In a follow-up to the article featured in my last post of 1/30/13, Scott Thurm, along with Douglas Belkin, further investigate the rising costs of tuition at public colleges and universities. In the Wall Street Journal of December 29-30, 2012, they wrote an article for the "Dean's List" feature entitled, "Hiring Spree Fattens College Bureaucracy - and Tuition". The article concentrates on the University of Minnesota and how rising administrative costs have affected its bottom line. To illustrate the burdensome effect, they report that the "school employs 353 people earning more than $200,000 a year...up 57% from the inflation-adjusted pay equivalent in 2001. Among this 200K plus group, 81 today have administrative titles, versus 39 in 2001." They relate an anecdote of how reimbursement of a professor's $12 parking fee cost $75 to move the paperwork "from a secretary to the head of his department to an accountant who entered it in a computer to a senior accountant responsible for approving it."
This Kafka-esque scenario would be humorous if it weren't so prevalent. Belkin and Thurm report that many public colleges "went on a spending spree over the past decade, paid for by a steady stream of state money and rising tuition." The U.S. Department of Education reported that the "number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011." The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that the cost of tuition "has risen even faster than health-care costs". But in this tight economy the stream has run dry and, speaking of healthcare, schools are also cutting back on the number of adjunct professors - the people who actually do a lot of the teaching in colleges and universities. This is in response to the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) and its mandate that employers provide health insurance to employees who work 30 hours or more. Starting in 2014, employers who don't provide healthcare will pay a penalty. (Mark Peters and Douglas Belkin, "Health Law Pinches Colleges", Wall Street Journal, Saturday-Sunday 1/19-20/13) Many schools have responded by eliminating adjunct positions or the number of classes adjuncts teach. This will only exacerbate the issues of overcrowding and class availability.
Most college advisors and guides have urged students to consider the student/teacher ratio at the schools in which they are interested. In addition, it might be wise to find out the administrator/instructor and administrator/student ratios as well.
