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Share Your Thoughts on How Colleges Can Cut Costs in Order to Hold Down the Prices They Charge
Harvard’s December 2007 announcement that it intends to provide more financial aid for the middle class has caused many less wealthy colleges to squirm, as they worry that it will impossible for them to “match” Harvard’s largesse. I believe that colleges can address this issue by examining more closely their own cost structures, and by learning to do more with less. Clearly, something must be done to stop the college cost spiral from continuing to go up and eventually out of control. Do you agree? Please Share Your Thoughts on How Colleges Can Cut Costs in Order to Hold Down the Prices They Charge by leaving a comment below. Thank you for your continuing interest in College Parents of America, the nation’s only membership organization for current and future parents. Our mission is to empower you to best support your children on the path to and through college.
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February 27th, 2008 at 11:20 am
The best favor that parents can do for their children is to examine what a prospective college or university does with its own endowment fund. Quite a few endowment funds earn enough new money in a single year to offset most or even all of the students’ expenses. And you alumni, ask the same question when your college comes a-calling. It is bizarre that many universities holds billions of dollars in endowments while raising student costs relentlessly. If we all cared a bit more about this, it would stop.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:04 am
I was motivated to comment here after watching (on C-span on Feb 24th, 2008) a veritable circus of (mostly) droning idiots talk about how they are not part of the cost-of-college problem, when the fact is that they are actually the totality of the problem. As a long-time employee of a large state university and something of an efficiency expert, it is my studied opinion that nearly every college and university in America is so shockingly inefficient that they could easily cut their budget by at least 1/3 (and perhaps even 1/2) while teaching the same number of students in the same size classes. Of course, prices continue to rise beyond all reason because - as public choice theory tells us - public employees have no different motivations than anyone in the private sector. Almost to a person, they only want pay raises, promotions, and larger empires, education (which is their stated purpose) per se be damned. In the context of a university, this turns into spending ever more unbelievable amounts of money for totally unnecessary salaries and other things. I offer the following comments and suggestions:
Every university and college is very top-heavy with all levels of administrative personnel that do not teach per se. I would suggest eliminating 9 of every 10 of these useless, high-salary administrators. Truly, normal people would be astonished to see the ridiculous make-work and politically correct positions that exist at every university - scores of vice presidents, etc. For the most part these are positions that add nothing except cost and, in fact, did not exist at all some decades ago. For example, at my university, both the diversity office and parking enforcement each consume millions of dollars per year, and the lowly personnel office has approximately 50 people to print the paychecks and manage the benefits of a few thousand people. Note that the last private company I worked for had one person to handle these issues for over 300 employees.
Eliminate unnecessary paperwork and the people who process it. This may sound insignificant, but such things can add significant costs. I have no doubt that if an experienced efficiency consulting firm visited a typical university, it would totally eliminate 80% of the paperwork, and would severely streamline the remainder.
New university buildings typically cost at least 5 times what a similar private sector building would cost, and can cost as much as 20 times as much. I know of a portable building (glorified trailer) that came in at approximately $2000 per square foot. I don’t think the fanciest 7-star hotel suites cost that much to build!
Eliminate unnecessary junk such as “student recreation centers”, etc. Building and staffing these sap many millions from actual education. Believe it or not, some schools have spent several hundred million on just the facilities, and then staff them with literally hundreds of employees. Can you imagine the cost of that? And, it’s all money that is diverted from academics. Actually, the same could be said of sports programs, but they seem something of a sacred cow to many, even though I can assure all that hosting these de facto farm teams make American universities a laughing stock overseas.
Instead of having universities building and staffing expensive dormitories and eating facilities, let the private sector build them. They are called apartments and restaurants, and competition will assure that they are far cheaper than any housing and food a university could provide.
Out source mundane services like janitors, grounds keepers, facilities maintenance, printing, etc. These are all jobs that in the private sector pay a small fraction of what universities pay. For instance, paying janitors $50,000/year in salary and benefits is just plain stupid. I recall an ad for a university janitor I saw a few years ago: starting salary 36,000/year, and in bold print, “Must have completed 10th grade. Only first 100 applicants will be considered.” Of course, anyone offering that pay for a janitor would be flooded with responses! And it gets better. Not only is each janitor is assigned about 1/4 the area that a private sector janitor would be responsible for, but they typically work about 1 hour per night, and laze about in lecture halls watching movies the rest of the night. Amazingly, that’s been the story at every university I have been at.
Eliminate “academic” departments and programs that are not truly academic. I’m thinking here of the departments and programs that all academics know in their heart are just crap; things like “sports leadership”, “communications”, “womens/ethnic studies”, “environmental studies” (not a science in most universities), “education”, etc.; at best these things belong in trade schools or community colleges. Just because someone can come up with a program doesn’t mean it should be a (subsidized) part of a proper university. It would go a long way to restoring the pre-eminence of American universities if they would focus on offering rigorous, “real” degrees that actually require four years of serious study.
Finally, a comment on the actual *out-of-pocket* cost of attending college in America - and I’ll warn you that it is nowhere near the *published* costs we see. The latest data I’ve seen comes from the November 3rd, 2006 edition of The Chronicle (of Higher Education) [http://www.chronicle.com], and it makes it clear that actual college costs should not be too much of a burden. The numbers I found there? Based on data from 2700 American institutions, the average *actual cost* of tuition at public four-year colleges comes in at $2,700/year, private four-year colleges at $13,200, and community colleges a whopping $100/year (yes, just one hundred dollars). Though these numbers do NOT include room and board or books, they are more affordable than many people would think.
Indeed, based on the above numbers, it seems to me that most students could work their way through college without the help of their parents (as I and most people I went to college did in the past). And I think that is a good thing. First, it is my long experience that students whose parents are paying for college are usually lazy and unmotivated because, I believe, they do not bear the cost themselves. And, second, there is nothing better for building character and responsibility than a job, and those that most juniors and seniors can get (in their field of study) additionally provide experience and networking opportunities worth far more upon graduation than the money they pay.
So, cut the enormous waste and focus on rigorous academics and not the fluff of fancy buildings, etc. Doing such will do more to make a college education attainable for most people than all of the financial aid and subsidies in the world ever could.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
In China & India college is free and they graduate 700,000 engineers each year, we will be unable to compete with that. The avg. engr. pay in Vietnam is $ 200 / month.
You can see where were headed if we don’t wake up soon.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Granted college grads make more than non-college grads, but in many cases they make more because they are brighter and in spite of time wasted at college. Certain majors are likely to make the US more competitive: engineering, science and business to name a few. But I challenge you to show that the same individual (IQ, work ethic, personality) will make more graduating with a Sociology degree from Harvard than if she had chosen any number of far less expensive and more practical alternatives. A reasonably priced college education in a major with good job prospects can be good for the individual and good for the country but the notion that any college education is a good thing is just silly. www.ValueOfCollege.com email InfoLTF@gmail.com
January 17th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I’d like to see colleges and universities provide detailed information to parents about how tuition money is being spent. This might help schools be more accountable with their budgets.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I love Jim’s idea… especially that kids would actually learn some practical skills in the process. My husband and I are working full-time at professional jobs. We live modestly… but college tuition is driving us into the ground. I think the “powers that be” figure out who those of us are that have steady incomes, then go after us to suck us dry, be it tuition, taxes, gas pump. We can’t afford to keep supporting everyone else’s “great ideas”… we’re hanging on by our fingernails as it is. Please stop.
January 7th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I heard of a small private college somewhere in the mid-West, in which costs are held down by the students working a hour a day in capacities that normally would require employee labor. When I was studying Linguistics at a private institute near Dallas, Texas, we had this system. Teams of students were organized–some for housekeeping the dorms, some for kitchen and dining hall work, some for grounds, etc. Everyone contributed an hour.
Was an hour a day a burden? Sort of, sometimes, but we knew it was a universal contribution towards the operating costs of the institution. It became a “hands-on” time of the day, very often a welcome change from book-learning. Skills were learned, as well. I was special assistant to the dining hall director one semester; one day we carved up a deer carcass. Making sheet cakes for 400 diners was a new experience, using industrial-sized mixers.
Evidence is that there is a lot elitism among college students: those who “have to work” seem to be looked down on by some of those who are better off financially. An hour a day on the job for everyone might cure some of that. If colleges and universities take seriously the notion that they are helping to turn out citizens of one kind or another, this sort of routine might instill a healthy dose of egalitarianism, from which the country would suffer not one bit.