Universities: “we are committed to your success”
Universities: *raises tuition*
Universities: *cuts scholarships*
Universities: *builds unnecessary things*
Universities: *puts money into their own paycheck*
Universities: *pays sports coaches more than professors*
Universities: *cuts funding to certain departments
Universities: “why is the drop out rate so high in America?”Ahahahaha, no.
Have you seen a university budget lately? I have been behind the scenes at no fewer than three universities of varying type and size in the past 10 years, and have heard from more. Almost all of them are struggling to survive. They are not raising tuition and slashing department funding because it’s fun. They’re doing it because the state governments have reduced their funding to colleges and universities so drastically that the universities have no other means to continue functioning.
A typical public university’s budget used to look something like this:
- 45% from student tuition
- 45% from state government
- 10% donations, grants, etc.
And then over the course of about five years starting in the late 1990s, it suddenly started looking like this:
- 45% from student tuition
- 20% from state government
- 10% donations, grants, etc.
You might notice a problem with the way that adds up.
They still build buildings and renovate stuff because those are capital costs—they happen once and don’t recur, and you can still get grants and funding to support one-off costs like that. They don’t have to foot the whole bill for that stuff out of pocket, and they hope that by improving their infrastructure, it will attract more students and help them to succeed despite the damage being done to faculty and staff rosters.
Some colleges are big sports colleges, and they actually fill a pretty large gap in their budgets with the money sports pull in for them (not to mention, their fundraising success tends to be partially contingent on their sports doing well), so paying a coach an exorbitant amount is considered a worthwhile investment. Is a college coach taking over $1 million per year greedy and stupid? I think so. But they can’t afford to hire bad coaching talent, so they pay what it takes to lure good talent in.
Same goes for the senior administration at the big-name schools—presidents, VPs, etc.
And then you have the majority of colleges and universities, which in fact do NOT have hardcore sports programs or pay their senior administrators like rockstar CEOs. And they’re floundering too.
Money is NOT going to faculty. Faculty are getting their salaries and positions axed left and right. Tenure barely still exists as a concept; adjunct professor positions get paid course credit taught per semester and don’t come with all the health care and benefits. In fact, you know what? They’re barely getting paid more than what minimum wage SHOULD be. Educators and researchers are being put on starvation wages, essentially.
In fact, the VAST MAJORITY of US colleges and universities are in debt, because they got strung out to dry and are having to tap into their operating reserves and lines of credit to make ends meet. More of them than you think—including many storied name-brand institutions—are fighting for survival. If they chose not to raise tuition, you would be seeing probably better than 50% of US universities simply closing their doors and going out of business (and if anything that is a conservative estimate). Even if they didn’t pay coaches and presidents ridiculous salaries, that wouldn’t be enough to save them.
And what would we do as a country if we lost better than 50% of our higher education institutions over the course of, oh, 10 years? You don’t want to know how hard they’re fighting not to make that a reality.
Public universities across the country are now struggling to build robust fundraising arms like the upper echelon private colleges have had for so long. And hey, that takes money too, to hire good financial development people, and it also—unavoidably—takes time. It takes years, to build out those contact networks and communication channels, to cultivate relationships with a wide base of donors willing to give each year and, even harder, with donors who have the kind of money to establish endowments that can support a college long-term. Harvard’s got that. Stanford, Yale, Columbia. Not many others.
All this is because the government has reconfigured its priorities and it has decided that higher education is not among them. Not because universities got greedy. They hate it, believe me. They know that they are gutting themselves in order to survive and that the bloated price tag is turning away students who should by all rights be there, and it drives them NUTS. But until the situation stabilizes, they simply have no other choice.
So if you hate it, take it up with the people who can actually do something about it. Hint: that’s your state government, not the universities. They’re already lobbying as hard as they can.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1uT7IrI