The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released several studies. One of them, written by Robert C. Dickeson, deals with perhaps the most frequently discussed college topic of all – does it have to cost so much?
Higher education is very labor-intensive, so if you want to find ways to lower costs, labor is the first place to look.
Dickeson points to tenure as being one reason why labor costs are higher than they need to be. The decision to grant tenure, he notes, carries with it a price tag that often exceeds $1 million. Its effect is to reduce institutional flexibility in two ways. First, if student interest in a field declines, the school can’t readily adjust; it’s stuck with a tenured professor even if students aren’t enrolling in his courses any more. Second, a tenured professor who is no longer effective – someone who is just coasting along, putting forth a minimal effort for his students – is hard to remove. Although tenure is not an absolute job guarantee, trying to remove a professor with tenure is a costly, time-consuming task that many administrators don’t want to try.
The paper lists numerous cost-reducing steps that colleges can take. With regard to tenure, the best alternative seems to be long-term contracts with faculty members that protect against arbitrary dismissal, but don’t commit the school to keeping them employed indefinitely.
Another reason why higher education is so expensive is that at most schools, professors do very little teaching. “In the past,” Dickeson writes, “15 credits was considered the standard ‘faculty load.’ That is, most professors were expected to teach 15 hours per week. That number has gone down steadily. Today, nine hours would be considered a “heavy” load; many professors teach six or fewer hours per week. That obviously means that many more have to be hired to accomplish the same amount of instruction.
Professors will be quick to argue that the reduced teaching requirements are necessary so that they can have enough time for research. While it is true that some professors are engaged in truly important research, most of them are not. Writing in his book Inside American Education, professor Thomas Sowell had this to say about academic research:
Much of what is being mass-produced under the label of scholarship has variously been characterized as trivial, routine, or even meretricious. A survey of more than 35,000 professors at nearly 400 colleges found that more than one-fourth regarded research pressures as interfering with their teaching.
At least one college president has realized that having professors do more teaching would not be a bad thing. Dr. Edward Hammond of Fort Hays State University in Kansas, faced with declining state support in 2001, instituted an increase in teaching from 12 to 18 hours per week. The result was a smaller tuition increase than at other Kansas universities and also smaller class sizes. Professors still can make time for professional reading and writing, but teaching takes priority, as it should.
Another reason why college costs are so high is that some schools – particularly research universities – try to improve their “quality” ranking by purchasing expensive inputs. “Bidding wars to attract and retain high profile faculty members add to college costs,” the paper states. That’s certainly true. We often hear that UNC will experience a devastating “brain drain” unless it can match salaries offered by the likes of Harvard. Having highly-paid “superstar” professors raises a school’s U.S. News ranking, but it doesn’t do much to improve undergraduate education.
Many colleges and universities drive up costs by admitting “students who have scant promise of collegiate success.” That is especially true for the mid-and lower-tier schools that are so desperate to keep themselves full that they admit students with low SAT scores and weak academic profiles. The result is that the schools have to offer remedial courses in English and math. Such courses add to costs and it is doubtful that they even work since many of the students who taken them later drop out anyway.
Schools could reduce costs if they set higher admission standards and told students who don’t have the necessary skill levels to go to either a community college or a private learning center to learn the “3Rs” well enough that they can do college-level work.
The paper makes many other recommendations that would reduce costs. For example, academic departments with only a small number of faculty members should be consolidated, and redundant courses should be eliminated.
Higher education has taken advantage of its “sacred cow” status to add a great many expenditures that have little to do with giving students a solid education. Leaders who would like to slow down or even reverse the skyrocketing trajectory of costs should start by reading Dickeson’s paper.