I think both Austin and Raleigh have grown large enough that the "college town" effect is in the noise. In both cases the underlying economy is doing more to drive itself than the college is at this point. In those cases 40 years ago it would have made a big difference, but today better examples would have been places like College Station TX, or Gainsville FL, where the college remains the primary employer. UT Austin is the 10th largest employer in a town with a pretty self reinforcing tech economy, and a very long tail of national brand SMBs.
In both of those cities the colleges have become feeder schools to the tech industry. And they're both desirable places to live on their own.
Austin is gorgeous. Semi-arid but the big river gorge running through it means downtown is lush. Big hills/mountains a mile west. Tons of nature, water. Colorful history. Great downtown thats a regional vacation destination. Within 3 hours of Houston, Dallas, the ocean, and only 45 mins from San Antonio. That means 50 million people within a few hours, densest area you can find besides east and west coast. And of course the capital, which means a lot more in Texas than elsewhere due to secessional tendencies (ex the TX state capitol is taller than US capitol)
Tech triangle is again in a gorgeous area. A few hours from NC coast and Blue Ridge mountains. Weather is an interesting hybrid between cold-winter northeast and humid deep south. It doesn't get very hot or cold. Probably the closest you can get to west coast weather in the east, and the nearby coast and mountains heighten the illusion. Nicely positioned for business, Miami and NYC are less than 2 hours by plane.
They're both safe with great weather and a low cost of living (for tech hotspots). I have deeply considered living in both.
Austin is not semi arid. Salt Lake City and maybe Denver are semi arid, but Austin is humid in the summer and almost swampy in overall climate. You aren’t going to see a hint of beige until you get way into west Texas.
It's definitely not swampy, its quite dry. I looked up rainfall levels and its also not an arid climate like I thought. Much of the rainfall is concentrated in large storms, it doesn't rain very often. Much of the local vegetation is drought tolerant, succulent and cactus.
Houston is swampy because of the coast. Austin is dry and not very humid, like Dallas. The wind often comes from the deserts out west.
> Austin is located within the middle of a unique, narrow transitional zone between the dry deserts of the American Southwest and the lush, green, more humid regions of the American Southeast. Its climate, topography, and vegetation share characteristics of both. Officially, Austin has a humid subtropical climate under the Köppen climate classification. This climate is typified by very long and hot summers; short, mild winters; and pleasantly warm spring and fall seasons in-between.
> An uncommon characteristic of Austin's climate is its highly variable humidity, which fluctuates frequently depending on the shifting patterns of air flow and wind direction. It is common for a lengthy series of warm, dry, low-humidity days to be occasionally interrupted by very warm and humid days, and vice versa. Humidity rises with winds from the east or southeast, when the air drifts inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but decreases significantly with winds from the west or southwest, bringing air flowing from Chihuahuan Desert areas of West Texas or northern Mexico.[76]
I never saw a cactus in Austin before...at least one that wasn't being cultivated in someone's yard. I do remember my time there for one hot and very humid summer...it made Mississippi feel nice in comparison, it definitely wasn't like Salt Lake City in climate.
Prickly pear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia is a very common sight in the few remaining wild/unkept parts of Austin and surrounding country given that Austin is part of its native range. As cactus goes, it is definitely one of the friendlier ones.
Depends on what you like in terms of "great weather." They're both pretty hot and humid in the summer. (Not as bad as some places but...) So long as you're OK with that sort of weather though, they're two pretty nice areas.
NC is hot and humid compared to the west coast maybe, but the average temp of hottest month is only a few degrees more than Chicago. In contrast the average temp of the coldest month is about 20 degrees warmer. Proximity to mountains and ocean moderates the climate significantly.
Sometimes state capitals aren’t economically that powerful. Denver and Columbus are certainly positive cases, but Springfield and Albany are pretty middling compared to the biggest cities in the same state.
Springfield MA is not the state capital. Boston is. But, to your broader point, there's often been a deliberate decision to site the state capital somewhere other than the main city to balance out political and business power a bit.
[ADDED: Ah. Probably referring to Springfield IL.]
Springfield IL was what I had in mind, but I didn’t specify that. I used to live in Chicago, so to me “Springfield” obviously meant IL, but in retrospect I should’ve been more clear.
Raleigh is a college town around the college (Western Blvd to Hillsborough St) for sure, but there are enough tech jobs (Citrix, Red Hat, many smaller shops) and state government to keep things going regardless of how universities are affected.
This is to say nothing of RTP and other areas outside of downtown.
Raleigh is well-positioned to handle this and while NC State is a huge draw, not the only game in town.
Out of the three cities in the research triangle I'd say Raleigh is the least like a college town. I'd expect Chapel Hill to be much more affected by this with the impact on Durham being somewhere between the other two cities.
Champaign-Urbana IL, pictured in the article but not named, is characteristic of a campus that I think will be impacted. 32,000 undergrads, 14,000 graduate students, tons of research departments, and increasing (til now) corporate satellites.
Bryan/College Station is already growing beyond A&M for sure, even outsourcing companies like Cognizant are opening offices there, not to mention the oil (that might be a big if now of course) jobs around.
I don't see this at all. Bryan/College Station exist entirely because of A&M, and these towns would do the same as almost every other small town in that area if it weren't for A&M.
The graduate student analysis doesn't seem right. I don't think the article understands the incentives of graduate students. Yes, there are lots of foreign graduate students, especially masters students. One big motivator for them studying in the US is that they want to work for a US company and / or immigrate. Moreover, the ones that want to pursue a PhD often choose institutions based on potential advisors. It seems very unlikely that these things are going to change in the next year or so. Schools might miss out on prospective students with a time table, but I'd be surprised if the situation in 2025 is significantly different from today.
I do see academic towns really hurting from the lack of undergrads. That's a big decrease in population, and even if most businesses are allowed to open in the fall, lots of universities will take conservative measures and not let undergrads back on campus --- dorms etc. being an ideal transmission environment.
Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.
This is in addition to the fact that international student numbers had already dropped over the past couple of years thanks to US hostility towards immigrants.
> Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.
What story are you referring to? I've seen stories around the edges of this kind of thing for H1B's, but nothing so definite.
A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two years of OPT if they were in STEM.
> A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two years of OPT if they were in STEM.
Yes, but it's also possible to use some (or all) of that OPT time on internships in industry. I have colleagues who were in that situation, and had to spend a few months back in their native country after graduation, while their visa was being processed because they had no OPT left.
Perhaps the lack of foreign graduate students willing to do high skilled labor for $12k/year will incentivize universities to begin to pay rational wages to graduate student researchers. Then American students might actually find it economically appealing to get graduate degrees.
It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa.
Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.)
US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.
Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth.
In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school.
If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.
The programs are so expensive because there is such a large supply (or rather demand) from wealthy international students, even if they college or university is far less prestigious than this cost would otherwise suggest.
Many foreigners treat PhD and especially Masters program as a way to get visa and access to USA - doing actual research is secondary goal. $30k/year is poverty wage in US but solid pay for somebody from eastern europe, India or China. Programs will be in jeopardy because they won’t be able to do visa/salary arbitrage which could positive thing and lead to more Americans in those programs.
Doing a Master's/PhD from a good university isn't a cakewalk for these foreign students. It's not something you just buy and forget with your parents' money - you have to work quite hard, compensate for language and other educational gaps, and then succeed in landing a good job and the H1B lottery. It's a risky investment.
America must ask itself why its students are not interested in grad school. Unaffordability (especially after an expensive undergrad) is absolutely a major issue, but from my experience at an Ivy, very few Americans were interested in grad school. And maybe that's fine, because doing research* is probably something that makes sense only for a small percentage of students. So there may not be a problem here, unless increasing this is an actual goal.
Without explicit measures, and with a more globally accessible approach to admissions, it stands to reason that the PhD demographics would move towards global population ratios, adjusted for access and affordability. And that's been the secular trend of the past 20 years.
*Master's is not research, and is primarily a way for universities to make money.
I'm pretty sure there is a portion of H1Bs that is reserved for people with advanced US degrees. Doing grad school in the US can dramatically increase your chances of getting an H1B.
I remember the professor asking a student from China how he was doing with the class being taught in English. The student replied, "Uh... book. I read book." At that moment I caught a glimpse of how big the language barrier could be, and how much sheer work it would take to overcome it.
Those grad programs are too large. The main draw for international students is often the visa, and the universities treat them as cash cows, often providing poor quality product.
A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in.
Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.
This so much. I live in Boston so I end up interviewing a lot of new Northeastern grads. Foreign Masters students are the absolute worst cohort of candidates I deal with. The vast majority cannot write fizz buzz without help. A Northeastern Masters in CS seems to be nothing more then a way to buy a visa.
This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.
FWIW, I've interviewed tons of CS Masters grads myself, US and international. Northeastern is not alone in awful coding skills.
Makes me wonder what the typical curriculum is in a CS masters degree? How can so many people get a Masters without actually knowing fundamental programming skills?
Not a great analogy perhaps, but you can't get a Masters in French without speaking the language right?
This would depend on what specialty you're getting your masters in. What we would call theoretical computer science is really just math and predates computers. How many working programmers can explain fundamental concepts like the halting problem to a layperson? Clearly this knowledge isn't required to write good code but to use your analogy I'd say your average good programmer is more like the man in the chinese box than a fluent speaker of the language.
One of the reasons many foreign grad students come to the US now is because there are so many foreign grad students they can find a community of fellow nationals which makes them feel less isolated and helps them in coping with a new culture. As the number of foreign students declines there will be less community which will make coming to the US less desirable. I worked at Dartmouth in CS and most of the grad students were foreign, at first mainly from China, but later many from India also.
My understanding is that a big part of the economic hit for universities is the profit from providing housing. If undergrads are not on campus, the profit vanishes. Dartmouth has historically cut staff and expenses rather than use it's endowment to weather crisis. They say it's because much of the endowment is tied to specific purposes, like building new buildings with the donors names affixed there-on. So a big endowment may not be of much value in weathering the current crisis if you can't spend it and your cash flow dries up.
I was very active in the university recruiting effort at large Silicon Valley for many years. I went to tons of university career fairs. This statement is wholly true. At the undergraduate, the majority of students were US citizens (but there were still a lot of foreigners). But at the master's and PhD levels, virtually everyone was a foreigner.
It does seem like there'd be an obvious pivot from student visas. "Loved your college experiencem? Stay in the US! Here's a two year work permit, and if you get a position in your field, maintain it for 12 months, and show you're paying down any student debt you've accrued, you can convert it to a green card.
It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge salaries for administrators.
I read my public university's annual finance reports, and there's been a shift away from steady general funds towards less secure non-general funds.
My take-away is that as the formerly safe and relatively simple general state funds dried up, universities invested more in securing funding through various creative means. Which requires more and better administration.
International student tuition is a big source of general funds. But attracting and supporting them takes some investment. So universities grow and they pay more for people who can better balance the books.
University finance is very diversified now. You can't directly see most of it. But you can see a bunch of foreigners walking around campus, and you can look up state employee salaries online. They're symptoms.
The problem is that finance is getting more complicated.
My alma mater, the University of Illinois, made a uniquely astute and prophetic move in 2017: it purchased a 3-year $60m policy to insure against a drop in Chinese student enrolment in case of a political or health event. They foresaw trouble and hubris from the current administration. Lo and behold...
So, slightly more specifically it was the College of Business and College of Engineering only that did this. And since the policy expires June 1st of 2020 unless it got extended (couldn’t find any announcement that it did), I don’t know if the impact will have hit yet.
Just to point out what may not be so obvious, the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators".
For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.
These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20.
Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.
the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators".
Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing.
This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff.
I asked a friend about this stat last year. He was a graduate student at Stanford, and was surprised. A few days later, he came back saying that it appears that a big chunk of the non-faculty staff are researchers.
I'm not sure I believe that's the whole story, but I kind of want to see a more detailed breakdown to be sure it's not just a matter of silly categories for reasonable jobs.
Your link [1] seems to suggest that
the campus does not just house administration but also
clinical departments of the School of Medicine. This may be School of Medicine administration, I am not sure.
> These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary.
If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different.
I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.
Yeah I think it's true that some institution are reliant on incredibly high tuition costs, and wouldn't be able to survive. But I don't think that's true of the majority, especially when weighted by number of students. ( Imagine it's smaller colleges that are more expensive to operate per student due to a lack of efficiencies of scale. )
> campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20
8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number.
Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well.
But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class.
Most large US university have large medical centers attached to them, so at my school our staffing numbers were 1/3 for the university (teaching + admin) and 2/3 medical center. These are not small hospitals.
There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?
Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid relative to what they could command in the private sector.
If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace? If we compare their relative level of education with your average San Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high?
Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage. This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation.
Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to, say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source of income.
Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more (subsidised) US students to attend.
This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.
It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up, or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection between the two.
But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't have much support to offer each other.
Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students, that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.
But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries.
And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need money. It seems like a win-win-win all around.
But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings, faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal financial controls of grants and donations.
>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.
Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades.
Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow.
It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.
Australia is quite different, but there's tax payer funded unis here paying their Deans over 1 million a year who claim they can't afford to pay people more than $40/hour casually to record video lectures for first year business statistic classes to be delivered to over 600 students/year across multiple countries. They've also spent millions upon millions moving their campus in to the city when they already own a really good campus 10 minutes drive from the city with lots of decent free parking around even for undergrads. They also announced this year that they're so poor they're going to cut 75% of either the classes or courses next year (not sure which). People who run tax payer funded institutions like that should be thrown in jail.
> This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.
That's exactly what is happening, and the mechanism is simple. It's the original bundle and upsell model. It doesn't take terribly much imagination to consider why this might be the case:
- second largest purchase (maybe single largest purchase) most Americans now make in their life
- purchased when prefrontal cortices haven't fully developed (~18yo in most cases)
- sold as an "investment" to parents (you "need a bachelor's degree to get a good job")
- purchased as an investment by students (I want a career after college) but also as an "experience" (I need to party, mingle, socialize with the opposite sex for the only 4 year span of your life where I will ever experience actual freedom)
- financed with debt products guaranteed by the government
- .. but which often cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (!!)
Why wouldn't such a "product" balloon in breadth, depth and average cost given that it's an enormous industry? The US student debt market alone is ~$1.6T. To give a benchmark for comparison, the US mortgage market is $11T, and those consists of bonds securitized by assets.
> There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?
Your argument boils down to "I can't haven't researched any of the details here and I can't come up with any off the top of my head so it must be the result of ideological astroturfing." In doing so, you completely ignore one of most insidious modern forms of legalized debt slavery. Don't reduce and flatten arguments you don't agree with. It's not just wrong, but it conditions you into ignorance and against engaging in a basic investigation of the details.
You wrote a lot of text, but I think you are speaking from a position of ignorance or emotion, to be honest, on the topic of high salaries.
You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.
But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality.
As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.
> You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.
That's sort of the definition of a salary subject to market forces, yes. But, as an alternative, I even suggested comparing administrators' salaries with education-matched employees in IT startups.
You're not offering any specific alternative, but OP's comment and yours seem to basically amount to "I know what people should earn, and 'administration' is useless anyway."
> If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system.
Many countries produce many things cheaper than the US, often at the same quality. Foodstuffs are an obvious example, but there are many more: a pilot in China or South Africa earns far less than an American, even though they are trained to the same standard. Does this mean US pilots are overpaid? Taxi drivers the world over provide pretty much equal service, but does that mean US taxi drivers should earn $1.20/day (average Iraqi daily income for taxis)?
But even assuming US universities are too expensive, which I would tend to agree with, I was specifically challenging the idea that high salaries are as dominant a part of the explanation as the relative number of comments here focussing on it suggests. And because "administrators" was and remains ill-defined, I offered specific reasons why that is unlikely for a number of groups that people might be referring to.
While you've devoted a paragraph to reading the emotional subtext of my comment, you neglected my rather plain request to be a bit more specific: by "administrator", are you referring to the Dean of the Law School, the Quinnipiac Polling Call Center Temp, the Executive Assistant to the Greenkeeper, the Physics Postdoc,...?
Anyway, here's four alternative explanations that make more sense, IMO:
- US universities spend more on research, and use tuition money to (partially) fund these activities.
- US undergrad programs spent far more on student life, such as luxurious dormitories or sports centres
- US tuition includes medical care, doesn't it? US medical care is famously inefficient.
- US universities, even public ones, rely far more on tuition than universities in other countries, that get comparably higher government subsidies
I think you missed his point, which is that both the Iraqi and US taxi driver provide about the same amount of value, yet while one gets paid more than the other (despite provide equal value). He implies that people don't see this as a problem, and suggests that maybe the salaries of the administrators are something similar.
More broadly, there seems to be a lot of money coming in as student fees, and very little going out in academics' salaries. If things in-classroom are so profitable, there must be a heck of a lot of out-of-classroom expenses going on.
I feel like that Forbes article is concentrating on the wrong things because it makes for better copy. I calculated estimates based on the numbers they gave.
For the 1980-81 school year, $20.7B at 41% for instruction and $13.0B at 26% for administration yields $16.6B at 33% for other than instruction/administration.
For the 2014-15 school year, $148.0B at 24% for instruction and $122.3B at 29% for administration yields $239.7BB at 47% for other than instruction/administration.
That means, for approximate multiples, instruction increased 7.15x, administration increased 9.41x, and other than instruction/administration increased 14.44x. When I recalculate what the 2014-15 expenses would have been had they all increased at the same rate as instruction, I get $29.35B excess for administration and $121.02B excess for other than instruction/administration.
It seems to me, based on those estimates, that the elephant in costs is somewhere in that "other than instruction/administration" category. Overpaid administrators are certainly a problem, but they appear to be a relatively minor problem.
It also subsidizes largess such as unnecessary buildings and retreats. University department managers treat budgets as signs of status, and try to build as large of org chart pyramids as possible.
Source: I worked at a top 5 US university as an employee, on both the business and academic sides, for 7 years.
Gee, this is what subsidized looks like? Must be a lot cheaper than the tuition in other countries that don't have nearly as many international students :)
The key difference is: our universities do not run expensive world-class sports teams (while there are amateur things such as racing, these do have an educational focus as they tend to be a side gig of the mechanics courses) and at the same time are properly financed by the state.
That sounds like a great system. From purely selfish motives, the state will reap more taxes from college educated citizens than they would otherwise, so literally investing in public colleges makes financial sense. America chose to invest in education debt (and modern day indentured servitude) instead.
> From purely selfish motives, the state will reap more taxes from college educated citizens than they would otherwise, so literally investing in public colleges makes financial sense.
On the other hand, college educated citizens are less likely to enter the army out of desperation (so no more cheap replaceable cannon fodder for the endless wars) or to agree to usurious 20%+ APR payday loans or end up in private prisons or work as replaceable cogs in Amazon warehouses, "gig economy", farming, meatpacking or whatever else exploitative labor market. This costs the rich elite donating to politicians actual money in profits.
Incentives for politicians are not aligned with the targets for a better society, that is the core issue.
Most German universities also don’t have dorms, on campus amenities, erm, or often even campuses. German courses don’t have TAs, and many only have grades based on one final. It isn’t a bad system, but you get what you pay for.
> Most German universities also don’t have dorms, on campus amenities, erm, or often even campuses.
Most universities have some form of dorms, however they're usually wildly inadequate in numbers - but as most students come from the town or nearer region of the university and don't move across half the country they can live at their parents' houses.
As for amenities: who needs special "college amenities" here? Sports is provided by the town (public sports training grounds), its clubs (for team sports) and for really niche stuff sometimes by the universities themselves, drinking is allowed both in public and in a number of bars, discos and other venues... so what is missing? (Honest question, my knowledge about US campus culture is based upon more or less shitty comedy movies)
As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
I'm not arguing that the German system is bad, just that it is a very different product from what American universities sell. It might actually be a better model for America to provide higher education to more people at a better cost.
> As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
Neither of those are called TAs. The first kind is a graduate student lecturer, the second is called an RA (research assistant). One or more TAs for a large course typically helps the professor in running sections and grading homework, those two things being missing from most German courses (from my understand being told by my friend about his college experience in Germany; they might have homework, but it wasn't graded).
Is complete ignorance of the economics of US collegiate sports a European thing? Those big sports teams are money-makers, not cost centers. Everyone bitches and whines about a college football coach being paid more than anyone else at the university, but that same coach's team actually provides funding to the rest of the university. The sports teams are not expenses, they are revenue.
They may be revenue generators indeed, but anyway I see this as yet another symptom of a failed setup in the core: research and education should be fully funded by the taxpayer directly instead of indirectly via saddling youth with decades of debt or by sports activities that have nothing to do with academia.
Academia should be academia and only dedicated to further scientific knowledge and teaching, not to spend boatloads of time and resources to hunt for half year grant money or sports revenue. Just imagine all the management time of what is consumed by sports go to helping the professors deal with grants/funding issues - that would be a major boost for science if scientists could actually do science things instead of management things!
> Those big sports teams are money-makers, not cost centers.
Are they actually, when all's said and done? (Genuinely asking, I've no idea). In particular, after the facilities are paid for? Non-education-related sports facilities (stadiums and such) are notoriously nearly always net costs to the government who subsidise them.
As a simple example, a school with a division 1 football team like Ohio State will spend approximately $100 million per year on athletics but that will be less than the athletics programs bring in. The mens football and basketball teams will bring in almost all of the revenue, and will support all other athletic programs (and athletic scholarships) at the university. The Ohio State football stadium seats more than 100K, and the minimum ticket price is $22 so you are looking at more than $2M in gate revenue for games, plus TV contract revenue, plus merchandise it sells all over the state, plus donors and alums who will pay far more than $22/seat for corporate boxes or to attach their name to some aspect of the program for commercial purposes.
Stadiums can sometimes look for public subsidy when being replaced or re-built, but they can equally make a claim that their presence brings in millions of dollars of revenue to the local area over the course of a season and that the cost of the stadium can easily be amortized over decades (something that is actually easier for a collegiate program in a mid-sized city to claim than a pro team in a major urban center.) The ancillary facilities like practice space, offices for coaching staff and other infrastructure are almost always paid for by the athletic programs to the best of my knowledge.
My alma mater built a second stadium for their tier 3 football team that just got kicked out of their league for poor performance. I must be very ignorant of where this magical revenue comes from.
No, the point was that administrator salaries are not the primary reason for tuition increases.
Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).
I teach part-time in a private for-profit college in Germany (in which German-citizen students get up to half their tuition paid by the government) & tuition is comparable to the least expensive public state universities in the US.
I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.
But then the school would be ranked as a low cost institution, and carry a stigma that many parents and students would want to avoid. There's a reason USC is raising tuition right now. Signaling that it's worth it...
My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half.
This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.
I find news sites to be consistently horrid in terms of bloat. One of the reasons I switched from NoScript to uMatrix is the latter has a scrollbar because using NoScript on CNN would end up with the menu literally blowing past the bottom of my screen.
Even if remote learning MAY (it may not) become the norm for higher education, parents who can afford it will still send their children someplace where children who engage in higher educationing congegrate. Probably college towns.
This is a very hard situation for the affected, but I cannot look at it any other way than a positive change. My own opinion is that modern universities are a mix of ponzi scheme with stockholm syndrom. It's a bubble that should have burst a long time ago. From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve they morphed into thought-culling money making machines. I think we underestiumate just how many things changed for the better thanks to the virus.
You can't bag all higher education just because you don't like some narrow part of it (ie IT-related). Any white collar job with legal responsibility, or doctors have some good reasons to be as they are (maybe not in ideal state, but that's another topic).
Would you trust an architect who aced some online course with a building that you will live in? Or doctor to perform your surgery?
> From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve (sic) they morphed into thought-culling money making machines.
How did you come to that conclusion? I would agree on the money-making machine part, but I had rather a different and mostly positive college experience on the education side, both in undergrad and graduate school.
If someone asked what are the two most liberal pc colleges in the u.s. I'd probably mention Evergreen and Oberlin. Despite the general trend to move in this direction, these colleges are still pretty large outliers.
> It will be impossible for engineering departments to replace many of these lost researchers. That in turn will force many labs to shutter or scale back, making college towns a less attractive investment destination for private companies.
This part made me curious. Is grad school not all that competitive to get into?
Well, it’s hard to find capable people for grad school. It’s not just a selection to pick some form of the best. To succeed as a grad school you need people that can make discoveries and play the academic game.
These articles claiming new normal ignore the fact that having a pandemic per century is normal. America of four months ago is an America after many pandemics, and that includes college towns.
Journalists just want things to say they think people might read.
> The highly successful model of using tax and tuition dollars to subsidize and plant the seeds for thriving local economies is getting hit from all directions at once.
Maybe schools can pay competitive wages to their researchers while state schools focus admissions on state students?
Taxpayers are paying for the schools, the schools do contribute to the economy in a big way, but are also massive externalities on the communities. Perhaps by scaling back a big on admin and other costs the people will get a better bang for their buck -- as well as having their own kids gain the instruction.
I am not sure why state schools exist if not to teach the state students, esp. if taxpayers have to fund them. Is it strictly a jobs program then, to feed local profs, staff, restaurants and so therefore they have a duty to the taxpayer to just bring in the most income?
Part of the reason tuition costs more is because the Baby Boomers and Generation X decided they didn't want to pay as much in taxes as their parents did, and so public education got less funding--in some places, as much as 90% less funding compared to 30 years ago.
For example, in the 1970s, the state of CA covered more than 90% of the UC system budget. In 2020, CA only covered around 10% of the UC budget.
Sorry, but that is not even close to the truth. The state covered only 32% of the UC system budget in 1974 when 18% of the state budget went to higher education, and it covers 16% of the UC budget now but the state spends 12% of its total budget on higher education. What changed? Proposition 98, which mandated that community colleges get a bigger piece of the allocated higher education funds -- they now receive 58% of the total (22% UC and 20% CSU).
For many schools, football subsidizes all sports, even after paying the coaches and staff. And for a lot of schools, football pays for scholastics. You'd be hard pressed to find a school that pays a coach out of line financially.
I keep reading these same talking points without any data to support it. Can you provide any details on “many schools” or “a lot of schools”?
My alma mater, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, pays their coach $533k/year. That is half-a-million dollars for a mid-tier team in a mid-tier conference. They also built a $13 million indoor sports practice facility a few years ago.
https://miamiredhawks.com/sports/2018/6/7/facilities-indoor-...
Miami of Ohio isn't a football school as you know, although it seems they want to try and capture more of the football pie. The school has 36M in annual sports revenue [1], a good chunk of that football. From a source that had 28M in total sports revenue, it stated over 6M in football [2]
As the coach of a multi-million dollar business, 533k is justified. Especially since the talent is currently not compensated. If you want to compete you have to spend a decent amount. You're right that Miami of Ohio is mid-tier but the 533k is a mid-tier salary these days (#112 in rankings). There are 6 other MAC schools with higher coach salaries than your school. [2]
Also, from your own article "The 91,000-square-foot facility was built completely with donor contributions and is used by student-athletes, intramural and club sports participants and youth athletic tournaments."
Donor contributions.... And used by everyone for various sports including youth... So I'm not sure why you are so upset.
Aside from that - there are 108 schools with athletic revenue of 30+M. [1]
And, "The average college football team makes more money than the next 35 college sports combined" [3].
But these are the extreme outliers. Here is a list of schools in Tennessee as an example [0]. How many of them have a big time football program? Maybe 4 or 5 out of the 53 schools?
In many schools, football programs (and usually also basketball and baseball) are "revenue" programs that contribute more to the school than they cost.
Additionally, many states require that coaching salaries above a certain threshold not be paid out of tuition dollars, so boosters are actually funding the salaries of many coaches at the FBS (fka Div I-A) level.
Masks reduce R0 so much that in Austria the infection rate plummeted after Apr 6 when masks were required.
The lockdowns are a last resort, the result of a public policy failure to contain the virus.
The entire US establishment including the CDC, Fauci even Mike Pence said until mid March not to wear or buy masks. Mind you, not even the cheap surgical ones that are 50 in a box.
I have pamphlets in NYC written by the city’s health agency Feb 26th that insist there are no confirmed cases in NYC and the risk to new yorkers remains low.
NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks when there was no emergency.
So the outbreaks were swift and led to exactly the lockdowns we were in now.
We will face this situation again as we emerge from the lockdowns.
We can’t rely on government to create a clear framework for businesses to follow. We need businesses to step up and sell a standardized solution.
At Qbix we are doing our part. Contact me if you want to help in your community.
Even the most staunch libertarian can’t say no when a private building enforces a mask policy in their lobby and in public areas like elevators. No amount of social distancing will help in elevators - only masks can.
But the stupid attitude is “a mask can’t protect me, so why bother?” No!! The masks are to prevent everyone from spewing virus particulates into the air.
Seriously this is the 21st century and several months after China got the epidemic, the richest countries in the world are still complaining about not enough masks.
Meanwhile in Taiwan the buildings are handing them out and you can drop them off. That’s how it should be.
> Even before coronavirus, President Donald Trump's administration had been working to decrease the inflow of students from overseas
Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. is purposefully trying to move down in world rankings... I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to intentionally limit the opportunities to the best and hardest working people in the world; those opportunities will just spring up elsewhere instead. I have a theory that a society cannot maintain leading world standings without also leading in science and technology, and it's not long before the U.S. loses this (if it hasn't already). Most of the greatest recent technological advances are already driven by people born outside the U.S. that work within the country; it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that coming to the U.S. is just no longer worth the hassle.
US pulled ahead of the rest of the world in STEM during the wars. The brain drain of scientists fleeing Europe - exemplified by Einstein and Von Neumann joining IAS in Princeton - set up US in a dominant position that has only gotten stronger over time.
So it will take some time to lose that lead, and there will be push back from the immediate beneficiaries: DoD, national science labs, Tech sector. In fact some drastic parts of the recent immigration restriction plans were removed due to pressure from tech CEOs.
In the meantime this is a golden opportunity for Canada. Toronto and Montreal already have world-class CS research cluster which they can build on, and attract scientists frustrated with anti-immigrant sentiments in the US and EU.
I'm all for international students but when you say they are a net positive, are they competing with US students for admission slots? If they are, that would seem to put pressure on prices US students have to pay as well as make admission that much harder.
In a normal business, someone spending $20 for something that cost $10 to make would not decrease the availability for anyone else, because the company would be able to make two widgets for every one widget they bought.
There's already something very fishy about the university system that anyone who can pay more than they cost isn't let in. Why do admission slots even exist?
universities aren't aws nodes that can be instantly spun up to meet demand. it takes time (and possibly more land) to build new buildings and hire new teaching staff without compromising the quality of the education. the wealthiest institutions can afford to ignore ability to pay, but most need a certain fraction of their students to actually pay the full price.
Most exclusive schools have been exclusive for several generations. There's no way to explain the scarcity of seats at Harvard by saying "they haven't had time to recruit new professors."
It's not just this country though. Every society has used some sort of "them" to cast blame on. Even subsets of society have their own "them". I'm not a head shrinker, but just like religion helps certain people feel okay about unknowable/non-understood parts of life, some people are just more comfortable being able to blame their ills on "them" even if it's unfounded blame.
It's really just accelerating what was going to happen in a decade or so anyway when the demographic bulge passed. Colleges are to some extent wildly overprovisioned, as well as overextended, and many were starting to fail before SHTF.
To be fair that's high schools and elementary schools. They're a different risk category, yet lower than colleges. College are really low risk too, though I haven't seen anything to indicate spread would be slow in a college setting.
Close proximity does not have to the the only factor, although all the world ist currently fixed on social distancing. How about children being less contagious? After all they are developing no symptoms at all in most cases.
You can still be contagious without obvious symptoms. And allergy season could help spread the particles even if the virus isn't triggering coughs/sneezes itself.
https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-pr...