have a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis, and I was a postdoc at Madison and Duke. (See http://ralphhaygood.org/ for my bona fides if you care.) I decided not to become an assistant professor, because I didn’t want to work 60+ hour weeks, with most of those hours being consumed by money, politics, and bureaucracy. As Paul Graham put it recently, “Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side.” It’s a mind-numbing grind that has little to do with what drew me into science.
Be careful how you talk about academics, their salaries, and their workloads, though. Simply saying Professor So-and-so “earns $242 per hour (based on actual classroom and office hours)” suggests Professor So-and-so is an overpaid layabout. But especially if he or she is untenured, it’s likely nothing is farther from the truth. For one thing, every hour in the classroom is apt to require several hours of preparation outside the classroom. More importantly, most academics aren’t hired or promoted on the basis of their teaching; this is absolutely the case at marquee institutions like Yale. Overwhelmingly, academic survival depends on research success, measured by grant dollars obtained and journal articles published. “Publish or perish” and “grants or good-bye” are the tyrants that rule the lives of the many junior academics I know. More than a few would love to spend more time teaching and otherwise helping students, but it would be hazardous to their professional health. It’s a perverse system badly in need of reform, but calling for academics to work harder for lower pay definitely isn’t appropriate.
Also, if you’re going to talk about how much the Department of Education is spending, you’d better also talk about how much state governments *aren’t* spending on education that they used to. A few years before I started college, you could attend a California state university for under $300 a year. Now it’s many thousands of dollars a year. For three decades, whenever there’s been a hiccup in America’s economy and hence California’s tax revenues, California’s (mostly Republican) governors have declared there’s no alternative but to raise tuition. The “funny” thing is that when the economy picked back up, tuition didn’t go back down.
Ralph: http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/mission-shrinking?page=0,1 indicates that per capita funding of the University of California is about the same today, in constant dollars, as it was in the 1960s (the big growth in funding happened when Ronald Reagan was governor (1967 to 1975), but had to be scaled back starting in 2002 when the state began to go broke). So if tuition is more than it was in the 1960s, it cannot be explained by the stinginess of the taxpayers and their elected representatives (you’ve complained about Republicans, but my understanding is that the California assembly has a Democrat majority and I thought that the legislature set the budget).
As far as the value of faculty research to tuition-paying students goes, the authors of the book say that they’ll deal with that in a later chapter (haven’t read that far yet).
philg:
>As inspiration, the very first chapter has some awesome calculations. A professor at Kenyon College earns $242 per hour (based on actual classroom and office hours); his or her counterpart at Yale? $820 per hour. “We readily acknowledge that [professors] do something outside their classroom and office hours. But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research, the utility of which we question in a later chapter.”
My translation of the quoted Hacker & Dreifus statement:
“We readily acknowledge that there exist data that would make our compensation figures much less spectacular and sound-bite worthy. However, the great bulk of these data do not fit with our pre-conceived notions, so we ignore it.”
If the authors applied the same metric to the business world, the definition of hours worked would be restricted solely to face-to-face time with customers. Budget and planning meetings, strategy meetings, and even time spent making the product would not count. By that definition, almost every working person would have an eye-popping hourly wage rate.
Maybe what makes $242/hour seem so high is that the product is so ephemeral. The information imparted in an hour of instruction might really be worth $242, but why is it accessible only to the attendees, and only for such a short-time, and then forever lost? That seems like a terrible waste. And it makes the value hard to judge.
I’m continually amazed that schools (of all kinds) aren’t investing heavily in the production of teaching assets–screencasts, written materials, etc–that can be used over and over again. It’s as if they don’t understand that, given modern technology (YouTube, mainly), teaching is fundamentally scalable.
Yes, scalability. It has killed many institutions, and schools are next.
Sir,
Apparently, you didn’t actually read the document to which you referred me (http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/mission-shrinking). If you had, you wouldn’t have said “if tuition is more than it was in the 1960s.” You’d know that, as the document states in its second paragraph, “the consequences [of recent state budget cuts] thus far have included steep increases in student tuition, totaling 57 percent over the last two years.” And, “In 1990, student tuition for state residents at the University of California amounted to $2,362 in today’s dollars – roughly a fifth of the current level.” Etc. You’d also recognize that comparing per-capita funding at present to that in the 1960s is misleading in view of the growth in enrollment over that period. As the document says, in the 1960s, “Enrollment at [University of California] campuses doubled in the course of ten years.” And, “[in the 1960s] there was one faculty member for every 14 students; now, there is one for every 24 students.” Etc. And if you knew much at all about California state government, you’d know the state budget is proposed by the governor. You’d also know that until Proposition 25 passed last fall (over largely Republican opposition), passage of a budget bill required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature, and many tax increases still do; this has enabled a Republican minority to obstruct all kinds of progress in California for many years. And although Democrats are not exempt from responsibility for the sorry state of higher education in California, you might note that both of the “critics” quoted in the document (Jean Fuller and Bob Dutton) as calling for more cuts to the University of California are Republicans. This isn’t a coincidence. One can hardly expect much support for higher education from the party that asked us to vote for Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, and any number of other conspicuously dim bulbs.
In short, sir, your response to my comment fails abysmally. I had expected better from the one-time founder of Ars Digita. I am herewith unsubscribed.
Ralph Haygood
Professors not being in the class room has grown considerably over the years. If you have not yet noticed, it is now the trend at high schools too — at least private high schools (2 that I know).
My daughter’s and son’s high school (both private, and different schools), so far for this school year, 2010-2011, every single teach has missed at least 2 classes with NO substitution (you get a free period). During my days, when I was in public high school, there was far less absent, and we always had a substitution.
Yes, in the next teacher / parent meeting, I will bring this up.
As a side note, my daughter is getting ready for collage (she is Junior now). As we look at collages, some of the none-high-profile collages, pride themselves on the fact they have real professors, who are in the class room and campus all the time. I don’t know how much to believe of this, but it shows you collages are aware of the complaint and some are taking advantage of it to signal themselves out.
Ralph: The article’s analysis wasn’t relevant to me because I was interested in the data. As far as enrollment having grown, so has the population of California. Let’s assume that they’re roughly proportional, so constant per capita funding should translate roughly to constant per student funding. The article does say that tuition prices have been increased, but since per capita (and therefore per student) funding is roughly the same as in the 1960s, the change in tuition cannot be explained by a change in taxpayer funding. You have not provided any data to indicate that UC enrollment has grown much faster than California’s population.
It is true that I’m not a California taxpayer and cannot pretend to be an expert on your political process. However, it seems like a stretch to blame Sarah Palin for whatever problems you might be having at the state level. If present trends continue, 100 percent of California tax dollars will go to pay public employee pensions and retiree health care. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-boosted-pensions-20110408,0,6381236.story shows that your elected officials continue to promise additional pension benefits to government workers retiring at age 50. For whatever reason, Californians have voted for a government that exists primarily for the benefit of retired government workers. Any other government function is secondary and necessarily paid for with leftover scraps, so I don’t see the point of blaming a specific party or person. Maybe Californians should outlaw the Republican party for the next 40 or 50 years. Then, secure in the knowledge that the Assembly was free of Sarah Palin’s influence, they would have time to run the numbers on what they’ve promised to pay.
[A separate way of looking at the question would be to ask why we would expect California’s state government to run a world-class research university. Why wouldn’t it be Texas, Alaska, or Wyoming? They’ve got oil and gas revenue; California has pension obligations.]
Ok, i signed up for the club and bought the book. Couldn’t we have started with something fun and meaningful like Tina Fey’s Bossypants? It kept me smiling all weekend. I doubt i’ll laugh out loud reading “Higher Education?”
As long as we are going to pick apart the academics industry, an easy target, why not add academic publishing? Most academic books are written in purposefully unreadable style, tailored to an audience of 50 of your peers. So even when professors are off publishing, the number of people that can use the fruits of their out of class labor is so small that society has little benefit. All academic books should be edited by High School English teachers for clarity and purpose.
Ralph,
Phil definitely has a point. The article’s analysis really tries to downplay the data and make it seem like the UC has gone way down hill.
Assuming a population of 17M people in CA in 1965 at $78 per capita, that comes out to ~$1.3B for the UC. Total headcount was ~80K, so ~$16K per student.
Now assuming a population of 37M people in CA in 2010 at $78 per capita, that comes out to ~$2.9B for the UC. Total enrollment may be around 210K, so ~$14K per student.
Anyone got a better back of the envelope calculation?
http://ucfuture.universityofcalifornia.edu/documents/campus_compare.pdf
Overall, from this crude calculation, the UC is taking in more than double the state cash than in 1965, enrolling about 2.6X the headcount. Including ~$11-12K in “fees” per in state resident, that would put the UC at ~$25K per student, and that is a conservative estimate. We still are not including the fact that many students pay out of state fees. And we still haven’t included all the other revenue streams the UC digs into, such as their >50% cut of research grants. And this is still not including food, housing, opportunity costs etc.! It costs a lot even to go to a public school!
You might be able to say that per student spending is down, but why shouldn’t it be? Has teaching really gotten more expensive? Considering the massive fall in the price of various goods in 1965, that is not a drop in funding that should matter. HP is still in business selling computers cheaper than ever.
The UC really has nothing to complain about money wise. Their problem is that they are not even half as smart as they think they are.
Quagmire,
Unless I am misunderstanding something, I don’t see inflation factored into your calculation.
Just to estimate the effects of inflation, I used an on-line inflation calculator:
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
which uses the US government Consumer Price Index
That $16K per student you figured in 1965 is inflation adjusted to $109K per student in 2010. Going the other way, your estimated $14K per student state contribution in 2010 is the equivalent of $2K in 1965 money. Therefore, if we accept the dollar figures in your back-of-envelope calculation as roughly on target, then in real terms the state contribution to UC (on a per student basis) has dropped by a factor of eight from 1965 to 2010.
And yes, the normal cost of operating a university is highly vulnerable to inflation. Power, heating, water, labor, food, supplies, etc. are all inflated since 1965. I really don’t think UC (or anyone else) can hire employees by offering static 1965 wages.
Markl: It would certainly be impressive if UC managed to do everything that they’re doing with such a dramatic shrinkage in state support. However, the original graph of “per capita state general fund spending” has a note at the bottom saying that it is in constant 2010 dollars.
Thanks Phil for pointing that out again. I do think people have been deceived by the idea that colleges are poor for some reason. They really are not. They are either so horribly inefficient that they really can’t figure out how to keep costs down like those greedy capitalistic computer companies. Or they have become places so cynical and greedy they shamelessly misrepresent their finances, screwing their students with over $1 trillion in debt. Read the latest NY times article on student debt. At least we can repo a house and try to fix some of Fannie mae’s bad mortgages. What will we repo to payoff sallie Mae? Diplomas and dissertations?
Do people who spend their whole lives in school ever learn common sense?
“When you think about what’s good debt and what’s bad debt, student loans fall into the realm of good debt, like mortgages” -Professor Susan Dynarski in interview with NY Times
Maybe not. Again, good luck on repossessing those diplomas and dissertations. I’m sure their will be some bidders for those assets in default…
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/education/12college.html
Quagmire: Thanks for that NYT link. The graphic is scary, with student loan debt going from $200 billion in 2000 to $800 billion in 2010. As someone who has spent a lot of time on college campuses, I am struggling to think what could have been taught that would be worth $800 billion. (I posted about this earlier, but I was walking a dog in Harvard Yard on a dark Massachusetts afternoon and looked into a classroom to see a Harvard professor lecturing some $50,000/year kids on the subject of Rousseau. What unique content that would not be available to students at less elite universities was on the projector? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
Phil,
I’m 26 and see how the student debt problems, unemployment and generally crappy education system has been making us practically worthless. We are not all dumb, but it’s hard not to look dumb with $90K in debt, no job prospects, living at a parents house with a degree. What is the current boomer generation in power doing?
They are telling us to work for free:
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/25/unpaid-jobs-the-new-normal/
Finance their debt:
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
And, oh yeah, volunteer (i.e. work for free):
http://www.servicenation.org/
And just in case we forgot, keep paying those student loans and take out that nose ring you lazy kids!!!!
Many friends are stuck in that situation just scrapping by with whatever job they can find, deferring loans with enrollment at the nearest JC. Some still volunteer, hoping to pad their resume for medical school, since their current degrees have gotten them nothing thus far. Many get stuck in grad school, hoping for that 5 year post-doc:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2bdJ3zyj-nA/TaRBWA1Ye5I/AAAAAAAAAPc/f1LXH2wfeX0/s1600/organix.jpg
I’m a product of the CA Master Plan myself. It’s a big concern for me and I have warned my family members to just not go to college if possible. They should find cheap vocational training or aim for a professional degree (MD, PharmD, etc.). If they really want to learn what’s taught in college without falling asleep for 5 years, like you showed, use wikipedia.
Quagmire: Take heart! You’re a better writer than 98 percent of the college graduates who send me emails looking for jobs. That’s worth something. If nothing else, you can be the ghostwriter for a backstabbing corporate ladder-climber (a surprising number of top executives are essentially illiterate).
Phil,
I know this post has died down and I’ve posted a lot already. But I think these UC budget facts (ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION, in 2010 $’s) are very important:
UC Budget 1966-67: $4.8 Billion ($728M Nominal 1966-67 $’s)
Source:http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hNI_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZuEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=654,4322965
UC Budget 2010-11: $21.8 Billion
Source:http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/factsheets/thefacts_budget_11_17_10.pdf
Just the unrestricted funds the UC receives ($6.1B) that goes to classroom instruction, etc. are more than the entire budget UC had in 1966. I’m sure students at UC Berkeley see the improvement in quality since 1966 in Biology 1A with its now 672 student enrollment limit.