From 2014 to 2024, the University of Nebraska Office of the President’s yearly expenses increased by about 110%, adjusted for inflation. Over the same time period the budget at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NU’s flagship campus, decreased by 0.3%.

University system officials say those increases were driven by the centralization of IT services, procurement and the management of campus facilities, cost-saving measures that began in 2018.

Pulling those multi-campus costs under one roof saved the university system millions of dollars and is generally considered a success, said Chris Kabourek, chief financial officer and interim NU president.

But not everyone is onboard with an increasing amount of money and power moving from the campuses to NU’s system-wide headquarters.

More decisions that impact the university’s research and teaching are being made in Varner Hall, where there is no formal faculty representation, said Julia Schleck, vice chair of the English department and member of UNL’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. That worries some professors, she said.

“So the fact that it comes with increased spending, at a moment when we are cutting academic programs that we used to offer to Nebraska students, is particularly concerning,” Schleck said.

It’s clear that this push for consolidation at NU is just beginning.

Fewer teenage Nebraskans, forecasted continued declining enrollment and an ambitious goal to get back into the Association of American Universities are spurring NU leaders to look for more services to centralize, Kabourek said. The goal: Free up money to invest in academics.

As Varner Hall’s spending grows and individual campus administration shrinks, leaders are considering an existential question: Should there be one University of Nebraska?

“Just looking at the data, we have to be very candid with ourselves. The status quo is not working,” Kabourek said. “Our academic rankings are not where we want them to be. Our research rankings are not where they want us to be.”

In the past three years, the university’s central administration – which oversees campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, an ag-tech college in Curtis and the NU Medical Center – has spent $27 million more than the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

The Board of Regents recently approved cuts to UNK’s Theatre, Geography, and Recreation programs due to declining enrollment. Over the past decade, UNK’s budget has shrunk by about 14%.

Lincoln’s campus saw a slim decrease over the same period. Omaha and the Medical Center both grew, by 8% and 9% respectively. No individual campus experienced budget changes anywhere near the President’s Office, which doubled its expenditures.

This same budgetary trend is happening across the U.S. higher education map.

“There is generally a push to, instead of each university taking things on, have it be done centrally, especially with some of the smaller institutions down in enrollment,” said Robert Kelchen, higher education finance researcher at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

But when universities shift services to the center, those changes hollow out employment opportunities in rural areas and lower capacity at those campuses, Kelchen said.

The Office of the President’s spending leapt from about $91 million to $155 million, adjusted for inflation, when IT services and facilities management were centralized in 2018. Spending has steadily grown since.

While university officials attribute that growth mainly to the added services, those aren’t the only line items driving the budget higher.

Spending on system administration – salaries for the university leadership including the president and legal team – also more than doubled. Recently, NU hired more attorneys and consolidated internal auditors from individual campuses into Varner Hall, Kabourek said.

“The idea is it’s a lot cheaper to have, I think we’re up to 12, attorneys functioning at one versus every campus having eight to 10,” Kabourek said.

A category called “general administration” has also grown by 85% in the past decade. This includes funds allocated by the Legislature, money then budgeted for specific programs and passed along to campuses, Kabourek said.

Presidential salaries, rising across the country, have also contributed to the system administration’s expenses.

“Some of it is, when I first started, we paid a president $200,000,” Kabourek said. “And now we’re paying the president a million dollars.”

Varner Hall has also gained a handful of smaller programs, including the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, which are budgeted by the President’s Office but operate across the campuses. Together, these programs made up about $25 million of budget growth.

The number of full-time system administrators in Varner Hall actually fell by around 20% during President Ted Carter’s tenure, Kabourek said, as leaders didn’t fill unfilled positions.

But with the additional services now under NU’s central umbrella, the workforce has ballooned. In 2014, there were 200 budgeted employees on the central administration payroll. In the most recent year: 506.

“Administrators tend to breed more administrators,” said Anna Sillers, data analyst for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “Policy changes lead to more administration, data requirements lead to more administration.”

While centralizing operations has saved the university millions of dollars, the changes have left some faculty worried that top-down decision making will hinder their work.

There are non-voting student regents from each campus on the Board, but no faculty regents. While administrators at the campuses do often work directly with the Board, Schleck said, there are no regular meetings between any faculty body and Varner Hall to advise decisions being made there.

“It’s resulted in some recent, incredibly problematic decisions that have at least inconvenienced and at worst significantly endangered some of the research mission of some of the faculty,” Schleck said.

The IT department, now a part of Varner Hall, made necessary changes in the university’s web security system. The programs allowed for greater internal surveillance, Schleck said, which endangers confidentiality agreements for research conducted with human subjects.

In order to secure federal funding for studies, Schleck said, confidentiality standards must be upheld. Researchers now aren’t sure if they’re able to provide that confidentiality because there aren’t policies protecting that data.

“We realized it very late … but (the professor’s union) caught and questioned it and spent the year drawing up all of the potential impacts on faculty and students,” Schleck said. “But of course, this is all post implementation of the policy.”

University leadership and IT had to make timely decisions that impact faculty members, Kabourek said, to ensure the university is secure from cyber attacks.

Varner Hall’s IT team consulted with the UNL Faculty Senate before the policy went into effect, said Melissa Lee, chief communications officer.

“There may be some who disagree with the policy that devices on the University’s network should follow University standards,” Lee said. “But disagreeing with a policy is not the same as not having the opportunity to provide input.”

While there is room for improvement with faculty representation in Varner Hall, Kabourek said, faculty have the chance to give input on any changes at public board meetings.

“There’s a pretty significant communication gap. On our side, we don’t know what’s going on with Varner Hall,” Schleck said. “Decisions come down from on high. Sometimes they’re fine. Sometimes they’re really problematic for us.”

Despite the cuts to academic programs at UNK, university officials said they’ve generally tried to cut back-office functions over academics.

But now that the university has picked off lower hanging fruit, additional cuts might impact academics, Kabourek said. Incoming president Dr. Jeffrey Gold has already been working to identify duplicate programs across the campuses, Kabourek said. It will be an “all hands on deck” effort.

The university’s overarching goal is to be the first institution readmitted to the Association of American Universities after UNL was removed in 2011, in part because the AAU places less importance on agriculture research. Every other Big Ten school is part of the AAU.

UNL and UNMC are considered separate institutions for research reporting purposes, another hindrance to their rankings, Kelchen said. It’ll be a challenge to get back into the AAU even without budget cuts.

The university appears poised to clear one hurdle.

The National Science Foundation will allow UNL, UNMC and the Buffett Early Childhood Institute to start reporting research together, Kabourek said – but with the requirement that it’s part of a broader strategy to unify the university’s structure.

The university, he said, has already made that commitment to unification.

Part of Gold’s charge as the incoming president is to implement a plan for return to the AAU, Kabourek said. It’ll take significant investments.

“To get to where we want to go, we have to have all 50,000 of our students or 15,000 faculty rowing in the same direction,” Kabourek said. “Because we’re competing with Michigan and Ohio State and Minnesota, and it’s going to take all of us working together to get there.”

To be competitive with those schools, a rebrand may be in the future for some campuses. Research has shown the red block “N” symbol used by UNL is Nebraska’s most recognized across the country, Kabourek said.

“I understand people are proud of the O, or the Loper, or the shield at the Med Center,” Kabourek said. “Those have value, but we have to think about what’s best for Nebraska, best for our students and faculty. And if we’re really serious about competing, we’re gonna have to think differently.”

There was no plan to become a single entity under the “N” when the President’s Office started to centralize functions in 2018, Kabourek said. But now, as NU faces more financial headwinds, the relative success of those consolidations is inspiring leaders to consider more consolidation.

Next year’s proposed budget, up for consideration at Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting, aims to bring the system’s multi-million dollar deficit to zero with proportional budget cuts across the board and a tuition increase. The Office of the President will face its own share of cuts, Kabourek said.

“Now, if we don’t have some of the hard conversations of five versus one, we’ll be in the same place nine months from now,” Kabourek said. “It’s important to get a wide variety of opinions and make sure it’s transparent, but time is not on our side.

This post appeared on 10/11 NOW on June 19, 2024.

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American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s (ACTA) was formed in 1995 as a 501(c)3 organization with a mission of raising public awareness about the current state of higher education. ACTA does extensive surveys of thousands of colleges to determine climate, finance and policy issues of the day.

The group says it is “the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States” in supporting liberal arts education and high academic standards, as well as protecting the free exchange of ideas on campuses.

On its website, ACTA boasts it has a network of supporters and educators, including more than 23,000 trustees nationwide coupled with 1,200 college and university system presidents.

ACTA President Michael B. Poliakoff, Vice President of Trustee and Government Affairs Armand Alacbay, and Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom Steven McGuire offered insights on topics ranging from the new UNC School of Civil Life and Leadership (SCiLL) to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as institutional neutrality and how ACTA aids boards governing universities to navigate the pressing issues facing them.

“I am euphoric about this development,” said Poliakoff about the formation of SCiLL, noting other states with similar programs such as Tennessee and Texas.

“These are initiatives to focus on something that has been missing in higher education, which is a keen focus on the nature of American citizenship. That’s unique,” Poliakoff said. “What I particularly like about SCiLL is its explicit commitment to intellectual diversity, which is the lifeblood of higher education and one of the most valuable aspects of the American experience.”

McGuire called SCiLL “an excellent contribution to the future of the university” and said he was looking forward to how it will “contribute to building an even stronger culture of freedom of expression and intellectual diversity on the campus.”

McGuire noted surveys have revealed college students often self-censor while others exhibit intolerance toward differing ideas, sometimes resorting to unacceptable actions to stifle speech they don’t like. He added that a program like SCiLL will provide the skills in history, government and civic discourse “that can only be good for the University of North Carolina as well as for the state and for the country.”

When asked if programs like SCiLL might be of help if introduced prior to college entry at the K-12 level, Poliakoff remarked that “Higher education trains teachers.”

“And if teachers are not imbued with a belief and commitment to the value of free discourse, then they will carry that over into their own classrooms. I believe it will be one of SCiLL’s contributions to offer professional development for teachers.”

Poliakoff added that professional development was a part of the programs similar to SCiLL happening in Tennessee and Arizona, which he said is “vital.”

“One thing that I think we need to keep in mind is that all of these new institutes, schools, centers, whatever we’re calling them, start with a basic assumption that there is something very special and very important about American ideals and the promise of American life,” said Poliakoff. “We are unfortunately in an age when the very word patriotism is, in many circles in higher education, considered something that’s off limits.”

Alacbay said he thinks SCiLL is “part of a longer trend” that ACTA has been seeing in other states.

“This is the beginning of a movement,” said Alacbay. “I think that SCiLL just reflects another inflection point where you see that movement gathering even more momentum.”

ACTA held a retreat for the UNC System’s board of trustees in late 2022. Poliakoff characterized the trustees as “extraordinary” and “highly receptive” to the idea of a program like SCiLL. He went on to say that criticism of SCiLL was confusing to him.

“Why do they think that devoting a relatively small amount of the curriculum to understanding the foundation of America — its pivotal moments, its founding documents — is something that should be shunned as hostile or out of place in the university?” Poliakoff asked. “Or indeed an intrusion on academic freedom?

“To the contrary, within the REACH Act is plenty of room for the creativity of all the people who would teach it. So that really is a symptom of an institution that doesn’t understand the urgency of the civic disempowerment that takes place when college students don’t understand the American story.”

The REACH Act was a bill filed during the 2023-24 long session of the North Carolina General Assembly. The bill would have required students to earn at least three credit hours in American history or American government in order to graduate from a UNC System school.

Coursework would have included various founding documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the North Carolina Constitution and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

The REACH Act never made it to final passage, stalling out in the Senate Rules and Government Operations Committee.

The topic DEI drew a lengthy opinion from McGuire.

“I’d say a couple of things; first, I don’t think there should be objections to universities being places that are welcoming to everybody,” said McGuire. “So, you see this word diversity and yeah — people from all diverse backgrounds, perspectives, traditions — they should all be welcome on a university campus and especially on American public university campuses, they should be open to all Americans.”

McGuire offered the same thoughts on inclusion but said the trouble begins in how those words are interpreted.

“The one in the middle, equity, I think is arguably more difficult because it’s a concept that is purposely distinguished from equality,” said McGuire. “And I think there’s a lot of people who would argue that the treatment of various individuals on American campuses, like in many areas of life, should be one based on equality.”

McGuire also questioned what DEI really means, wondering what it means to be included or to be diverse.

“Does it mean you need to be free of ever hearing an argument or an idea that you find harmful or even offensive in order to feel included?” asked McGuire. “Or can you feel like you belong in a community that’s devoted to exploring ideas, and there will be people who may have different ideas than you that that you don’t like, or that maybe you even find deeply offensive, and it’s still clear that you’re welcome to be a member of that community. The sort of common interpretation by many who advanced the DEI on our campuses is the former.”

McGuire pointed to problematic issues with DEI practices on campuses such as mandatory diversity statements used in hiring, which surveys have shown faculty see as a way to screen out applicants holding differing views.

Referring to a survey of faculty conducted a few years ago showing 50% of faculty nationally regard the use of diversity statements as “ideological litmus tests,” McGuire noted that when the responses were broken down by those identifying as liberal and conservative faculty, 90% of the conservative faculty agreed the statements were ideological litmus tests.

“So that’s a large chunk of people in the Academy who feel like these are being used to screen faculty, you know, to only let in people who hold certain views,” said McGuire.

Another example given by McQuire was the lack of challenging of perspectives or even a lack of perspective diversity.

“For instance, I believe there were 34 student groups at Harvard who issued a statement immediately after Oct. 7, essentially blaming Israel for being attacked by Hamas,” McGuire said. “The fact that they were able to pull that together and put something like that out so quickly, to me, suggests that they are routinely accustomed to not seeing opposition to these ideas on their campuses, and I think that’s a real problem.”

The UNC System has been cited as having an extensive DEI office infrastructure and related staff costing millions of dollars each year. In an August 2022 report published by the James G. Martin Center, UNC Chapel Hill had the largest number of staff with 36 and was spending nearly $3.4 million alone just on DEI administrator salaries.

At its upcoming May 6 meeting, the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) may take a look at the DEI office costs with the possibility of ending DEI policies as well as DEI offices and redistributing those funds to other areas.

The idea of dismantling the DEI operations within the UNC System was first brought up at UNC Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting on March 27. During that meeting, Trustee Jim Blaine said DEI is “an elephant in the room” and that either the UNC BOG or the General Assembly will “follow Florida’s path” of dismantling DEI bureaucracies on college campuses.

The BOG’s possible action on DEI also follows an April 17 meeting by the UNC BOG Committee on Governance during which the body unanimously voted to repeal its diversity, equity and inclusion policies for the entire UNC System.

The North Carolina General Assembly may take up the topic of DEI during its current short session. When asked what advice ACTA might have for lawmakers attempting to tackle the issue, Alacbay said there were many layers to what DEI really means and needing to weed out and keep legitimate areas like those dealing with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance.

“The ideas of diversity and inclusion are in the abstract … are things I think most people agree on,” Alacbay said. “The problem is getting at what happens in practice in these offices. And what that is is enforcing ideological orthodoxy which is completely anathema to the mission of an institution of higher education.

“I think that legislators should empower the institutional governing boards to make the hard decisions; they have the closer campus knowledge and will be able to navigate some of those definitional questions more nimbly than something that is done by statute.”

This post appeared in The North State Journal on May 3, 2024.

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Speakers came from a diverse set of departments, spanning the humanities, sciences, law, music, informatics, education and public health. While several urged lenience for Carrie Docherty, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, as some faculty believed she was merely carrying out directives from those above her, few spoke in defense of Whitten. Faculty ultimately voted no confidence in Docherty, though it was a smaller margin than the motions against Whitten and Shrivastav.

Multiple speakers alluded to budget cuts and an overall dissatisfaction with administrative decisions. 

Maria Bucur, a history professor, read a statement on behalf of faculty who felt they were in too vulnerable of a position to speak publicly. The statement lamented a pattern of committees being created to provide faculty and staff input, only to have their recommendations ignored. It also criticized an overall lack of communication and transparency from the administration. 

Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, a law professor on the Faculty Board of Review who helped write the opinion that IU had violated policy in suspending Abdulkader Sinno, said the administration does not listen to faculty opinions — a sentiment shared by multiple other speakers. 

He also said that the administration’s attempt to provide a “confidential dossier” on Sinno during the board’s review process was unlike any proceeding he’s seen in his life. The dossier contained bias incidents reported by students and alumni against Sinno, as well as emails and letters illustrating conflicts between Sinno and some faculty members and administrators since 2022, according to the FBR opinion document. 

“I can tell you as a lawyer that that violates his due process rights, and I can just tell you as a human being – that offended me that they thought that somehow we would go along and use information when he was not given the information and a chance to respond,” he said. 

A few faculty voices provided potential explanations for faculty abstentions and “no” votes. 

Richard Shiffrin, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said during the meeting that the administration deserved a chance to learn from mistakes they may have made. He said administrators should be judged in the context of the challenges they face and mentioned Whitten’s status as the first female president. The comment was rebuked later in the meeting by Stephanie Sanders, chair of the Department of Gender Studies, who called the statement sexist because it implied women should be graded on a curve. 

Bob Eno, a retired professor from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, said he planned to abstain from the votes. While he believed the university had committed egregious violations of shared governance between faculty and administration, he said some of the statements included in the case for no confidence were unfair and even untrue.   

In interviews with the IDS, other faculty present at the meeting expressed disappointment in Whitten’s statement and the quick affirmation and support the Board of Trustees expressed following the vote. 

In a statement, Whitten emphasized the challenges faced by higher education and pledged to weigh faculty guidance when making decisions. Her full statement can be read here.  

Provost Shrivastav also addressed the no confidence vote in a column on April 17. Shrivastav acknowledged many of the specific concerns of faculty, including a “culture of unwitting competition” that makes those in the humanities feel like priorities are shifting to STEM fields, efforts to “combine operations” across schools, departments and campuses and decisions related to “geopolitical conflicts or campus procedures.” 

“And so, to deepen confidence and shared understanding, to ensure a united path to a brighter future, we must do a better job of listening to each other and coming together collaboratively,” he wrote. 

Michael Hamburger, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said Whitten’s statement didn’t show much engagement with the issues brought up by the vote.  

“Definitely there have been sudden, unexpected and very destructive decisions made on the part of the central administration about budgeting, finance and priorities,” he said. 

But Hamburger said the way it’s been handled — which he described as “haphazard” and with limited communication — makes it worse. This harms departments’ ability to make long-term plans and contributes to a climate of distrust, he said. 

One good decision from the provost was mandating increased salaries for graduate workers, Hamburger said. But departments were left to find the money within their own budgets instead of receiving increased funding from higher ups, he said.  

Hamburger, who has been at IU for 38 years, said the tensions between administration and faculty have created a dark cloud over campus. 

“There are many times where faculty have been unhappy or disgruntled, but I have never seen this kind of pervasive unhappiness with the way this university is being administered,” he said. 

Shane Green, an anthropology professor at the meeting, said he thought Whitten’s statement was upsetting in light of no confidence votes from multiple sectors of campus.  

“It seems a little disingenuous to pretend that we’re all just a big happy family,” he said. 

He said the issue was more than just Whitten’s administration, pointing toward a deeper, structural change in the role of public education. While public education was designed to produce educated, informed citizens with knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines, he said, they now appear to focus on producing a certain type of person with more specialized skills. Declining appropriations from state legislatures and reduced enrollments while colleges provide an increasing number of amenities create a precarious financial environment, he said, which a raise in tuition rates have accompanied.  

For example, Green referenced that his undergraduate tuition at UNC Chapel Hill in 1989 was around $500 per semester, or $1,265 in 2024 dollars. UNC Chapel Hill’s current in-state tuition is $7,020 per year.  

The financial constraints on public education have accompanied a shift to a less faculty-centric university, contributing to a belief among faculty that shared governance is in jeopardy. More recent theories of higher education, supported by organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, outline a university model where trustees take a more active role in reviewing and directing the work of administrators and faculty.  

“We’ve become employees,” Green said. “We’re supposed to shut up and do our jobs.” 

In “Governance for a New Era,” a report released by ACTA in 2014, a group of trustees and administrators wrote that “trustees must regularly assess the cost/value proposition of academic and nonacademic programs in setting their goals” and encouraged a balanced approach to academic freedom, which the report said is being expanded by the American Association of University Professors, at the detriment of faculty “accountability and responsibility.” 

Green said the vote of no confidence represents the opinion of most faculty, even though only 948 of the 3,276 total voting eligible faculty attended the meeting.  

“If there was a lot of opposition for it, why didn’t they show up?” he said. 

Jack Bielasiak, a political science professor who’s been at the university for fifty years, implied when he spoke at the meeting that many faculty didn’t show up for fear of retribution.  

“Look around you. There is no junior faculty that I can spot among the 800 — because they are scared,” he said at the meeting. 

It was a concern echoed by other speakers, who claimed they had heard from many faculty who also had no confidence in the administration but didn’t want to show up for the vote.  

“And I fear for this university that I’ve devoted my life to,” Bielasiak said. “I fear that it will disintegrate to something that is invisible and incomprehensible.”

This post appeared in the Indiana State Student on April 21, 2024.

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Economists and policymakers are swift to underscore the decline in government funding for higher education in recent decades. 

“The federal government and states have disinvested in higher education. This was particularly acute after the Great Recession. Understandably, they didn’t have enough money and they were looking for places to cut,” said Catherine Brown, senior policy director at the National College Attainment Network. 

However, unlike healthcare and K-12 education, funding for higher education failed to rebound significantly post-recession. 

As a consequence of the cuts, Kimberly Dancy, associate director of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), explained, the financial burden has shifted onto students and families. This trend, Brown noted, has precipitated an “explosion” in student debt.

The pullback in funding, Brown cautioned, is shortsighted.

 “If you really want your state to be set up to compete with your neighbors and be a magnet for students from other states, having a very high-quality public system of colleges and universities is usually beneficial,” she said. “It’s really important to keep pace with the investments and that those investments keep the cost of tuition down for students.”

Tuition and fees now constitute approximately a quarter of the revenue of public institutions. Declining public funding per student has compelled institutions to rely more heavily on tuition revenue than in previous years, noted Armand Alacbay, chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and a member of the George Mason University Board of Visitors.

Between the 1980 and 2022 school years, Dancy elucidated, student costs have surged by 136%, even after adjusting for inflation. 

“We have a situation where students and their families are really both paying a larger share of the college expenses that they are faced with and a situation where the total size of those expenses is increasing,” she explained.

With schools increasingly reliant on tuition revenue, a competitive landscape has emerged, particularly for students capable of paying full tuition, Alacbay observed. This, he contends, has catalyzed investments in infrastructure and amenities to attract such students, thereby driving up tuition costs for all. 

Phillip Levine, the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Department of Economics at Wellesley College, concurred. He emphasized that public institutions are incentivized to invest in amenities such as lavish dorms and lazy rivers to court out-of-state students who pay premium prices with minimal institutional support.

“It’s not irrational, that’s an investment. It may not work. Not all investments do, but the goal is to raise money because they need it to help support the institution. At the end of the day, the problem is the money needs to come from someplace,” he said.

The increased burden on students has led some to question the value of higher education. Despite this, Dancy said IHEP’s research has found that college is still a good long-term investment in most cases.

“Rising Above the Threshold” looked at whether institutions are producing graduates who earn as much as a high school graduate plus enough to pay for their degree. 

“We found that there are at least 2,414 institutions that enroll 18 million undergraduate students that typically have earnings that meet or exceed this minimum economic threshold, ” Dancy said. “In the vast majority of cases, higher education is providing students with economic returns on their investments that are really important.”

Private institutions, particularly non-elite liberal arts colleges, face even more pronounced dependence on tuition and fees, which constitute roughly a third of their revenue, according to Alacbay.

Levine describes these institutions as being “stuck between a rock and a hard place.” Tuition-dependent private institutions can’t charge high-income students much more than their public counterparts do, with whom they directly compete, he added. As a result, private institutions with high sticker prices end up awarding significant merit grants to a large fraction of their students to bring the price to a competitive level.

“They can charge a little bit more because they do offer things that public institutions can’t offer as much of, like small classes, prettier campuses, access to faculty. People may be willing to pay extra for those advantages, but they are probably not willing to pay $30-40,000 extra,” he explained. 

Without the cushion of higher-income students, these institutions struggle to subsidize tuition for low-income students, Levine said. They also don’t have much endowment support.

Alternatively, highly endowed private institutions use their endowment support to help pay the bills, Levine noted. 

“It’s actually the one sector of the higher education landscape where lower-income students do pay affordable prices because of the very large endowment support those institutions can provide,” he said. 

Despite the affordability of highly selective institutions for low-income students, their persistently high sticker prices are predicated on the ability of a significant proportion of students to pay full tuition, according to Nat Smitobol, an IvyWise college admissions counselor.

Many attribute the escalation in college tuition to rising institutional costs. A 2022 report from the State Higher Executive Officers Association identified higher instructional costs as a key factor driving tuition decisions. 

“The costs of providing education have increased. If you look at the total per-student expenditures across institutions, we see those also going up over the last decade well beyond the rate of inflation,” Dancy explained.

Levine highlighted the wage inflation among highly educated personnel at institutions, which outpaces other sectors, as exacerbating the cost burden. 

“In general, you face this problem that the costs of providing exactly the same services goes up over time,” he explained. 

Despite the increased cost of instruction, Alacbay explained, there has only been a marginal increase in graduation rates.

 “At public institutions, a 1% increase in instructional spending was correlated with only a tenth of a percentage point increase in graduation rates,” he said of findings from “In Cost of Excess.” 

The last numbers published by the United States Department of Education found that the average public college had a 35% four-year graduation rate for the class of 2020, while the average private nonprofit four-year college had a 44% four-year graduation rate. 

The “standard of care” that institutions offer has also increased over time, which has resulted in additional costs, David Feldman, professor of economics at William & Mary, noted in a 2017 Midwestern Higher Education Compact report. 

“It’s a one-way ratchet,” he said. “Once you discover that something’s better, you can’t go back just because it’s cheaper.

Institutions are often quick to adopt new technologies to prepare students for the labor market. 

Standard of care advancements also extend beyond the classroom, including counseling and career planning services and housing. 

“Colleges have had to increase the quality of their lifestyle amenities merely to keep pace with the quality of lifestyle amenities of their students,” he said. 

So-called “administrative bloat” has drawn scrutiny, with Alacbay cautioning against unnecessary administrative expenditures that inflate costs without commensurate improvements in education quality. 

Levine tempered this critique, advising against simplistic attributions of tuition hikes solely to administrative expansion. 

“It’s analogous to people talking about balancing the federal budget for five years by cutting fraud, waste and abuse. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but that’s not the problem,” he said. 

Feldman added that there’s a truth embedded in a lie regarding the administrative bloat argument. Although the share of an institution’s workforce that is deemed as administrative has increased over time compared to professors, it’s worth considering who is classified as being in administrative positions. 

“The IT staff is not instructional, it’s administrative. The professional staff counts as administrative. The number of IT staff that we have is certainly very different than what it was in the 1980s,” he said. “Maybe we should be a little bit more reticent about assuming an increase in the proportion of a college employee base that is not the professors is necessarily inefficient or bad.”

Experts suggest that augmenting the federal Pell Grant funding could ameliorate affordability concerns. 

When the Pell Grant launched in the 1970s, it covered three-quarters of the cost of a four-year public college. Today, it covers less than a third, Brown lamented. 

“It’s not keeping up with inflation, and that’s a huge problem for students from low-income communities,” she said. 

Doubling the grant, according to the IHEP report, could extend a minimum return on investment to students at an additional 95 institutions. President Joe Biden’s proposed 2024 budget, which includes a $820 increase in the Pell Grant, has been heralded as a step toward addressing affordability, according to Dancy. 

An increase to the grant would also help close the affordability gap, Brown added. She pointed to research the National College Attainment Network published in “The Growing Gap” which found that the average unmet financial need at four-year institutions was $2,256 for 2020-21.

Most students who receive Pell Grants, Dancy noted, are from families making less than $35,000. 

“That is an enormous amount of money for these families to try to come up with in order to just cover the remaining expenses that they owe to their institutions,” she said.

Experts caution against fixating on colleges’ list prices, urging consideration of net prices after accounting for financial aid. 

Based on a survey from the Association of American Universities, the public largely seems misinformed about who pays more for college, with 48% thinking that institutions charge the same for tuition regardless of family income. 

“I think pretty much every discussion about the sticker price is misguided. Every single news article that you see that talks about college costs $90,000 a year. That’s just not true and it’s very damaging. Despite the fact that I think college is too expensive for low-income families, it’s nowhere near $90,000 a year,” Levine stressed. 

In fact, for the 2023-24 school year, the average list price for in-state tuition at a public institution was $11,260 and $41,540 at a private nonprofit, according to a College Board report.

High list prices can scare away students, Brown noted. 

“It’s counterintuitive that students won’t have to pay it,” she said of low-income students. “They go onto the website, and they see these high numbers. And they don’t want to take on a ton of debt, and they get scared off.”

Given the pricing discrepancies, Levine feels strongly that institutions should make that fact clear to lower- and middle-income families upfront. 

Smitobol noted that institutions have tools at their disposal to market to different zip codes and regions. 

“These tools allow colleges to target students from lower income brackets and send them marketing about affording their specific college,” he said.

Tools like net price calculators, which institutions are required to have on their websites, can help better inform students.

“They’re not always as visible as they could be, but it’s a really useful tool for students and families because, although it’s not perfect, it’s a pretty good way to estimate,” Brown said. “The more schools promote that tool, the more students can use it, the better.”

Although many students don’t often pay a college’s sticker price, ACTA found in its report that a rise in tuition is associated with a rise in net tuition. As long as sticker price is rising, Alacbay said, so is net tuition.

Levine emphasized that, while lower- and middle-income students often pay less than anticipated, the financial burden remains significant. 

“At four-year public institutions, a typical lower-income student with under $50,000 a year in income might face a cost of $15,000. That’s clearly unaffordable,” he stressed. He underscored that the focus should shift from the high tuition fees charged to high-income students to the formidable financial hurdle confronting lower-income students. 

Dancy highlighted the multifaceted challenge of rising college costs, encompassing both upfront expenses and general living costs. She pointed out that these financial barriers, particularly for low-income students, could result in borrowing and employment while studying, potentially deterring enrollment and affecting degree completion. 

Drawing attention to New Mexico’s Opportunity Scholarship, Dancy applauded its approach to prioritizing affordability. The program, a first-dollar initiative, permits students to utilize other forms of grant aid for additional expenses. If adopted nationwide at public institutions, the model could enable 44 additional colleges to enroll approximately 216,000 students meeting the minimum economic threshold as set out by the IHEP report.

“It’s a really promising approach, and it does a good job in terms of avoiding eligibility restrictions that are common in other free college programs and other sources of financial aid,” she said.

Defying expectations by maintaining or reducing tuition could provide institutions with a competitive advantage, Brown stressed. 

“It seems like a terrific opportunity to say, ‘We’re vastly more affordable than other schools that are the same size and offer the same education.’ I’m waiting for more schools to do it,” she said.

Prioritizing affordability could play a pivotal role in addressing the looming demographic cliff. With institutions vying for a shrinking pool of students, particularly Gen Z, who are more risk-averse to college debt, tuition decisions are likely to be influenced by changing student preferences, Alacbay explained. 

He also emphasized the fiduciary responsibility of trustees in ensuring college education remains financially accessible. 

“Institutions should be concerned about how much students borrow—not just those who graduate, but for the worst-case scenario in which students take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt and leave without a degree,” he stressed.

Brown proposed state-level intervention, advocating for caps on tuition increases to align with inflation rates. 

“Students are making decisions with their feet and that does have implications for schools. They are operating within a marketplace, and they should be responsive to it,” she said.

Despite the challenges, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. 

Higher education recently reached parity with pre-Great Recession investment levels, Brown optimistically noted. A 2023 SHEEO report found that in 2022, public higher education appropriations increased 4.9% beyond inflation. 

Alacbay added that there are some positive changes on the macro level. “The average inflation-adjusted tuition for both private and public four-year colleges has started to fall,” he said, pointing to national trends at HowCollegesSpendMoney.com.

This post appeared on Volt Magazine on April 23, 2024.

The post Navigating Higher Ed’s Rising Costs: Strategies for Affordability appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The origins of the turmoil lie in extreme campus reactions to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. They led to a blockbuster congressional hearing in December. In it politicians accused three college presidents of failing to curtail antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania’s then president, Elizabeth Magill, stepped down just days later. Claudine Gay, formerly Harvard’s president, resigned from her job in January amid twin furores over antisemitism on campus and plagiarism in her scholarship (which she contested).

Plenty of faculty—both at Harvard and at other elite universities—insist that hard-right Republicans and other rabble-rousers are fabricating controversies. Stirring up animosity towards pointy-headed elites can win them political advantage. But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

To understand the mess that the Ivies and other elite colleges find themselves in, first consider how they broke away from the rest in recent decades. Despite the fact that America’s elite universities have centuries of prestigious history, much of their modern wealth flows from a bull run that began in the more recent past. Back in the 1960s, only a modest gap divided the resources that America’s most and least selective colleges could throw around, according to research by Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Stanford. By the late 2000s, that had widened to an abyss.

This happened in part because of changes that enabled elite universities to enrol ever cleverer students. The collapsing cost of air fares and phone calls made sharp school-leavers gradually more eager to apply to ritzy colleges far from their homes. Smart youngsters from around the world joined them. At about the same time, the expansion of standardised testing made it easier for colleges to identify the very brightest sparks from far and wide.

These smarter, more ambitious entrants were more likely to value top-notch faculty and facilities, and were more willing to pay for them, according to Professor Hoxby’s analysis. And they went on to greater success, which meant the size of donations elite universities could squeeze from alumni began to increase.

Newfangled ways of managing endowments also boosted America’s super-elite colleges. For years top universities managed their nest eggs cautiously, says Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University. But in the 1980s the wealthiest ones began ploughing into riskier assets, including commodities and property, with considerable success. The richest universities were both more willing and more able to roll the dice; they could also reinvest a larger share of their returns.

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

For all their success, America’s best institutions are now flying into squalls. One clutch of challenges comes from abroad. American universities still dominate the top rungs of most international league tables—but their lead is becoming somewhat less secure. Every year Times Higher Education, a British magazine, asks more than 30,000 academics to name the universities they believe produce the best work in their fields. They are growing gradually less likely to name American ones, and a bit more likely to point to Chinese ones (see chart 1).

Research in disciplines such as maths, computing, engineering and physics is becoming especially competitive. Rankings produced by Leiden University in the Netherlands, which scores universities solely on the impact of the papers they produce, now place Chinese universities in pole position for all those subjects (see chart 2). “The difference from five or ten years ago is quite astonishing,” says Simon Marginson at Oxford University. The challenge is not that American output is growing weaker, he reckons, but that the quality produced by rivals is shooting up.

Competition to snag the world’s smartest students and faculty is growing more severe, too. Twenty years ago America attracted 60% of the foreigners studying in English-speaking countries; now it gets about 40%. Starting around the time of Donald Trump’s election, high-achieving Chinese—who once had eyes only for America’s finest universities—began sending additional, “back-up” applications to institutions in places such as Singapore and Britain, says Tomer Rothschild, who runs an agency that helps them.

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

Why has this happened? One argument is that academics’ views have not in fact changed that much; instead, Republicans have abandoned them by moving to the right. But conservatives insist that bright sparks with right-leaning views have been choosing to leave or stay out of the profession, in part because lefty colleagues have been declining to hire and promote them. This mix of bloat and groupthink helps explain why prestigious universities often find themselves at odds with the American public in battles over access and speech.

Start with access: elite colleges clung to affirmative action long after the majority of Americans had decided that it was unfair to give black, Hispanic and Native American students with slightly lower grades an advantage when deciding whom to admit. Academics who spoke against the practice—arguing, for example, that some youngsters were being catapulted onto courses they were poorly prepared for—have often been slammed as bigots by their students and peers.

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

As for speech, elite colleges have done a particularly poor job of handling a generation of youngsters who are alarmingly intolerant of views they don’t like. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (fire), an ngo, rates freedom of expression across America’s best-known campuses. Last year it placed two Ivy League outfits, Harvard and Pennsylvania, among the five worst performers; Harvard came last. More than half of students at the five colleges believe it is sometimes acceptable to stop peers attending a speech by a controversial figure. Only about 70% agree that it is “never acceptable” to use violence to stop someone talking.

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

All these problems would be better handled if universities had more effective governance. University presidents, and the deans beneath them, have too often looked intimidated by activist students and administrators, and unwilling to stand up for academics bullied for unpopular views. fire, the campaigners for academic freedom, reckon that between 2014 and mid-2023 there were at least 1,000 attempts to get academics sacked or punished for things they said (one fifth of those resulted in people losing their jobs).

Years of wishy-washiness about what speech campuses will and will not tolerate have made it more difficult for university leaders to referee the clashes that have erupted between students supportive of Palestinians and those speaking up for Israel. Presidents who have not always held firm on free expression now find themselves besieged by censors of all political stripes. College leaders who, since the start of the Gaza war, have rediscovered their commitment to vigorous debate have inevitably ended up looking partisan.

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

Where is all this going? Reports of campus antisemitism have roused lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In December a bipartisan group in Congress added new language to a draft bill that aims to boost funding for short, non-degree courses. They proposed finding the cash for this by preventing students at very rich universities from taking federal student loans. That idea was dropped in February, amid worries that it would create new obstacles for poor students, but it has since been replaced with a new proposal: that wealthy universities be required to “share risk” with the government by covering the government’s losses in the event that federal loans are not repaid. Universities have long resisted talk of such schemes.

Elite universities’ tax advantages are another possible target. For years politicians have accused them of “hoarding” huge endowments while raising prices for students and snaffling government money for research. Ten top colleges got about $33bn in federal research grants and contracts between 2018 and 2022, reckons Open the Book, an ngo. Over the same period, the endowments swelled by about $65bn. Until 2017 universities paid no tax on income from these nest-eggs; then Mr Trump hit the very richest with a recurring annual levy of 1.4%. He has implied that, if re-elected, he will take another bite.

At a minimum a Republican administration would make much sharper use of regulators, such as the civil-rights monitors employed in the federal education department. They might be encouraged to launch more investigations, for example into admissions rules or the work of dei teams. Republicans have already meddled energetically in the running of public universities, over which they have far greater control. The University of Florida announced on March 1st that it had got rid of all its dei positions in order to comply with a newish state rule. Signed into law a year ago by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, it prevents state money from being spent on such things.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

The ongoing furore over antisemitism could bring the impetus universities need to reform. But a less optimistic scenario exists, too. Seeking to escape heat over hate speech, college leaders could choose to become all the more watchful of what their students and faculty say. Tighter rules about speech on campus might deflect brickbats in the short term; but in the long term they would only degrade the quality of both teaching and research at American universities. “We are at an inflection point,” believes Professor George of Princeton. “It could go either way.”

This post appeared in The Economist on March 4, 2024.

The post America’s elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal  appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.

The post George Will: Restoring the Value of an Academic Degree appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

A conservative-leaning group that tracks higher education dollars found that administrative spending — which it defines as including such things as executive management, legal departments, fiscal operations, public relations and development offices — increased by 6.3% from 2016 to 2021, from $3,549 per full-time equivalent student in 2016 to $3,771 in 2021.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which compiled the numbers, says that contrasts with instructional spending — including professors, other instructors and deans — over the same period, which fell 4.7% from $14,352 in 2016 to $13,685 in 2021 per full-time equivalent student, the latest year the group studied. The group, which used figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, says it is “dedicated to promoting academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability.”

Critics say schools are spending too much on legal fees, branding and other administrative costs at the expense of instruction. Some also slam spending on efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI, and student amenities such as swimming pools and gyms. However, the ACTA report shows that per capita spending on student services, or expenses to promote the emotional and physical well-being of students outside the classroom, and which can include DEI, actually declined from 2016-2021.

Donna Desrochers, senior associate with the higher education consulting firm rpk GROUP, said in an interview that there is “no question that we’ve seen a rise in the number of administrators on college campuses.”

She said institutions have become more complex, with new federal reporting requirements and “increasing expectations around student services and types of staff to provide those services — things like counseling and advising that were previously provided by faculty.”

“I think some of the increase we’ve seen over time is legitimate.” Still, she said, universities need to closely scrutinize their spending.

Conservatives such as Richard Vedder, emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank, point to DEI programs as an example of the sort of non-instructional spending that has increased in recent years.

“Every place in the country was expanding DEI immensely over the past few years,” he said in an interview. “Regardless of whether that was good or bad, it was very costly.”

Another factor, he said, is that running universities is increasingly complicated, and university officials “try to buy some protections against being accused of making bad decisions. They hire more administrators so if something goes wrong, they can blame it on someone else. It’s job protection for administrators.”

DEI defenders, however, say new DEI jobs have yielded real benefits.

“Schools that have DEI programs turn out graduates that are better prepared,” said Erica Licht, research projects director at the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project at Harvard University. “Students at schools with diversity programs, those particularly from marginalized communities, perform better academically and graduate at a higher rate. Faculty with DEI programs stay at their jobs longer and are more satisfied with their work.”

Nevertheless, Licht said, spending on DEI is likely to decline as opposition to it spreads in Republican-led states. In the past two years, state lawmakers have introduced 49 bills in 23 states to prohibit colleges and universities from having DEI programs, according to her group’s count.

Armand Alacbay, senior vice president of strategy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that new federal and state rules and reporting requirements are part of the problem. Alacbay said schools should be judged on “student learning outcomes” such as how many graduate, and how long it takes them to do it.

“It’s the product that’s the most important thing, above and beyond the branding effort. Institutions maybe have lost sight of that goal,” he said.

Instead of just “going to football games and having fancy dinners,” university boards of directors should be more hands-on when it comes to scrutinizing spending, he added. Alacbay is a member of the board of visitors — akin to a board of trustees — for George Mason University, a public university in Virginia, where he attended law school.

“The growth in position types … over the past 10 years has come from highly compensated administrators … not support staff, he said. “Our No. 1 recommendation is that the responsibility to stem the tide falls on governing boards, boards of trustees.”

Michael Delucchi, a retired University of Hawaii professor of sociology, was one of the authors of a 2021 study on growing university bureaucracies. In an interview, Delucchi said universities hire “compliance officers” and “admission specialists” because they can fund those positions. He added that many schools have the attitude that, “if Yale did something and hired someone, then we need to.”

Among public four-year universities, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey found, Oklahoma had the lowest per-student administrative cost at $1,970. Hawaii was next at $2,230.

On the other end of the spectrum, Wyoming, with just one public university, topped the spending at $7,830 per student, followed by Alaska at $6,224. Small systems have higher per capita administrative costs because they don’t benefit from economies of scale; looking at schools in states with midsize university systems is more instructive, experts say.

Tennessee, with nine public four-year universities, had administrative costs at $2,450 per student, while New Jersey, with 13 campuses, averaged $4,982.

In Tennessee, the legislature passed and Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill last year prohibiting professors from promoting “divisive concepts,” in what sponsors said was an attack on DEI. Tennessee Republican state Sen. Joey Hensley said in an interview the administrative cost of DEI is a “big issue” and asserted the university was spending millions on it.

In an email to Stateline, spokesperson Tiffany Utsman Carpenter said she could not directly address how much the university spends on DEI, but noted that University of Tennessee President Randy Boyd, in a speech in June, emphasized giving greater access to all Tennesseans and “fostering an environment conducive for learning and free expression that meets the needs of our students, faculty and staff.”

One major state system has escaped the kind of growth that critics are complaining about.

Harrington Shaw, an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argued that costs for public university students in his state could be lowered if the system reduced what he called “administrative bloat.”

In a piece for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank, Shaw calculated that the ratio of administrators to professors, associate professors and assistant professors is 1.29 — “129 campus bureaucrats for every 100 actual teachers.” Shaw, an intern at the think tank, quoted economist Vedder and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in his essay.

In an interview, Shaw said UNC has done a good job keeping tuition down, but argued the system has “created all these extraneous programs” such as student amenities, athletic facilities, expensive dorms and “a lot of other initiatives some people think are a good thing, but do add cost, like mental health resources, and diversity, equity and inclusion.”

UNC system spokesperson Jane Stancill, in an email, did not directly address Shaw’s calculations, but noted that the UNC system has increased enrollment by 9% since 2014, and “it stands to reason that any growing university would add faculty and staff to accommodate additional student demand.”

“Professional staff are vital to our mission of teaching, research and public service, and many of them work directly with students to help them succeed, including academic advisors, career counselors and financial aid experts,” she wrote.

She also pointed out that the UNC system has held tuition flat for eight years and features “among the lowest student costs in the country.”

Indeed, the per-student cost of administration at all branches of UNC essentially stayed flat, from $3,549 in 2016 to $3,504 in 2021, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The return on investment for students, Stancill added, amounts to about half a million dollars more in median lifetime earnings for undergraduates compared with those without college degrees.

This post appeared on Stateline on January 22, 2024.

The post Critics say public universities are spending too much outside the classroom appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Having recently embarked on a new five-year DEI plan, UM is paying more than $30 million to 241 DEI staffers this academic year alone, Mark Perry found in a recent analysis for the College Fix.

That represents an astounding expansion of the school’s already-infamous DEI bureaucracy, which had a mere 142 employees last year.

And the price tag accounts for neither the money spent on programming and office expenses nor the hundreds of other employees who use some of their time to assist with DEI initiatives.

These expenditures are a reckless waste of taxpayer money considering the impact of UM’s last five-year plan.

It cost $85 million, and what did it accomplish? 

According to the university’s Black Student Union, “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”

Hispanic and Asian enrollments increased, but black enrollment dropped slightly from 4.3% in 2016 to 3.9% in 2021.

And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021.”

These results are consistent with findings at other institutions.

A Claremont Institute study of Texas A&M University found that despite an annual DEI budget of $11 million, the percentage of students who felt they belonged at the school dropped significantly from 2015 to 2020: Among whites, the number went from 92% to 82%; among Hispanics, from 88% to 76%.

Among blacks, there was an astonishing drop from 82% to 55%.

At the University of California, Berkeley, whose Division of Equity and Inclusion boasts 152 staffers and a $36 million budget, black undergraduate enrollment dropped from 3% in 2010 to 2% in 2021.

The truth is that DEI does not work and frequently makes matters worse.

DEI trainings not only fail to achieve their purposes but often exacerbate grievances and divisions by antagonizing people and teaching them to monitor one another for microaggressions and implicit biases.

DEI often leads to illegal activities, too.

The University of Washington recently revealed, for example, that its psychology department actively discriminated against faculty candidates based on race, elevating a lower-ranked candidate for a position over others because of a desire to hire a black scholar.

In another case, a former assistant director of multicultural student services at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire recently filed a lawsuit alleging that despite exemplary performance reviews, she was harassed and discriminated against simply for being white, until she resigned.

“We don’t want white people in the MSS office,” a student reportedly said during an open house.

Even with the failures and the excesses, Michigan is not the only school ramping up its DEI expenditures.

Another College Fix analysis found that Ohio taxpayers are spending $20.38 million annually on DEI salaries and benefits at UM’s famous rival, Ohio State University, where the number of DEI bureaucrats has grown from 88 in 2018 to 189 in 2023.

Oklahoma’s public universities spent $83.4 million on DEI over the last 10 years.

Florida’s public universities reported spending $34.5 million during the 2022-23 academic year.

The University of Wisconsin was poised to spend $32 million over the next two years.

Why not use all that money to give students a much-needed tuition break?

Or why not fund need-based scholarships for promising students instead of giving cash to bureaucrats who are actively damaging our higher education institutions?

Fortunately, some states are taking action.

Florida and Texas passed laws eliminating DEI bureaucracies, and Wisconsin lawmakers recently curbed DEI in the state university system by compelling the board of regents to agree to DEI staff cuts and a hiring freeze.

Many other state systems have ended the use of DEI statements in hiring, recognizing they are used to screen out heterodox thinkers when studies show ideological diversity is beneficial to the search for knowledge, which is a university’s core purpose.

And that points to the greatest cost of DEI: While the financial waste is appalling, the price of expecting everyone on campus to conform to an ideology that undermines free expression and excludes intellectual diversity, two foundational values of the academy, is one we should be unwilling to pay.

This post appeared on New York Post on January 11, 2024

The post How one college spends more than $30M on 241 DEI staffers … and the damage it does to kids appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Boston University Professor Phillipe Copeland would like to know. When news broke that Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University was laying off half or more of its staff, Professor Copeland called the move an “act of employment violence and trauma” and said the “university needs to explain … how mass layoffs are ‘antiracist.’”

Kendi needs to explain it too — and remember: neutrality is not an option.

Professor Copeland is not the only former colleague turning against Kendi. The outgoing faculty lead of the center’s policy office critiqued the original decision to give him “millions of dollars and so much authority.” The former assistant director of narrative (and, yes, the center also had an associate director of narrative) said she found the center “exploitative and other faculty experienced the same and worse.”

In another comment, Copeland accused others of sitting “at the feet of a ‘Master’ who provides answers in exchange for deference. They mistake celebrity for solutions. This is a ‘Chosen One’ theory of change.”

While these criticisms are partially directed at the university, they also clearly target Kendi and suggest he is what his critics have long said he is: a self-promoter elevated to a role he is unsuited to play.

In conversation with Columbia University linguist John McWhorter last year, Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University, was blunter in his assessment of Kendi: “I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed mother***ers like Ibram X. Kendi, who couldn’t carry my book bag, who hasn’t read … a f***ing thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. … He’s an unserious, superficial, empty-suited lightweight. He’s not our equal, not even close.”

The popularity of this mediocre thinker was always stunning. He has commanded up to $40,000 per speaking engagement and attracted millions of dollars in donations, including a $10 million gift from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. What has happened to all that money?

Those of us who lived through the moral panic that catapulted him (and Robin DiAngelo) to fame in 2020 could be forgiven for enjoying a moment of schadenfreude as his ideological brothers-in-arms turn his own arguments against him. It is an understandable enjoyment after those of us who always opposed racism were nonetheless subjected to all those workshops, trainings, and committee meetings. We watched as our institutions issued diversity statements and inclusive language guides, insisted on curricular changes, and announced new antiracist initiatives, suggesting racism lurked in every corner.

In fairness, Kendi cannot be personally blamed for all of this, even if he took full advantage of his moment. While the complaints about him and the layoffs are personal for his former colleagues, the rest of us should be more concerned with what he represents. His rise and fall are irrevocably tied to a fervor, fueled by the anxieties of a pandemic, that spread through the American academy, attempting to remake it according to the ideas of one or two thinkers — a damnable abdication of responsibility for the intellectual capaciousness and commitment to free and open inquiry aiming toward truth that should characterize academia.

Dare we hope that the decline of Kendi’s center is another sign that we have reached “peak woke” and the tide is turning, as some have suggested?

Texas and Florida are dismantling the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that colonized their universities, and public institutions in Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, and elsewhere have renounced the use of DEI statements in hiring.

Meantime, legislatures in Tennessee, Ohio, and elsewhere have created academic centers devoted to civic education and free expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against race-based college admissions. There is even some evidence that the number of cancellations on American campuses is declining.

These are small flickers of freedom against the backdrop of intolerance and ideology that still dominate our colleges and universities. These institutions are still overpopulated by those who would call themselves liberals or progressives or leftists. They have allowed too much of the ideology Kendi represents to become embedded within them. And looking to the future, survey data suggests that the next generation of college professors is already set in its even more intolerant ways.

But the reduction of Kendi’s center shows that things can change. As he and his former allies descend into infighting, we should slip past them and continue to build on the reforms that have begun.

Kendi famously and perversely claimed, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” The remedy to Kendi’s supposedly antiracist ideology is to ignore this pernicious binary and cultivate institutions dedicated to truth and freedom that are based on merit, fairness, and equality.

This article appeared on Blaze Media on September 21, 2023.

The post As Ibram X. Kendi’s ex-colleagues turn against him, higher ed should turn against his ideas appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

College is really expensive. And it just keeps getting more expensive.

The average tuition at US private colleges grew by about 4% last year to just under $40,000 per year, according to data collected by US News & World Report. For a public in-state school, that cost was $10,500, that’s an annual increase of 0.8% for in-state students and about 1% for out-of-state.

But at highly rated or selective schools, the price tag increases substantially. Harvard University charges $57,246 in tuition and fees, per year, for undergraduate students. When you add in housing, food, books and other cost of living expenses, Harvard says you should expect to pay about $95,438 each year.

Harvard University stands in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 6, 2023.Brian Snyder/Reuters

It wasn’t always this way. After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 747.8% since 1963, the Education Data Initiative found.

And between 1980 and 2020, the average price of tuition, fees, room and board for an undergraduate degree increased by 169%, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

That far outpaces wage increases.

Over the same 40-year period, earnings for workers ages 22 to 27 only increased by 19%, the report found.

That might explain why Americans’ confidence in higher education has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released this week. The June poll found that just 36% of Americans have confidence in higher education, down more than 20 percentage points from eight years ago.

“While Gallup did not probe for reasons behind the recent drop in confidence, the rising costs of postsecondary education likely play a significant role,” said Megan Brenan, a research consultant at Gallup.

So why is the price of college rising so rapidly?

The high cost of human teachers

It costs a lot to employ professors, said Catharine Hill, an economist with the education nonprofit organization Ithaka S&R and the former president of Vassar College.

“Higher education is primarily produced by skilled workers — faculty and administrators,” she said. “Their price in the economy has gone up.”

Real wages for US skilled workers have outpaced inflation by a couple of percentage points for long periods of time, but other industries have been able to offset those labor costs through productivity advances that reduce their reliance on skilled labor — things like AI and robotics.

But there aren’t many robots teaching college classes. You still need professors with expensive degrees to do that.

“We pretty much produce higher education the way we used to, which is a faculty member in front of a class of anywhere from 20 to 40 students,” said Hill. “That means that there haven’t been efficiency gains to reduce that cost.”

Some universities have been leaning more heavily on contingent, non-tenure track faculty with low pay and no access to employer-ee benefits in an attempt to save money. The higher education system has become increasingly dependent on this temporary labor, according to the National Education Association. Nearly 70% of US faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987.

Competition for the richest families is driving up costs

Income inequality in the United States has grown significantly since the 1970s, and there’s a much wider gap between the rich and the average income earner today than there was back then.

In 2021, the top 10% of Americans held nearly 70% of US wealth, up from about 61% at the end of 1989, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes home 21% of all the income in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

That means a top-ranked university can charge whatever it wants and will still find wealthy families willing and able to pay each year.

“Flagship schools are competing for talented students and families that can pay the sticker price,” said Hill. These families “don’t have any trouble writing that check,” and are willing to spend more in exchange for luxe services and well-maintained campuses. “They want small classes, they want nice dormitories, they want good food,” said Hill.

If a school tried to scale back on spending and cut back on those amenities, she said, “they wouldn’t end up attracting those students.”

Colleges currently spend more on administrative services and luxuries than they ever have in the past, according to a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. That type of spending grew by 29% between 2010 and 2018, compared to a 17% increase in spending on instructional staff.

State subsidies fall

State legislatures are also contributing less in their budgets to public education than they used to.

Between 2020 and 2021, state funding for higher education declined in 37 states by an average of 6%, according to a recent NEA analysis. “This means colleges and universities must rely on students to pay the cost of college — and those students are borrowing to do it,” wrote the NEA in a report.

Many students at the nation’s top universities who qualify are receiving a healthy amount of financial aid and other subsidies, greatly reducing the price they ultimately pay for their degrees. But not everyone benefits from financial aid and other subsidies.

The net price of college

Yes, sticker prices are increasing. But the net price of college — that’s the amount that students and their families are actually shelling out — has been decreasing.

The average student at a private four-year college paid $32,800 for tuition and room and board last year. When adjusted for inflation, the actual price paid for private college has dropped by 11% over the past five years, according to College Board data.

For public colleges, the net price averages out at just over $19,000 and has dropped 13% over the past five years.

What comes next

“These kinds of discussions about whether this ‘college cost disease’ could possibly continue, they existed 50 years ago too, with people saying, ‘oh, it couldn’t possibly go above $30,000. It couldn’t possibly go above $40,000,’” said Hill.

“On some level, if incomes continue to rise the way that they’ve been rising, I think it will go on for a while.”

Before adjusting for inflation, the average student loan debt at graduation has increased 2807% since 1970, according to the EDI. Even after adjusting for inflation, the average debt increased by 317%.

Student debt explosion

Late last month, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, blocking millions of borrowers from receiving up to $20,000 in federal student debt relief, just months before student loan payments are set to restart after a yearslong pause. On Friday, the Biden administration said 804,000 borrowers will have a total of $39 billion worth of debt wiped away in the coming weeks.

There is about $1.6 trillion in outstanding loan debt in the United States.

This appeared on CNN Business on July 16, 2023.

The post Some colleges cost $95,000 per year, and they’re only getting more expensive. Here’s why appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.