Looking at the hidden reasons for the cost of higher education.

My guess is that Paul Campos doesn't get invitations to the faculty Christmas Party.

Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.  That wouldn't keep him from getting an invite. But his book Don't Go To Law School (Unless): A Law Professor's Inside Guide to Maximizing Opportunity and Minimizing Risk was not without controversy.  In it, Campos seriously took on law schools and sparked a huge amount of debate, including debate from law school professors (which both Federal Judge Posner and I have likened to refugees from the practice of law, but I stated that first).  

Now, or actually several months ago, Campos wrote a New York Times Op Ed entitled The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much  and the reason, according to Campos, isn't the one that schools like to give out.

According to Campos, public funding of education is causing it.

That's right, public funding.

Now, that's counter intuitive.  In this era of Bernie Sanders inspired "let's make education free" the logic would be that funding education drives the cost down, and makes it more affordable for all. But that logic is pretty thin, and Campos raises some really good points.

Campos first notes what most suspect, but that few are willing to acknowledge.  Following the baby boomer flood into college, public investment in college massively increased.:

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

While not what this post is about, as this blog does track trends, it should be noted here what few are really willing to note.  The Baby Boomer generation has dined richly from the public trough, and has been more indulged, as a demographic, than any other.  Resource consumption wise, while they don't recognize it, Boomers are like the bulge in the snake.  They've received more from American society than their predecessors as well as more than those who have come after them, and they will continue to do so.  That makes them a rich generation, in a demographic resources sense.  And as they control the political landscape, they'll continue to do that.  Consider that in the current presidential election the former top contender in the GOP race and both top contenders in the Democratic race are Boomers.  We're not unlikely to have exactly one Gap Generation President, President Obama, before we slip right back into Boomers.  But I digress.

Campos notes the rise in university education cost:

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

 And he further notes:

 As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

So where is that funding going?  Well, Campos looks at that as well, and the results are pretty disturbing:

Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

Yep, public funding has resulted in a vastly expanded publicly funded administration.  That shouldn't be a surprise, but it doesn't surprise me that this has occurred.

Now, I can't say that all of this is unnecessary.  Some of it likely is, as the world has gotten more complicated and more administrative people have become necessary.  But not all of it is.  Consider the following, even though some will bristle at it, about the University of Wyoming, from a few days ago:

LARAMIE, Wyo. (AP) — The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees has approved creation of a new diversity assistant position. The Laramie Boomerang reports that the new assistant will lead the development and implementation of a diversity plan for the college. UW President Dick McGinity says a search committee will be formed to find potential candidates for the job. McGinity says introducing students to a diverse campus is important for many reasons, including success in the workplace after graduation.

Now, the state's one and only university is supposed to be "as nearly free as possible" for the state's residents.  Does hiring a diversity coordinator assist in making it as nearly free as possible.  No, it doesn't.

And is this even necessary?  I doubt it.  The university should, keeping in mind that it is a state land grant college, aim to be as diverse as the state's population is, and I'd emphasize the "state's population", as it is a state college, but that would mean trying to recruit more heavily from the Wind River Indian Reservation, something it's known about and has been trying to do for years.  

A "diversity" coordinator, however, will inevitably end up as a bureaucratic position deeply stewed in a the left wing social concept of what "diverse" means, which in that mindset is, ironically, that there is no diversity, as every human being is exactly the same in every imaginable fashion and any difference, including biological ones that every single human being displays, is simply a social construct.  And, moreover, in this day and age every college campus everywhere is pretty darned diverse in the conventional sense.  Over half of law school student bodies, for example, are female.  There is no racial or religious discrimination in major institutions any more.  What real (ie. racial) diversity is lacking stems largely from the impact of poverty, which should be addressed but which doesn't require a coordinator to tackle.

Not that this is going to be addressed any time soon locally. While the university does face spending cuts, as the state's in a budget crisis, the Legislature passed bills approving funding that will go into the university's athletic program. As the Casper Star Tribune recently noted:

A program that supports University of Wyoming sports appears safe from budget cuts that could slash millions from K-12 schools and literacy programs for young readers and their parents.

Stuff like this has to have an impact somewhere.  That is, at what point does a big athletic program become some sort of a burden and not make much sense, education wise?  Supporters will claim that doesn't happen, as the big sports pay for themselves.  Perhaps they do, I don't know, but it does make  a person wonder just a bit. This is not to say that athletics do not have a place in higher education, they clear do, but the place that the big name sports currently have is questionable.

I'm not saying that any of this creates a crisis at the local level.  Indeed, while Wyomingites no doubt do not think of it this way, Wyoming is a good example of funding university education for the state's youth in a way that simultaneously demonstrates that Sanders' concept of a big national program is both wrong and poorly thought out.  In other words, a Distributist model of how to approach this is actually working in some states, whereas a national one would likely be a bureaucratic disaster. 

Indeed, those who point to Europe on this should be aware that Americans send more students to college than the majority of European countries, and where there is state funding of higher education in Europe it is sometimes heavily controlled as to dictate societal outcomes and, of course, it's done by individual countries rather than the European Community, so it's more of a Distributist model as well.  Be that as it may, the much vaunted European system (which is actually a series of systems) generally produces fewer college graduates by percentage of the population than the much criticized American one does.  Perhaps that means that the American system, for all its critics, works pretty well.

Part of the criticism of the American system is, I think, actually that people pay a lot to not get much in return, in some instances.  This is actually a criticism of the quasi capitalistic nature of the system, although people don't realize it.  The proposals to really socialize it would address that in part, but only in part, which is probably why the European systems actually produce fewer graduates.

The reason for that is that is a combination of things.  On one hand, the public funding of higher education has sponsored a lot of phoniness in higher education.  We have professors who hold PhD's which are basically based on fairly worthless areas of study and who sometimes use their university positions to advance those areas of study, essentially producing needless data on the public dime. We have some entire areas of academic concentration that are really questionable at that.  Basically, if you look at college areas of concentration, and find one that didn't exist in 1960, if its current existence can't be explained by an advancement in technology, industry or fields of employment, it probably ought not to be there.

The fact that they are there, combined with student loans given out for any field of study, and combined with programs that generate students as they need to, means we have a system that generates graduates, irrespective of their employability.  That's a difference between our system and at least one other, the much vaunted German system. The German system may be free, but it also pretty much determines where you are going for you at a quite early age, and that's what you are going to do, more or less.  Indeed, one German national I know who is employed in the US has noted to me that the German system is admirable because it's free, but he's lucky he came to the US where he was able to have more liberty as to his choice of careers. 

But, back to the main topic, all of this sadly explains part of the real problem of current higher education.  At one time higher education was, well, higher education.  But now these institutions are institutions, and like any big institutions, they become top heavy. All that weight at the top has to be fed, and it will be.  And that drives up the cost  How to address that is another matter, but people defend their rice bowls, so addressing that isn't easy.

Which is also why things like professional coordinator positions tend to be a bad idea.  As a concentrated project (let's recruit more students from Wind River, for example), it makes sense. But by making it a position, the risks exists that it never sees its mission completed.  Very few bureaucratic offices ever see their mission fulfilled on their own.

The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted unanimously Friday in favor in changing UW regulations to create a new position to coordinate the institution’s diversity efforts.

Read More: University of Wyoming Trustees Create Diversity Coordinator Position | http://kowb1290.com/university-of-wyoming-trustees-create-diversity-coordinator-position/?trackback=tsmclip

The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted unanimously Friday in favor in changing UW regulations to create a new position to coordinate the institution’s diversity efforts.

Read More: University of Wyoming Trustees Create Diversity Coordinator Position | http://kowb1290.com/university-of-wyoming-trustees-create-diversity-coordinator-position/?trackback=tsmclip