Several weeks ago, I wrote a story titled “Shut Out: How the Cost of Higher Education is Dividing Our Country” for Tomdispatch.com that the cost of higher education has increased more than five times faster than the median income in the past 30 years. In that story, I asked, “How did college, once seen as an increasingly democratic path to advancement, become so expensive?”
I wrote that a combination of declining state appropriations, more financial aid to students from higher income families and a shift to loan aid from grant aid (the latter an actual discount on tuition, the former only putting off when you pay the full amount) all contributed to rising college costs.
In response to the piece, I received a lot of e-mails and comments saying I hadn’t really answered that initial question of why costs have spiraled out of control. Another reason, I replied but didn’t mention in the story, was that college charged more simply because they could: More students want to go to college, and thus colleges can drive up costs because people will still pay.
A recent report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (whose director, Richard Vedder, I interviewed for my Tomdispatch story) suggests another reason for accelerating costs: Administrative growth.
Full-time support staff grew by 100 percent in the past 20 years, while college enrollment increased only 40 percent. The number of full-time instructors increased 50 percent during that same period.
In other words, administrative growth (or bloat, as some critics see it) has increased much faster than most other parts of a college campus. Those people earn salaries, and something has to pay for those salaries, like tuition.
“Colleges have altered the composition of their work force by steadily increasing the number of managerial positions and support/service staff, while at the same time disproportionately increasing the number of part-time staff that provides instruction,” the report stated.
Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, suggested in an interview with The New York Times that perhaps closer scrutiny of the increase in administrative positions could help stop tuition increases.
“At a time when we’re trying to do something to hold down tuition increases, this gives us a pretty good clue where we ought to be looking,” Callan said. “And it does raise questions about the conventional wisdom that you can’t do anything to control tuition without affecting academic quality.”
Browse Timeline
- « Has the NYT’s chief political correspondent confused journalism with stenography?
- » Obama: The ‘Green FDR’?
