Where is all the high college tuition going? My alma mater is losing money.

[JoeH]

Dennis S wrote:
Without football teams, it would be almost impossible to have baseball, basketball, track and field, soccer, swimming, volleyball, tennis, and on and on.

You might think so, but there are many schools who have done so. In any case, the football program here has been a sinkhole for money for nearly a decade since going to FBS. That has actually resulted in money being taken from sports like you mentioned.

The reality is at most schools, including at the FBS level, football does no better than break even. Many programs are run at a loss. This was the results of a study commissioned by a former head of the NCAA.

[Sarcany]

The problem with small schools comes down to declining enrollment, competition, and financial aid issues.

A new generation of students is questioning the value of a degree vs loans/debt. Small colleges have tried to keep up enrollment by keeping tuition down and offering more financial aid.

With many small colleges, over 90% of the students might be on tuition assistance. I've heard of a few where it's at 100%.

Endowments are also down after recent tax laws have made them unfavorable. Big schools still get big donations, but smaller schools have to hustle. Government cutbacks have affected financial aid. Students are drawn to schools with more resources and there's a halo effect where services around student living will promote a school, but if the school's debt makes those services scarce then the situation simply degrades.

Something like 5% of all small private colleges in the United States were running deficits 30 years ago. Now it's approaching 30%. There's a bloodbath on the horizon.

[raz]

Given the current medical data on CTE, it's criminal that an educational institution should even have a football program

[Numo]

Maybe it’s feature creep - not just in colleges, but just about in every aspect of American life. People’s expectations keep rising and it keeps costing more and more to meet them.

[sekker]

Ammo wrote:
Maybe it’s feature creep - not just in colleges, but just about in every aspect of American life. People’s expectations keep rising and it keeps costing more and more to meet them.

Not maybe. True. Just go to any top 100 college in the US for a visit.

I watched tuition continue to rise without ANY salary increases for faculty or staff, or even decent maintenance on major buildings, for more than a decade as faculty and Senator.

Where did the $$ go to? Secondary items like local health facilities and other optional student activities. Middle administration. Dorms that were too expensive to build and could not have their costs recovered due to cap on how much could be charged.

Modern colleges are Spas and camps. They stopped being a place where faculty and students met to learn, and then the students went home (and the faculty did research etc).

[JoeH]

Partly feature creep, but many of those amenities for students are relatively inexpensive compared to other high cost items that universities are adding. University I work at has spent around a billion over the last dozen years on construction, the new dorms and rec center were only about a quarter to a third of that. The rest was for new classroom and instructional lab buildings that were needed to replace classroom space that had been converted over the last 2-3 decades into research labs.

I doubt they ever did a full cost analysis, they just saw the money from collecting institutional overhead on all of the STEM related research grants. That currently runs around 55%, for every million dollars in grant money awarded to researchers, the university takes over half off the top. So to attract more grants, they hired professors for their ability to get them and provided space out of existing instructional space. The bonds for the replacement space will be paid out of student fees.

Money going to administrators has also been mentioned. Don't know about middle administration, but upper level positions have increased here and done quite well salary wise. The unions for the staff have been having a difficult time getting more than 1-2% raises in the contracts, several times over the last 10-15 years pay increases for the top level adminstators have been in the 10-15% range.

[Michael]

Dennis S wrote:
[quote=Acer]
it's not going toward faculty as they swap tenure for adjunct wherever they can.

I was just going to say that.
That's an interesting issue that seems to be directly tied to administrative policies.

When I started my 38 year career at one institution, my college was a 1500 student, public institution with no adjuncts. The president at the time was very explicit that we were a service institution for the community and were to provide the best we could. Most of our instructors were PhD's and our class sizes were funded at 25 students. That president lasted about 10 years. The next one, at 14 years, followed the same philosophy and we grew to about 4000 students and most class sizes (except English writing-intensive classes) were funded at 35 students. By the end of that time, my department had 25 full time faculty (all PhD's) and 2 adjuncts. The next president who came in was very different. He came in to complaints from other administrative managers that they didn't have enough employees. Unfortunately, he was in the same building as were they and he was easily swayed by the most recent message he got. In the middle of the great recession, he started hiring staff. We saw the outcome in an interesting way. Our college has never had classes on Friday afternoon and so the employee parking lot was largely empty on Friday afternoons. That parking lot started to fill up on Friday afternoons. Faculty could easily keep track of how many new employees came in. Some faculty didn't get it--the money used to hire those folks came at the cost of full-time faculty. So, we started hiring more and more adjuncts. I became chair during that time and so I had to staff classes. By the time that president was forced out by the Regents (actually he was bought out, but that's a different story), I had 17 full time faculty (our department had been split) and 8 adjuncts. The current president came in 3 years ago and she has the perspective of the earlier presidents. She stopped hiring new staff and so budget increases started to come back to the academic side. I was able to transform 2 of the adjunct positions to full time positions by the time I retired in May. Both of the people hired had been adjuncts for us and were doing a great job. I presume they'll be good full time faculty.

It's obviously much cheaper to hire adjuncts. My college pays $2500 per 3 hour class for an adjunct. I don't know of any of our adjuncts who are trying to make a living doing this, driving up and down the interstate to different colleges. That pay has not changed ever at our college. Chairs typically ask retired faculty if they want to teach classes as adjuncts. Some do but I won't do it. I think it's an outrageously low price to teach and I just decided I won't participate in it.

[wowzer]

Private universities are criminal in their finances. State universities are much better values and the kids do just as well (salary wise) as the private universities. I think the private universities should have their nonprofit status revoked as they often times behave like bad corporate entities. Just my opinion.

[Speedy]

https://www.sctimes.com/story/news/2019/...351270001/

“Overall St. Cloud State student enrollment has dropped by 30%, more than 4,500 students, since 2011, Wacker said.

The number of SCSU faculty is around 600 now, 335 fewer than in 2011.”

[JPK]

The money is going to pensions and salaries. In that order.