dagblog - Comments for "Why Can't Education Reporters Read?"

Well, the Times piece floats

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:52:00 +0000

In reply to Thank, Doc. That explains the

Well, the Times piece floats the current hypothesis that schools need to add all kinds of frills to compete for student enrollment. The basic claim is that students and parents have become such picky consumers that you need to spend a lot on bells and whistles to attract them. (The favorite cartoony example is building a rock-climbing wall for the students.) That argument is current inside university administrations, and it isn't the whole story but is probably part of it.

It is true that it's hard to build up enrollment by improving a college's teaching. Even if administrators had much direct control over teaching quality, which they really don't, the improved teaching will be invisible to outsiders and even to the administrators themselves. The effects of improved teaching are delayed; the results stat to show indirectly a couple of years down the line, in stats like degree completion and anecdotes about graduate success. And better teaching only becomes something that parents and donors and prospective students notice after a generation or so, after the well-educated undergrads have become prominent and successful alumni. Increase your instructional quality for fifteen years or so, and your reputation will go up. But that doesn't help you meet your enrollment target for next fall.

On the other hand, administrators can put resources into non-academic and para-academic programs pretty easily and get clear, useful results. You can show off shiny new builidngs, the new tutoring center and computer center, the nicer food in the dining hall, and a bunch of small, contained programs (like study abroad or first-year boom programs) that have intellectual value but aren't integrated into classes or majors. Those things will work. If you're an administrator, you'll be under enormous pressure to do them.

If you ask the Math and Sociology Departments to limp by short-handed for a couple of years, and offload some of your foreign-language teaching to cheap "part-time" instructors, the educational quality will slip a little, but no one will notice for a long time. (Until it's too late to turn things back around easily.) If you let the campus grounds go to hell, everyone will notice immediately and view it as a reflection on the school as a whole. If parents take a campus tour and things look run down, they're not going to write you a check. So it's perversely easier and safer, at least in the short term, to skimp on teaching instead of landscaping.

Thank, Doc. That explains the

Michael Wolraich — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:03:54 +0000

In reply to Fixed. Thanks for the catch,

Thank, Doc. That explains the relative differential between the growth in academic and administrative costs, but it doesn't hit the burning question: Why are administratitive costs climbing so much faster than inflation, not just at a few bloated and inefficient universities but across the board?

I know it's a big question and that you want to avoid the pat answers of the journalists, so feel free to kick this can to a future blog post.

Fixed. Thanks for the catch,

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:35:00 +0000

In reply to Why Can't Education Reporters Read?

Fixed. Thanks for the catch, Genghis and AC. And thank you, Quinn.

As for answers, Genghis ... I think there are a lot of reasons, and I didn't want to speculate in this pos, especially after buisting on journalists for peddling their pet theories. I have theories, both pet and full-size, and I'm going to be blogging a lot of them in the near future.

For now... one of the things that's led to the faster growth of non-instructional spending, at least at public schools, is that cutbacks tend to fall on the instructional side. One of the study's conclusions is that every time a state government cuts back funding (which is cyclical), those cuts fall heavily on the instructional side. In practice, I suspect this means not replacing tenure-line faculty who leave, or replacing them with so-called part-time faculty who make a small fraction of a professor's salary, and once those reductions are made, they are seldom repaired.

(Okay, I'll present it from my side of the table. If budget times are hard, and one of your co-workers retires, the administration asks your chair to just *delay* hiring a replacement for two years or so, till the budget gets better. And by "ask" I mean "not give permission or funding to hire." Then, when the state budget gets better in two or three years, and you ask the administration to replace your colleague from two or three years back, they say, "Well, you look like you've been getting along fine without her. You really don't need a replacement. You just want one.")

Meanwhile, the administration hires new administrators and staff, but that's not seen as bad stewardship because since they're hiring people without tenure, you don't have to worry about keeping that salary forever. However, in practice you do carry that salary forever, because organizations are naturally reluctant to fire people, and because those positions come to seem necessary. (So if you fire a superfluous assistant dean, it's because he's doing a bad job, but you replace him with someone making roughly the same money.) Administrators have come to see tenured positions as "inflexible" burdens on the budget, but people on the non-tenured side will also permanently increase the budget. In fact, that expense might be more permanent, since those positions tend to be filled when vacant, while faculty lines are deliberately left unfilled.

Some administration and student-services expenses doubtless appear to administrators either as necessary for institution building or as part of the educational mission. At many places, they've added tutoring centers instead of hiring more faculty. And once you've created a new administrative post that;s designed to increase enrollment, or build the school's PR brand, or whatever, that person is going to look crucial to the administration's mission and they're going to protect that.

Some of the administrative and student-services expenses have probbaly been cut back since 2008 (the study covers the ten years up to the beginning of the crash), precisely because those positions aren't protected by tenure. But if that seems to point to the inefficiency of tenured faculty ... well, if it weren't for the rule against it, a lot of colleges would have saved more administrative assistants and cut more classroom teachers. I'm not sure restraining them from that course of action was an unmixed evil.

Naw. That was a fluke.

quinn esq — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:19:06 +0000

In reply to Oops, I really should stop

Naw. That was a fluke.

That's what happens when you

quinn esq — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:18:35 +0000

In reply to "4) However, the cost of

That's what happens when you bold things. Your mind truns to rot.

Oops, I really should stop

acanuck — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:17:47 +0000

In reply to "4) However, the cost of

Oops, I really should stop skipping over all Genghis's comments.

"4) However, the cost of

acanuck — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:05:23 +0000

In reply to Why Can't Education Reporters Read?

"4) However, the cost of attending a four year public university went up a lot faster than the cost of attending a four year public university."

Something wrong there, doctor.

Doc, while I normally love

Michael Wolraich — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:25:55 +0000

In reply to Why Can't Education Reporters Read?

Doc, while I normally love your dissections of media misrepresentations, this post left me hungering for something else, perhaps because the issue of education costs baffles and disturbs me. Leaving aside media preconceptions, why do you think academic administrative costs continue to skyrocket every year? Where's all the money going?

PS I think that you meant "faster than the cost of attending a four year private university."