(Please excuse some typos and errors today. I'm using Steve's ancient computer to blog and, well, it's ancient.)
The New York Times continues to write about student loan debt. Finally. In today's article, we get a close look at E. Gordon Gee, the president of OSU.
E. Gordon makes a good penny.
Mr. Gee’s compensation package this year, moreover, is worth about $2 million, and The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him the highest-paid public university president. The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Mr. Gee had billed Ohio State for $550,000 in travel in the last two years.
He recognizes that tuition is at a tipping point and that student loan debt is out of hand. While he's not proposing a pay cut for himself or cutting back on his travel, he did improve the purchasing system for the school. He's also not cutting back on dorm or gym facilities, but he is cutting back on sabbatical time.
I think we need a serious discussion about what makes an essential college education. The basics. Colleges need to justify their expenses to outsiders, including administrative pay.
UPDATE: Andrew Hacker's opinion article in Today's Room for Debate is a must read. Hacker is a professor at Queens College, who has always taken a strong stance against graduate education. He refused to teach at CUNY-Graduate Center.
More colleges now give their faculties expensive sabbaticals every third year. A recent count found that 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors weren’t teaching. Nor can it be shown that research enhances classroom instruction; often the reverse is the case.
Nationwide, full professors average a not-humble $113,176. Faculty pay at Stanford has close to doubled in actual dollars in the last three decades. The president of 1,991-student Carleton College gets $593,132. I don’t doubt he has weighty duties; but the head of the Food and Drug Administration makes about a third as much.
Nationwide, full professors average a not-humble $113,176. Faculty pay at Stanford has close to doubled in actual dollars in the last three decades. The president of 1,991-student Carleton College gets $593,132. I don’t doubt he has weighty duties; but the head of the Food and Drug Administration makes about a third as much. Even while indenturing their futures with loans, students find they are increasingly taught by underpaid adjuncts, and in huge lectures where they peer at a professor from the 26th row. At another time, I’ll fault state legislators for starving public colleges. For the present, I’d say that the prodigal ways of faculties and administrators could use a closer look.
Also, read Lawyers, Guns, and Money.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve written a fair amount about this over the years.
The article mentions first off that colleges and universities, because they’re labor-intensive, are highly exposed to health care cost increases. Because they have big physical plants and residents, exposed a lot to energy costs. Because they depend unusually heavily on information technology, that’s a big uncontrollable cost as well.
So past that, labor is the first big fixed item in the budget. When people want universities to be cheaper, some cuts in the labor side are inevitable. What most universities have already done is cut very very deeply into their labor costs on the faculty side, by relying more and more on adjuncts and graduate students to teach. At many large research universities, a substantial majority of courses are taught by adjuncts, grad students and contract faculty. So for one, eliminating tenure is very nearly something that’s happened already. It’s not a big cost driver in and of itself. If you canned all long-term faculty (whether contract OR tenured) you might see some savings simply from keeping your faculty young and cheap. Assuming that these savings were passed on to the sticker price (not a safe assumption) you can ask yourself if the discount would be worth getting rid of the most experienced teachers and researchers wholesale–and if anyone who had a choice would want to work for an employer that practiced the “Logan’s Run” method of staff development. Basically if you think the University of Phoenix is a great deal and the future of higher ed, you’ll love this idea. (Notably most of the online for-profits are almost as expensive as brick-and-mortar despite not having most of the overhead I mentioned at the start.)
The other disciplined choice to make on the faculty side is not about dumping everyone with more than a starting salary but about having curricular specialization. In a large public system, that might make a lot of sense–Big State U #1 is a science school, Big State U #2 is art. But I think there’s a big loss to that approach too–it’s essentially a vocational strategy. I honestly believe that a liberal arts approach is better both for career development and for the other purposes of higher ed (the cultivation of humanity, education for democratic citizenship, etc.) Still, I think you could ask institutions to find a way to ask for more intellectual flexibility and nimbleness of liberal arts faculty and therefore have fewer lines of “deep specialization”–and thus perhaps smaller and more adaptable faculties. (If you want a favorable student-to-faculty ratio, though, making the faculty smaller doesn’t solve the problem, because you’ll have to have fewer students as well.)
So what next? Administrators, the favorite target of faculty who are looking to explain high costs. There’s no doubt that there’s been big growth on the administrative side, and a lot of inefficiencies in particular at larger institutions. (The NYT article is good on this point.) But the faculty I know who talk about this just hand-wave in general at “administration”, not at anything specific. That’s where it gets tricky. Universities have way more legal mandates and liabilities than they had 20 or 30 years ago–so there’s people you have to have. Their finances are more complicated than they used to be–I know I want specialists who can handle that. You could argue that many places have too many deans/residential life specialists, but you know, students and parents often demand those staff. Better have a mental health specialist–or you’re exposed to legal judgment. I think we ought to have a specialist in learning disabilities, and I assume Laura would agree. ITS and library staff seem essential. And so on. It’s easy to handwave, hard to specify.
What else? All the press about hot tubs and climbing walls a few years back was mostly lazy, not really based on close examination of the costs. In many cases, those facilities yielded students, including the precious full-paying students that are important to the bottom line. We have a pretty basic gym at Swarthmore but it’s better than the truly squalid facility we had 20 years ago–and our students (including progressive students who profess concern about elitism) like to complain that our current facilities are sub-standard.
I wrote out a sketch some years ago of what a liberal-arts institution that abandoned specialized majors and went completely no-frills on the administrative side might look like. I think it’s a viable model and at least on the curricular side there’s a few institutions that are sort of like what I had in mind. (Quest University in British Columbia, for example.) But I don’t know how much cheaper those institutions would be. I think they’d be more effective in the value added in the education, but they’d be more unpleasant and barren for students (no real residential life or community, 18-year olds having to assume complete adult responsibility for all aspects of their lives & budgets). You tell me if when the time comes, you’d compare my imaginary No Frills Liberal Arts College at 65% of the sticker price to Swarthmore, Princeton or Duke and say, “Ok, kids, you’re going to No Frills”. Particularly if 65% of the selective privates is also roughly the same as an in-state public Mighty Big U.
This gets at a major point: cost control will take hold in earnest across higher education at the point at which either a: all or most major sources of revenue are going in reverse or b: the customers aren’t willing to pay the price. A) might happen–it did happen during the 2007-2008 financial collapse. A sudden contraction is probably not the best way to discover what’s truly “essential”; a slow contraction of revenue might do so. B) is so far not happening because college consumers continue to regard higher education as a Veblen good.
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I think that Ohio State and other state giants will be O.K. and able to adapt. There isn’t a better a choice for many of the people there and people will be willing to pay. I think the smaller state schools are going to be where the first shifts happen. For example, there is the local normal school/newish university. When this stuff comes out in a climate of declining state support, it looks like somebody is playing SimUniversity instead of running a school.
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The Swarthmores and the Princetons probably don’t have to make changes. As Tony pointed out, 40% of the student body at Princeton can afford the full tuition. That information depresses me horribly, but if there is nothing I can do about it. There are enough families that can afford a full sticker price and all the frills, so there is no pressure to change. OK, whatever. The changes will have to have to happen at state colleges.
I hope, I really hope, that students like the poor girl featured in the NYT’s article with $100,000 loans stop attending schools that eat up their money. There are large numbers of middle class and lower income students who need No Frills schools. I hope that they create a demand for reform.
Re: labor costs. Labor costs could be reduced through manditory retirements of the 70+ faculty and a full 3-3 course load for all faculty. The elimination of grad departments and a reduction of reseach/publication requirements would free up faculty to teach undergrad classes. There’s is room for change here.
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Re: labor costs. Labor costs could be reduced through manditory retirements of the 70+ faculty and a full 3-3 course load for all faculty. The elimination of grad departments and a reduction of reseach/publication requirements would free up faculty to teach undergrad classes. There’s is room for change here.
3-3 course load + no grad departments might cut down on labor costs but it would mean the end of academic research as we know it. Are you suggesting that we sacrifice academic research for the sake of affordable college? (I’m up for an honest debate about that.) Or maybe that academic research happen in some other venue–corporate or government research centers, perhaps?
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“3-3 course load + no grad departments might cut down on labor costs but it would mean the end of academic research as we know it. Are you suggesting that we sacrifice academic research for the sake of affordable college?”
Or maybe just that not every college and university should aim to be a research powerhouse.
I suspect that looking at presidents’ salaries (at least at the bigger schools) is probably barking up the wrong tree, at least from the point of view of cost cutting. If a guy can magic millions out of individual donors with a smile, a handshake and a few nice lunches, his salary is almost irrelevant as long as it stays in seven figures. I suppose you could put college presidents on commission (say 1% of donations collected), but that might wind up being more expensive, as well as looking crass to the public.
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Labor costs could be reduced through manditory retirements of the 70+ faculty
I’m pretty sure that that’s illegal now- generally, not specifically at universities. I suppose that age discrimination laws could change, but I don’t know if that’s the right way to go or not.
More generally, I’m surprised there’s been so little talk here about how the percentage of operating costs at state universities payed for by the government has continually shrunk over the last 30 years. (I expect the nominal amount paid has gone up, but that’s not the right number to look at.) This is largely an example and a symptom of the upward redistribution of income in the US over the same period. I suspect this is the root of the problem, and the other issues are window-dressing.
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The pope makes priests retire at 70 and bishops at 75 so I’d guess that religious schools are the only ones that could set a fixed retirement age.
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The place of academic research and its costs should be seriously discussed. I’m not sure what the answer is. The problem is that the No Frills colleges are behaving like they are Princeton with its 40% of rich students. Not all colleges should be Princeton.
Yeah, Matt, you’re right. The problem is the declining support from state legislatures for state colleges. I haven’t discussed it recently, but I’ve certainly talked about it here. I think. Maybe I talked about it in person with real people. Can’t remember. But state legislatures aren’t going to kick in more money. They just aren’t. So, No Frills College have to operate in that new reality and make adjustments.
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I think you have to distinguish between state and private institutions. All of them are subject to the forces Tim lists very well above. But at state institutions, as Laura says, it’s often the withdrawal of support from the state budget that is doing the most to drive tuition upwards: a transfer of responsibility for higher education from the taxpayer to the student and her family. Private schools at the elite end, like Princeton, have pushed faculty salaries farther up (far higher than they are at comparable state schools), so they are driving costs as well.
On savings:
Tim’s right, there has already been a big move to use adjuncts for teaching, sometimes at elite schools (look at the ratio of full-time t-t faculty to adjuncts at NYU, for example). But there’s a limit to how far this can go without driving all the most talented people away from the academy (and remember, that means driving them away from vital research centers in all STEM fields, and from preparing younger people to enter those fields). And you can’t simply ignore the multiple legal requirements that have been legislated or defined by litigation, or the needs of managing huge endowments and complex physical plants and immense computer networks.
Universities used to have mandatory retirement for tenured faculty but were forced by law to abandon it. I’d be in favor of restoring it (and I’m close enough to 70 that it would affect me fairly soon) but I think it’s not legally possible.
So yes, as Tim says: until we hit a financial crisis worse than the last one (which caused a lot of painful budget cuts but no radical transformation) or the families and students stop coming, it’s hard to see what will change. This is a classic example of the garbage can model of decision making: the really serious problems sink down to the bottom while we deal with the everyday one.
Finally, on Princeton’s 40%: remember, this is the lowest that number has been, historically, and the same is true at Harvard and Yale. The change since I started teaching at Princeton in 1975, when the majority of the kids still came from private schools, has been very dramatic.
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“Are you suggesting that we sacrifice academic research for the sake of affordable college?””
I think we should, at the colleges where they’re relying on 18 year old’s taking out student loans to pay for it. That’s not (in general) Princeton. But it is many other schools, and even if we value research, those kids shouldn’t be paying for it.
I also think that some limit on state funded duplication of educational opportunities would be a good thing. And, I see this as returning to a system that existed before all schools starting trying to be universities, and all faculty started looking for places where they could e paid scholars (rather than teachers).
Mandatory retirement, at an arbitrarily chosen age, is likely to be seen as unconstitutional. A case would have to be made for why it’s necessary, not on societal grounds, but on why that particular individual can’t do the job (it is a civil rights issue — you can’t do it to restrict the labor supply, or because you believe that some or many 70+ year olds are unproductive). Universities are unlikely to try to contest the civil rights issue. I think the interaction between tenure (in its strong form, with nearly complete protection against dismissal for all but the most egregious conduct) & unconstitutionality of mandatory retirement creates labor force problems that we don’t have good tools to address.
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I have to run off to a 4th grade chorus production, but check out Andrew Hacker’s op-ed today.
Oh, I love the garbage can model of decision-making in a geeky, policy theory sort of way. Yeah, I think that’s been going in higher ed, too. But we might be at a critical point to make some more logical, long term decisions. Higher ed is certainly on the top of the agenda right now.
The current college model is based on an elite system of education, which cannot be sustained in an economic recession + huge numbers of non-elite students. No Frills Colleges have to be something entirely different than Elite Colleges.
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Maybe I talked about it in person with real people.
Hath not an internet commenter eyes?
Hath not an internet commenter hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a “real person” is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not troll?
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I see a lot of mention of cuts in state funding, but I think that if you look over on the private side, there’s something else going on. My understanding is that back in the day, there was quite a bit of difference in tuition levels at private colleges. Nowadays, it seems that private tuition levels have settled at more or less the same high level, regardless of how no-name some of those private institutions are.
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We already have colleges where the focus is not supposed to be on research, but on providing quality, low-cost education to the community, which are community colleges. Maybe we ought to beef up/combine public universities with community colleges, and consolidate research into one-several well-funded (public) universities per state. I agree that the “every school ought to try to be Harvard” model is highly problematic. But I also think that as a society we need to seriously reinvest in higher ed, including by refunding state public education, and that if we accept that state’s won’t reinvest in higher ed, we’ve basically accepted that we’re ok with a permanent social class gap, where the 1% get world class educations, and everyone else fights for the scraps.
I’d also like to see more discussion on how faculty are remunerated (not just an average of full professor salaries, many of which are paid for by multi-million dollar grants the faculty bring in, and/or endowed chairs) before I’m willing to agree that any faculty are overpaid. It seems like faculty remuneration is actually about market competition and leveraging yourself (I know at my school to get a raise or promotion to full professor you basically have to win a highly prestigious grant or get another school of equal caliber to ‘bid for you’ and hope our university wants to keep you), and while I think this is problematic, it’s more an issue of gaining more equality and job security for all faculty and bridging the gap between adjuncts & junior faculty and endowed professorships rather than cutting faculty salaries to save money. Considering how rare it is and how really highly paid faculty are probably paying much of their own way in other tangible or intangible ways. Complaining about top faculty salaries is also a red herring, and faculty has a whole are probably underpaid.
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“if we accept that state’s won’t reinvest in higher ed, we’ve basically accepted that we’re ok with a permanent social class gap, where the 1% get world class educations, and everyone else fights for the scraps. ”
Well, the 1% + the super-elite poor. That’s the balance (to some degree or another, from 50-50 to 40-60 to 60-40) that the 1% universities have.
That’s the problem I see with “no frills” without a real discussion of what the frills are. There’s definitely a trend in some circles to define a frill as anything that doesn’t directly, and in short term, lead to a measurable outcome (i.e. test scores, which are a particularly bad version, since they are measurable, but not important, say, like whether the student gets a job or not). I do not consider giving kids a chance to learn the sophisticated skills of analysis and critical thinking that they need in modern society a frill, but some would define those skills away, because they are difficult to measure (or because they don’t value them).
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I only got as far as Tim’s comment and I have to run off again, but re this:
“I think you could ask institutions to find a way to ask for more intellectual flexibility and nimbleness of liberal arts faculty and therefore have fewer lines of “deep specialization”–and thus perhaps smaller and more adaptable faculties.”
I think this would be a boon for faculty as well. Faculty complain about not having a lot of flexibility for family leave/time off. If a kid gets sick, you’re screwed. I don’t have that problem because if something happens (like when my MIL died) and I needed a week off, I had people on deck to sub for me. (I knew it was coming, so I had some sort of lesson “plan” ready–but basically, an experienced teacher can fill in if you say something like “teach the rhetorical appeals today” or “I planned to teach the second act of The Tempest.”)
In a pinch, I could fill in for a lot of faculty in my Arts and Sciences division. Not math or a foreign language, but I could do a lot of history, poli sci, sociology and even some psychology. If you’re adept at teaching, you know how to pull knowledge out of students and build on it. These would all be gen ed courses, of course.
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I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but they’re not necessarily well formed, so here’s what I’ll say at this point. I would happily do more teaching at my fancy R1 school (I already do 2-and-2) if the expectations for my research output were lowered. While I guess I prefer research, all things considered, I like teaching too. What I don’t like is constantly feeling like I don’t have enough publications while I’m expected to lovingly craft my courses at the same time. But I don’t know what the right answer to this is, so yeah, I agree that we need a real conversation about research vs. teaching too. Regardless of whether research improves our teaching or not, university professors are the ones who are doing the bulk of basic science, social science, and humanities research. So if we value that as a society (think of public intellectuals and scientists like Jill Lepore, Dalton Conley, Steven Pinker, Eric Kandel, etc–they’re all university professors), then we have continue to support that.
The issue of the value of research is something that has been lacking in all of these discussions about the crisis of higher education, the rise of MOOCs, etc.
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bj is right on!
Nationwide, full professors average a not-humble $113,176.
First, this is a minority of faculty — many never make it to the full professor level (or never have the opportunity to make it, as in adjuncts). Second, $113K is really not that much when you consider 4 years for a BA, 6 years for a MA/PhD, 3 years of postdoc (in the sciences), and a *minimum* of 12 years at the Assistant/Associate level. It seems perfectly reasonable that a very well educated person who single-mindedly pursued a specific ‘project’ for 21 years (not including BA) might hit $100K salary. (be it a professor, small business owner, an MD, etc). I think the real issue is the same as K-12 teachers — education is not valued in this country. (NOTE: I realize that $100K is a very good salary, much better than the median. My point is that professors are hardly overpaid). And how can we both suggest that Presidents making millions is OK, but that the very top faculty making $100K is too much?
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from Hacker’s article “Expensive, often money-losing varsity teams are a drain for many colleges. Bates College, with only 1,725 students, fields 31 such teams. It costs the University of Southern California $32,234 per player per year to field its golf teams. Did you know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a football squad? At last count, only 683 of its 10,353 students turned out for a typical game. Marquette eliminated football and Emory has never had it, reasoning that students foot its deficits.”
Do we value college sports more than research, so that research is the first thing we considering putting on the chopping block?
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In the sciences, the research is paid for. So Kandel isn’t a good example of research supported by tuition. (the university might have made an investment, but it’s probably gotten paid back). Kandel is also at a private medical school, which are not being supported by undergraduate tuition.
The issue for me isn’t the value of research, but who should pay for it. Unless undergraduates are getting something out of it (and I think they are at Columbia and MIT) they shouldn’t be paying for it. and, not because we shouldn’t share in the cost of research, but because undergrads shouldn’t be the section of society we target to pay for it .
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I’m sympathetic to everybody, and very unsure how we can actually make things more sensible. I agree that every school shouldn’t try to do everything–and then I think about my younger colleague who went to a tiny state college where his teachers saw his talent and nurtured it through research projects and sent him on to a wonderful career in grad school and at Princeton; and of how proud I am of my daughter, who uses her Ivy League and London degrees to teach 9th-grade history to a fantastically mixed group (ethnically speaking) of Brooklyn kids; and I begin to think that the conversation about which schools should be able to foster which activities won’t be simple either.
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“More colleges now give their faculties expensive sabbaticals every third year. A recent count found that 20 of Harvard’s 48 history professors weren’t teaching.”
Harvard isn’t very typical, is it?
I think my husband has had sabbaticals on a more usual schedule (every six or seven years?) and he’s decided that he doesn’t like them and that he is more productive with just a teaching reduction rather than full release from teaching. The teaching and the research are so intertwined that not teaching at all is bad for his research. (People in different subject areas, or who have overwhelming teaching responsibilities or people who are less collaborative in method may feel differently about this.)
My husband is doing the paperwork for full professor right now. It’s quite exhaustive. $113k is within spitting range at that point, but as somebody has probably pointed out, not everybody gets to be a full professor–it’s not at all automatic. You can see this by looking at a roster of departmental faculty and doing a head count of assistant professors, associate professors and professors.
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I am not getting all this hatred of research. Have any of you partaken in modern medicine? Technology? I dunno, even watched a documentary or non-fiction TV show? Read wikipedia? Aside from the fact that lifesaving/life-changing research by and large happens at universities (I suppose we could just leave it all up to the drug companies), do none of you believe that as a civilized society we ought to invest in the higher pursuits of intellect? I mean, yeah, what did Michelangelo, or Matthew Arnold ever *do* for undergrads? You could get 5 accounting 101 adjuncts for the cost of 1 Toni Morrison.
Sure, maybe Italian women’s renaissance poetry isn’t changing the world, but I’d think it pretty cool if my kid got to study with someone who was an expert on the topic, and not someone who read about it in a book and regurgitated it in front of a class. More directly, as an undergrad I took classes which involved doing research that included reading books and academic articles written by college professors. That benefited me. I don’t know where you want your kids to go, but I didn’t want to go to glorified high school. (In fact, some teachers in my high school did have PhDs, and some of them also taught college courses.) I got an absolutely stellar (free, public!) high school education, but one of the reasons I really liked college is it’s where research actually happens. The reason why college isn’t just 4 more years of high school is that you get to see people *do* things and participate yourself, not just talk about them, whether it’s molecular biology or Russian formalist literary analysis.
I know not everyone wants this, or cares that they could learn about Roman history from someone who digs it out of the ground, or cancer from an oncology research professor, and some people just want practical skills. But, it’s pretty freakin’ sad if the only people who get access to mindblowing opportunities like this are the hyper elite. One of the really amazing things about American higher ed isn’t that we have Harvard, it’s that we have well over 100 universities that do things similar to what Harvard does. Our land grant university system made the strongest, most in-depth quality system of available, reasonably affordable higher education in the world, and post-war allowed anyone to go to their state school and get a decent education. If we dismantle it, then we’re saying that people at University of Ohio or University of Missouri ought not to have a chance to compete for the same jobs or the same grad schools, or ultimately the same life chances as those who went to Princeton or Williams. I guess that’s very likely becoming a reality, but I don’t see why we have to capitulate to it.
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(ok bj, I think we do mostly agree. I think public money (at public institutions) should pay for it, and it shouldn’t primarily fall on the backs of undergrads. I don’t think we should first look to gut research though to make tuition affordable though. That should be one of the last decisions.)
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“You could get 5 accounting 101 adjuncts for the cost of 1 Toni Morrison.”
I’ve read “Beloved”. I would want the accounting adjuncts.
“If we dismantle it, then we’re saying that people at University of Ohio or University of Missouri ought not to have a chance to compete for the same jobs or the same grad schools, or ultimately the same life chances as those who went to Princeton or Williams.”
Any university that we’ve all heard of probably does deserve to have a strong research program (oddly, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Williams until you mentioned it). However, University of Ohio is not the bottom of the US academic barrel. The bottom of the barrel is way further down.
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Is there a university of Ohio? I know of Ohio State and Ohio University but U of Ohio.
And, yes, I agree that the bottom of the barrel is a lot lower than OSU or Nebraska or Indiana (which are not the elite publics)
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“I’ve read “Beloved”. I would want the accounting adjuncts.”
Them’s fighting words. And you read Morrison backwards. Always start with Bluest Eye and then read chronologically.
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Right now, I’m on sabbatical from a lower level state university. Of course, like many other institutions similar to ours, the administration (both at our school and our system) have ambitions to make us an R1. Expectations for promotion (related to publications) to associate and full are ratcheting upward, and we’re putting forward all sorts of proposals for crappy PhD programs. Why? The world does not need more R1s. It does not need more PhDs from institutions that will not open doors for the degree holders. But we have to stay ahead of the other institutions in our state (not part of our system) otherwise, there’s fear the legislature will cut our budget further.
I’m not going to believe that the legislature will magically give us more money, but maybe a better place to start would be for some sort of rational plan of how we’re going to allocate scare resources among the existing institutions (without starting a crazy build-up race). Maybe then our institution could go back to doing what we do well – educating undergraduates and engaging them in our community, while requiring reasonable amounts of research productivity from our faculty. One can dream. In the meantime, I’ll go back to working on my research as the institution has been giving us the message loud and clear: research is currency of the realm these days.
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Wow. Academia is an extremely elitist institution, isn’t it? Responding to random comments:
True facts. You can learn a lot from a professor who doesn’t do research. You might, dare I say it?, even learn more from a professor who isn’t rushing you out of his office, because he has to jump on a plane to give a speech.
Academia should not be exploiting adjuncts and treating them like bartered goods.
I don’t care if my kid’s professors do research or not; I mostly want them to teach my kid. I certainly don’t want to put a second mortgage on my house to pay for anyone’s research. You can tax me a bit for it, but don’t take away my life savings for it. I don’t want the Harvard model replicated, because I think that Harvard is a rip off. If they want to rip off rich people, I don’t care, but I don’t want that system replicated in state colleges, which will then rip off other kids.
“If we dismantle it, then we’re saying that people at University of Ohio or University of Missouri ought not to have a chance to compete for the same jobs or the same grad schools, or ultimately the same life chances as those who went to Princeton or Williams.”
First, undergraduate colleges should not be in the business of creating more grad students, because very, very few should be going to grad school. Second, all the studies show that kids who do well enough to go into Harvard, but don’t go do just as well as the kids who go there. Professors who do research don’t make better teachers than professors who teach. There is no different in outcomes for their students.
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bj,
I was operating on the assumption that there is a U of State and a State State U for all 50 states, which is not true, of course.
Indiana’s school of music is a very big deal, isn’t it?
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I’m on faculty at a regional comprehensive that suffers from what I’d call ‘delusions of grandeur’. My teaching load’s officially 3/2 but with higher enrollments, that doesn’t feel easier than the ‘bad old days’ when I taught 3/3. With overloads at various rates of pay (and most of which I can’t avoid because they’re required to keep various programs alive), in 2011-12 I taught the equivalent of 5/5.
What’s galling is that teaching’s not what’s important to my professional advancement or standing. What’ll get me promotion and kudos aren’t the innovations in teaching I’m applying or the hours I spend grading and prepping. It’s publications and, even moreso these days, grants. So I teach more but I don’t dare take too much time for that: there are articles to revise and grants to submit!
We certainly see the effects of unfunded mandates – reporting’s gotten a lot more detailed and demanding since I started twenty years ago. I also attend more mandatory workshops on various issues that have nothing to do with my academic subject and everything to do with legislation and liability. These eat a bit into my time: I’m certain they take a big bite out of our institutional budget!
I’ve adjusted my teaching and student assessment to reflect the new reality – no longer am I assigning daily journals that will be reviewed and used to help students improve their writing. I assess my course outlines as much for workload as for pedagogy. I wish I could privilege the latter more but how can I when I’m being asked to do so much more more in every aspect of my professional life?
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My husband got all his degrees from Indiana. It may not be “elite” but it’s a good school.
I’m in the think of looking at schools for my kid. There are something like 11 state and state-affiliated schools here. The cheapest is $8k, which I thought, “Awesomesauce!” But then, I start poking around web sites, and it just feels a little sad. Some, not all, seem like the co-op grocery stores to the Whole Foods of the world (I’m a little hungry). On the one hand, I kind of believe you can get a good education anywhere, but on the other hand, I wonder if a place that costs $8k is going to challenge my kid enough. Temple, Penn State and U of Pitt, mentioned in your other post, cost around $12-16k, which isn’t bad, but honestly, I’m not sure my kid can get into those places. And let’s say I have to pay full price for those places, and get aid from another out-of-state or private school, the costs start to converge.
I don’t know what the answer is. Honestly, I wish that those $8k schools felt like better opportunities to me, instead of places of last resort. (I recognize the elitism of this, but I’m being honest). That might mean investing more money in them. Some of these places tout sports teams and programs that as others have mentioned are expensive and orthogonal to the state goal of these schools–educating students. I get that study abroad and even intramural sports can contribute to one’s growth as a student, but there has to be a limit. I think we should all want our state schools to be places our kids can get into and thrive at. I’m not sure every state has that.
Having worked at two state schools, I can say that the research issue is huge. I don’t want to dump research. I think one of the things that bothers me about a couple of the state schools I’ve looked at is that it’s clear the faculty do no research. I think you can require faculty to keep up without requiring them to write and publish x number of papers every year–or write a book! I liked researching and presenting things informally or using what I’d learned in my teaching. But I had no desire to crank out papers on increasingly esoteric topics. Surely, as Laura says, at some schools, we can eliminate or decrease the amount of research in favor of more teaching and save *some* money.
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I just noticed this from the post:
“Faculty pay at Stanford has close to doubled in actual dollars in the last three decades.”
And what do we think Bay Area CA real estate prices have done in that time period? I follow socketsite.com and housing in that part of the country is freakishly expensive. That was a very poorly chosen example.
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And . . . what Janice say. I saw my class sizes go from 18 to 22 in the span of about 4 years. And then when I looked at jobs elsewhere, they were talking up to 25–in writing classes! And then requiring (for accreditation) a certain number of papers/pages to be written. At a minimum, I was looking at a couple thousand pages to read and comment on.
I may work hard now, but it’s all in my teaching. I have 7 students in one class. And the largest class I have is 18. I can prep and grade and spend extra time with students all I want. We should expect that from places we pay money for.
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Professors who do research don’t make better teachers than professors who mostly teach. There is no different in outcomes for their students.
There IS a difference in that undergraduate students can engage in research when there is an active research community at an institution (at least in the sciences, not an expert in any other area).
Across and within institution it seems that the answer is to allow people/institutions to do what they do best. Some of us rock research and some of us rock teaching, foster that excellence. Let great teachers teach more and research less and great researchers research more and teach less, same for institutions. Great teaching needs to be rewarded in the same way great research is, why is that so hard to accomplish? How is this related to tenure, if at all?
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Just came across this article. “Abstract
This article investigates whether faculty members are rewarded for teaching. We find that teaching a wider variety of courses and devoting more time to teaching results in a significant wage penalty, even when research productivity is carefully controlled.”
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“they were talking up to 25–in writing classes! ”
*raises hand* 28 in one of my classes. I even let the 28th in myself. It’s like having a certain number of children over 6. After that point, what’s another one? Fortunately, Jim ended up being a dream student.
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I keep forgetting that I don’t have full text library access at home. I can’t see the details.
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Isn’t “teaching a wider variety of courses” the sort of thing that happens to somebody who is very low in the institutional pecking order?
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I’m curious to see how they measured research productivity. It isn’t at all obvious to me how a single metric would work for both the social and physical sciences.
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Laura:
Others have pointed out that the mandatory retirement thing is illegal now, so that’s off the table.
The less selective institutions already have 3-3 or 3-4 or 4-4 teaching loads and extremely little support for faculty research. I know people at some of the non-selective liberal arts colleges and branch public university campuses who have had one sabbatical in twenty years of teaching for whom “research” is essentially a hobby in their spare time. So what you’re asking for has been accomplished.
And guess what? It doesn’t lower the price very much if at all. I know 3-4, no research support colleges that cost almost the same as Swarthmore or Williams. In any event, in some cases, lowering the price doesn’t help either the institution or the students. Rather infamously, there were several Tier III liberal arts colleges that moved up the selectivity hierarchy a few years back simply by charging more. Nothing else–they didn’t change program, hire better people, anything. Because price is used by parents and students as an informational signal and they don’t have any better ones. Being more selective, in a weird feedback loop, makes your institution better–because smarter and better prepared students educate each other.
Remember too that the oversupply of Ph.Ds means that it’s still a buyer’s market, even given how crappy the terms of employment in some colleges and universities are. You can hire talented, interesting faculty, compensate them poorly and throw them away if they burn out, because there are that many good people out there to hire. Would I want my kid to be a student at such an institution, even if it was discounted? Not particularly.
Another thing to keep in mind. I fully understand that the idea that faculty at top research universities need to teach a 1-1 (or 1-0) load seems ridiculous. I happen to think it is kind of ridiculous, in fact. (Remember though that at least some of them are bringing in revenue to the general budget via outside support.) It’s why I’m happy to be working in an undergraduate institution that’s focused on teaching. But what makes for a great teacher? I am more than willing to concede that churning out monographs, articles and studies guarantees nothing about your commitment to teaching, and may in fact make it difficult to teach with a whole heart. However, great teachers in higher education are in my experience *always* intellectually active in some way or another. The idea that a great teacher just has all this knowledge in their head acquired at the beginning of their career and a great skill at conveying it just misses the boat in so many ways–that’s the most static version of “sage on the stage” in a nutshell and it is demonstrably not what makes for a high-value, high-impact teacher. You want a 3-4 load, no support for research or other intellectual engagement, then you are weighting things very heavily against the continued development of faculty commitment to teaching.
You have to ask yourself: if you could cut the cost of already weak, underresourced institutions in half, would it be any better an investment for some of the students mentioned in the NYT piece? What I think really would make sense is for some of those students to be at community colleges. There might be room for a much better version of the trade or vocational school than what is presently available–that might be one of the things that all the entrepreneurial energy around higher ed could actually produce if it can be pried away from the sleazier for-profit operations.
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Laura,
I guess I’m not sure what your issue is. You want your kids to go to a cheap school, where the focus is on all teaching, and there’s no research? Problem solved. Send them to community college, and then they can transfer to a cheap commuter university to finish up. I agree that not all schools should try to be Harvard, and that there are a great many ‘universities’ that were better off teacher’s colleges. But, to say that only Harvard should be Harvard is IMO even more elitist in a different way. I agree we don’t need more and probably have too many R1 research universities, but I think the response should be a public commitment to fund the ones we have and convert the non-viable ones back into tech and vocational schools. The biggest problem is that we as a society aren’t willing to fund schools like we used to. Hand waving about full professor vs. adjunct salaries are a bit of a red herring, (though, as an adjunct myself, I FULLY support treating adjuncts better, paying them more, and offering more full time TT positions.) More perniciously, this ‘lets gut the faculty and pay them less’ is part of the same neoliberal position that led to defunding public universities and the skyrocketing of tuition in the first place. Pointing a finger at ‘greedy’ faculty who want to research (and get paid for it!) instead of teaching 5/5 course loads is simply buying into the idea that schools should be run like corporations and faculty should be treated like dispensable minimum wage workers. You say you don’t want adjuncts teaching your kids, but if you take away tenure, decent pay, and research opportunities, I’m not sure whose going to be attracted to teach in higher ed, but it’s not going to be those who are particularly stellar.
On teaching, at a certain point, a professor who doesn’t keep up with the field isn’t great at teaching his or her subject. Keeping up with current research is a lot of work, especially if you’re not participating in the dialogue. I don’t want my kid’s college professors to be 20 years out of date on their teaching. Again, I had those people as my high school teachers. They were amazing high school teachers, really really top notch. But, they weren’t able to teach at a high college level because their knowledge of the field stopped around the time they finished.
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Ha. Pwned by Tim Burke. Basically I agree with everything he said.
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I think it possible for a school to be selective and affordable and prioiritize teaching. It is also possible to teach a 3-3 course load and publish. I did. I think a 3-3 course load is light. I know people teaching a 5-5 load. I taught 4 classes in one semester with 3 new preps.
As I said before I don’t have a problem with research. . It is a form of professional development (but not the only form of it.) I think that faculty should be rewarded for teaching, as well as research.
this thread went in a weird direction. It started talking off about efficiency. I think it was Tim who said that there wasn’t much fat to cut in labor costs. I said that changes could be made by closing grad programs and by increasing teaching requirements/decreasing research requirements.
Sadly, the savings wouldn’t come from increasing teaching responsibilities, because adjuncts are so damn cheap. Bigger savings would happen from closing grad programs.
I think what will eventually happen is that as colleges stop hiring hiring tenure faculty and instead hire teaching heavy adjuncts, there’s going to be a Sparta/helots rebellion. They are going to demand salaries, benefits, and will take over the faculty meetings.
Change is going to happen. You have to read the comments in the NYT articles.
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“You say you don’t want adjuncts teaching your kids, but if you take away tenure, decent pay, and research opportunities, I’m not sure whose going to be attracted to teach in higher ed, but it’s not going to be those who are particularly stellar.”
I don’t want adjunct teaching my kids, but not because they are bad professors. I think that adjuncts are excellent professors. I don’t want adjuncts teaching my kids, because I don’t want to support their exploitation. There isn’t a problem with finding great people to teach colleges. There is no supply problem. Actually, it is the opposite. There are tons and tons of fantastic PhDs who want those jobs, and would be perfectly happy teaching a 3-3 load.
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At Duquesne University (regional, smaller, Catholic), the adjuncts are trying to organize. I don’t know if it will work or not but the pay is way too low ($2,500/course). Curiously, they are organizing as United Steelworkers. I don’t know if that sort of thing is common or if it should be taken as a subtle smack at whatever unions exist in the field.
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Here’s just a little something to ponder. Do you think a college president should be paid 2, 3, 5 or 10 times as much as say, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? Do we really believe that being the president of Hiram College or Ferrum College or Emory and Henry College is more difficult than, say, BEING THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD? Just a little something to think about —
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“Do you think a college president should be paid 2, 3, 5 or 10 times as much as say, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?”
The president of the US has way more perks than a college president, including some non-obvious ones. If you’re the POTUS (or at least a Democratic POTUS) you can get more or less any singer or actor to come party at the White House with your friends. How many college presidents can get George Clooney to host a fund raiser?
Also, bear in mind the post-presidential perks. They all write memoirs, get multi-million dollar contracts, and then do multi-million dollar speaking tours. Bill Clinton, for instance, has been particularly successful at this.
“Former president Bill Clinton enjoyed his most lucrative year ever on the speaking circuit in 2010, capping a decade of paid speaking events that has earned him $75.6 million since leaving office in 2001, according to a CNN analysis of federal financial records.
“Clinton received $10.7 million for 52 paid speaking engagements last year, a sizable increase from the 36 paid speeches he delivered in 2009 for a total of $7.5 million. The most the former president had previously earned in one year was in 2006 when he earned $10.2 million for 57 events.”
If Clinton’s health holds up, he may be able to crack $100 million just in post-presidential speaking fees.
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“Curiously, they are organizing as United Steelworkers. I don’t know if that sort of thing is common or if it should be taken as a subtle smack at whatever unions exist in the field.”
I don’t think there are a lot of academia-specific unions. Here’s an article in IHE about unionizing attempts that mentions Michigan and affiliations with UAW: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/28/union
FTR, though vaguely as my institution does not have tenure, I teach at a university with a 4-4 load. Some terms (like this one) I get only 3 courses. Many colleagues teach 5 courses including an overload. It’s draining, especially if you have other responsibilities, like a family, but at some point you nail down a routine and just do it. After the first few years, new preps are rare.
But on Saturday, after commencement, I am free for the summer.* No commitments, no requirements to do research or write a book. I have projects I want to work on, but there is no institutional pressure to publish. Teaching is valued here above all.
And FTR, our students pay some $30K in tuition per year.
*Not really, as I have a service commitment that needs some summer maintenance. But it’s not onerous, and anything to get away from the Tumblr-addicted 13-year-old this summer will be welcome.
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“Bigger savings would happen from closing grad programs.”
Why? what is the cost savings of closing a grad program?
In biomed science, grad programs cost little (now a days, it’s the cost of 1 year’s graduate stipend + tuition) in return for employment that’s paid off NIH grants for the next 4-5 years. If the profs are well funded, the money to fund the 1st year stipends basically comes out of overhead for the grants.
I don’t know how it works in humanities/fields where TAships rather than RAships (or student loans) fund the grad programs, but I don’t see how grad programs are money losers. I think that’s actually part of the problem.
My solution, for the sciences, is to stop allowing funding of grad students off or research grants, and use that money to provide direct funding to grad students, in training programs + individual fellowships. I think this would encourage weak grad programs to close, through central management of NIH funds, which are what’s being used to fund the programs anyway.
(But, that doesn’t save money, just rearranges it, with the hope that it will prevent incentives towards building bad graduate programs and with an off chance that there will be efficiencies of scale in fewer larger grad programs at the higher tier R1s).
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Maybe sending kids overseas for university is the answer. It is a lot cheaper to do a BA here then in the US. Given the high cost of tuition and low salaries for faculty in the US the obvious answer would seem to be emigration. Just leave the administrators and presidents with their big salaries and empty buildings. 😉
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“I don’t want adjunct teaching my kids, but not because they are bad professors. I think that adjuncts are excellent professors.”
Yeah, now they are, because there’s a glut of PhDs in certain disciplines. If you turn academics into high school teachers, you basically completely alter the structure of both college, grad school and the sort of person who is attracted to grad school and who wants to be a professor. No one starts out wanting to adjunct, so if basically that’s the only option (and don’t kid yourself that if professors stopped researching the tenure system would remain intact, especially if standardized tests for college students were implemented), you’d get very different sorts of people teaching. But more importantly (since I don’t think there’s a teaching quality problem, even by professors who do research, I don’t think the teaching quality problem would be too much greater), you’d actually increase the exploitation of faculty, since they’d be easily replaceable and fairly lowly paid.
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“you’d actually increase the exploitation of faculty, since they’d be easily replaceable and fairly lowly paid.” … But they are now. We just call those faculty “adjuncts.”
I don’t think all professors should stop researching, I just don’t think that all professors need to be researching all the time. I also don’t think that it would hurt undergraduate education, if a different type of person went into academia. There are plenty of smart people in the world. Some of them actually like teaching.
OK. I’m moving on. I just came from a great photography class and I have pictures on my mind.
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A friend on the tenure track in one of the schools listed in this chart sent me an article from a local Albany paper showing the tuition and debt loads of Albany-area colleges.
http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2012/05/15/heres-your-diploma—-and-a-payment-schedule
Skidmore: Tuition, $40,420; Debt, $19,850.
SUNY Albany: Tuition, $6,748; Debt, $24,146.
This seems pretty stark to me. It doesn’t matter how efficient you make your college by pruning your administrative staff or loading up on adjuncts or not upgrading your gym. If you make your college cheaper, you will attract lower income students who will have to borrow to afford your school.
So it seems to me if excessive student debt is a problem, the answer has to be on the lenders side or, to put it more bluntly — stop letting the kids borrow so much damned money.
Framing it as a problem with colleges rather than a problem with lenders just seems mis-guided, if Albany can enact the equivalent of an 80% efficiency savings over Skidmore, and still have students with more average debt.
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Laura,
As someone who actually adjuncts now, *and* fights for adjuncts & grad student rights, I agree with you with adjuncts generally, Where we differ is, I think your solution would make the problem worse. It plays right into the right-wing playbook of turning universities into corporations where faculty are replaceable cogs. The faculty are not the enemy. Knee-capping TT and tenured faculty will not help adjuncts. It will hurt them. It will turn *everyone* into an adjunct. I don’t see why you’re so blind to the implications of what you are advocating.
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“…anything to get away from the Tumblr-addicted 13-year-old this summer will be welcome.”
13 already!!!
“I don’t know how it works in humanities/fields where TAships rather than RAships (or student loans) fund the grad programs, but I don’t see how grad programs are money losers. I think that’s actually part of the problem.”
That sounds right. Somebody (and a highly qualified somebody) needs to teach grad level classes, but the flip side is inexpensive instructors. (I have to note here that my undergrad Russian language teachers were all TAs, they were all pretty good, and I suspect that the actual professors would mostly have been quite disastrous in that role.)
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“It plays right into the right-wing playbook of turning universities into corporations where faculty are replaceable cogs.”
Wait–did I get the wrong playbook? Cause mine says completely different stuff.
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I neither meant to kneecap, nor be blind. But I’m walking away from this scrimmage right now, because I need to talk about other stuff. We can pick it up another day.
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