Can anyone in higher education tell us where all the money goes?

[Bread and Circus]

I am 100% for free tuition for college for all. Totally and utterly behind Sanders on this issue.

I also love that Clinton wants to make community college 100% tuition free! Totally support her on that. It's a start!

However, I kind of view high education as a bit a of a money scam these days and I have witnessed college tuition go through the roof these past few decades and people get less for their money in terms of a college degree as they are a dime a dozen in some ways.

What I want to know is why has college tuition outpaced inflation by a high margin and where does all the money go?

Also, what are your thoughts on tuition price control if the government does in fact more heavily subsidize tuition?

[-none]

1. Collage sports for one thing.

Where does all that money go?

[Myrina]

7. ^^ this ^^

Stadiums, recruiting, training facilities, coaching staff salaries (really, does any college sports coach deserve over $1M/yr?)

[Springslips]

8. In most schools

Funding for sports comes mainly from donations and tickets for games. Some schools subsidize their athletic department from general funds, but these are operating expenses not for buildings ect. Spilling general funds to sports is wrong but it is not the cause of the tuition bubble.

[-none]

10. Again, where does all that money go?

Sports is only one area over supplied with money. Where does the rest go?

[Springslips]

14. See my post #11

My theory from what I've read or been told by some academics is there.

Short answer: it makes up the difference in direct funding, fatten administration staffing, salaries, and trust funds.

[Wilms]

13. This article disagrees with that.

http://www.newsweek.com/college-sports-basketball-football-411984

Do you have any links?

[Springslips]

18. I acknowledge your need for a link.

Unfortunately, I have a busy day, don't have one handy, and can not look one up right now. Weak, I know, and I acknowledge I am unconvincing without one.

One quick critique in the Newsweek article: it makes a good case that college sports is "too high" but it doesn't claim to attribute sports to the hyper-inflation of tuition. It is kinda of a different argument. At best you could say that sports has a hand in part.

One biases from me is that I graduated at a huge university so my view on the issue may be slanted. My university sports actually transfers profits to the general fund so my opinion might be influenced from that experience. (The article mentioned this phenomena of larger school and student costs) Still tuition has increased the last few decades there, which means there are other factors causing it.

If I have time later I'll hunt for links arguing my side, to counter you with something better than "I said so."

[Gidney N Cloyd]

2. Ever since we stopped asking students to bring coals for the stove it's been an upward spiral.

[firebrand80]

5. LOL!

[hoosierlib]

3. The same place they have always gone..

Salaries, benefits and building / maintenance...

Some of the increase goes to the CEO level salaries of University President's (which is a effing outrage IMHO).

But a the big reason is the that state and federal funding has decresed only the last 40 years...

[DanTex]

4. Found this from google, it's got some pie charts.

Never seen this website before so caveat emptor, but at first glance it looks reasonable.

http://radioopensource.org/college-budgets/

[Ed Suspicious]

6. I've been told by my school that much of the increase in

our tuition and fees is directly correlated with decreasing support from my state and inadequate federal funds to make up the difference.

[Springslips]

11. This!

And also since the difference can be made up by tuition increases that load students with debt, schools can outstrip inflation by increasing cost. What I mean is that the number of administration positions at Universities have increased with the price of tuition. It's a bubble just like home mortgages were. Easy credit increases the cost of education just like easy credit bubbled up housing cost in the 2000s. School do not want to lose out on this available money, and since they don't get it directly from governments anymore--which came with tuition controls--they up the price of tuition and use surpluses for adding more and more staff, raising salaries for execs, and fattening school trust funds.

The tuition bubble is a direct effect of our school-loan education funding system. We should go back to direct funding, and keep tuition low.

[-none]

17. That makes sense.

[zazen]

9. sticker price is discounted for most students; still, there are increased costs

while there have been simultaneous cuts in state funding (and size of Pell grants) over the past 30 years.

There's a lot of administrative bloat. Paradoxically, some of that is in maintaining a resource seeking infrastructure to seek unrestricted gifts as well as the heavily regulated federal sponsored programs enterprise. All of that grant seeking requires a lot of pre and post award support and universities and departments within them spend a lot of time competing with each other rather than organizing to protest the larger injustice of dwindling allocations.

In addition there are assistant deans for every special interest because universities are terrified of being accused of being insensitive to any demographic. I'm all for sensitivity but you don't need a 100k position (inclusive of benefits and payroll taxes) for Native American students when you have .001% of the student population with that b/g. Ten years ago an assistant dean for diversity affairs was enough. But there are a lot of other more fluffy positions than that, in addition to the grossly overpaid upper admins. Admins hold onto their positions jealously and set up the administration to make sure their issues keep getting funded.

The major infrastructure investments are to lure students (partly because what's left of state funding follows FTEs). Also, all of that student loan money that will haunt students for the rest of their lives goes straight to the university, so there's no disincentive for the university to scale back fancy student facilities since the debt isn't hurting them.

[JVS]

12. Prices are high because it's very easy to get loans to pay for it.

If people actually had to pay cash, they wouldn't be willing to pay as much and prices would need to be more competitive.

[Nonhlanhla]

15. Not to faculty

75% of American college faculty are now adjuncts, people slaving away for pitiful wages and no benefits. Only a small number of professors actually are tenured or on the tenure track, with full benefits, opportunities for advancement, and career support. Some of us (like me) are full time, with benefits, but not on the tenure lines, which makes for a frustrating and often unfulfilling career with no support for research, no sabbaticals to write the books that we need to write in order to stay competitive, no opportunities for advancement and raises. I still count myself lucky that I have a good employer and that I am not an adjunct, like so many of my friends. Academia is absolutely brutal these days.

Most assessments of the problem point to the increasing corporatization of colleges, and the massive increase in both the numbers and incomes of administrators.

[exboyfil]

16. Most state schools have their budgets online

Take one you are familiar with and walk through it. Salaries are a matter of public record. In some cases the budgets even break out the salaries of individuals. You can also look them up in many (most?) states. Also many reports exist for sports funding, the most contentious part of the budget. Power schools like Alabama use their revenue generation football to fund hugely successful sports programs in other areas including many women's sports.

In Iowa the percentage of the state budget going to education has remained relatively constant. The big change is far more of it is going to K-12 than public colleges and universities. That difference is mostly been made up by student loans.

No doubt there could be a scale back of facilities on campus. To some degree schools do practice a bit of bargain hunting - for example at my daughter's university the older dorms with fewer amenities are less expensive.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

20. As others have pointed out, much of the rise at public colleges is cost shifting.

I'm at a community college but it applies to state universities as well. Less support from the state shifts the burden to tuition and fees (and at community colleges in Illinois, to property taxes).

Meanwhile, we're tasked with providing more and more services to students who are disabled, at-risk, and under-educated by the feeder high schools. All good to do but it underscores how the mission has expanded. Serving groups that in large part wouldn't have gone to college a generation or two back means more specialized support and a lot more expense, the funding for which hasn't kept up. This has led to expanding admin jobs in addition to the hands-on support staff.

Lastly, there's technological expansion. 30 years ago you had a school building with a lot of classrooms, each of which was outfitted with chairs, a blackboard, a projection screen and an overhead transparency projector as standard issue. You'd roll in a VCR & monitor when you needed it. Now every classroom and lab is loaded with video projectors, smart boards, smart podiums, phones (in case of emergencies like active shooters), and a computer. The whole building is networked-- hard wire and wi-fi. We provide interactive web services and online class learning management systems. Every support department has some special software it uses (like degree tracking for students and transfer databases) and state-federal regs require us to track and report on everything.

I'm probably still leaving a couple big, costly areas out but bottom line, all this stuff we do now and didn't before costs money. We're exceeding the pace of inflation because our "basket of goods" keeps expanding.

[exboyfil]

21. There is a lot of money to be had in the current system if we can

get the political will organized to address it.

Here is an article showing the institutions with the highest amount of outstanding student loans. Of course the big suspect are the for profit colleges with a very high debt load and very poor graduation rates. By definition these institutions have to be the biggest cost driver. Most of the credits from them cannot transfer to other institutions so the credits obtained have little if any value without a degree, and even with a degree - what value does it really have.

http://fortune.com/2015/09/10/student-loan-defaults/

University of Phoenix has $36B of student loans. It also has a a graduation rate of 17% and a default rate of 26%. This one institution has a measurable effect on the student loan program.

http://www.marketplace.org/2015/09/18/education/profit-schools-see-rise-student-loan-default