College Highs

The new semester has started, and if all goes well, I’ll graduate—again—in the spring.  I’m only taking two courses this semester, but my tuition for this semester at Enema U, a state cow college in Southern New Mexico is slightly over two grand.  To that, you can add a lot of other miscellaneous charges, bringing the total bill for my two classes to roughly $2500.

I’m not complaining, since as a retired faculty member, my tuition (but not those miscellaneous fees), is waived.   There were other incentives promised to retirees, such as free golf and a special parking permit, but the university has reneged on those benefits.  The tuition waiver has so far been honored—at least until some jackass in Abattoir Hall reads this.

The steadily rising cost of going to college is not just caused by the ever-escalating cost of tuition:  increases can be found in almost every sector of the university.  I’ll start with the obscene cost of textbooks.  For one of my courses, a five-year-old book (in fact, a rather small book that is cheaply bound), the cost is $360.  An alternate option is to rent the book for a semester for only $120.  This is not a rare textbook in an obscure field, but a standard in a subject where there is intense competition.  Seeking an additional reference text, it cost me under $30 to buy a similar book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.  

Why does the required textbook cost so much?  Because the book publisher also offers online quizzes, supplemental educational videos, PowerPoint slides and lecture materials to the professor.  The professor is being offered an entire course in a box, so that very little personal effort on his part is required…And in some cases, the publishing company has a financial arrangement with the university (or in layman’s terms, a kickback).   One of the other benefits for the university is that there will be dramatically less need to hire tenured professors to deliver the course.  The university can hire an adjunct professor to deliver the TV-dinner course, saving money since adjuncts are paid far less, rarely receive benefits, and can be fired at will, long before they retire—at which point they may start writing an irritating blog and take advantage of those tuition-free classes.    

One of the strange side effects of this arrangement is that, because of the higher cost of buying textbooks, the majority of the students are forced to use online E-books or rent the few textbooks that come on paper, returning them at the end of the semester.  My house is overflowing with books on history, anthropology, art history, and Latin American Studies because I acquired a lot of books while I was studying those fields—books that went from being required for a current course to later being useful reference tools.  Since the Economics Department has all but become a subsidiary of the British company, Pearson Group, I will not have a single leftover economics textbook for reference after graduation.  

Despite the widespread use of E-books and proprietary textbooks that the university can rent year after year, the cost of textbooks has risen faster than any other expense associated with university education.  Since the late 1970’s, the average cost of textbooks has risen by more than 1000%—an increase five times higher than the cost of other books.

It is hard to find something at the university that hasn’t become more expensive.  The students pay dearly in the dining halls to be served Purina College Chow.  My free retiree parking permit went up 10% this year, alone.  I may be mistaken, but the parking fee seems to go up every single year while the number of parking spaces available seems to dwindle.  Of course, every single time the subject of parking comes up, some nitwit will claim that when they were at the University of Who Cares, the parking fee was a fresh kidney and a bucket of unicorn blood.  For some reason, this is never comforting to cash-strapped students or a university employee who is forced to kick back the equivalent of a day’s pay just to park at work.

And then there is the high cost of tuition.  Universities do not waste money like drunken sailors because when sailors run out of money, they stop spending.  Universities spend money like the Federal Government:  state universities, in particular, can sell bonds to continually borrow more and more money.  Just about anybody could sit down with a university budget and cut out millions of dollars of wasteful spending (and could do it without any of the students—and most of the faculty—noticing any ill effects from the cuts).  

Here's a quick way to save millions:  eliminate all of the upper-level administrative positions created in the last thirty years.  If the university didn’t need an Executive Vice-President of Student Articulation and its accompanying staff in 1993, it could probably get along without one now.  (That’s a “real” position at Enema U and I have never been able to find out what responsibilities come with the job).

There are a lot of other, simple things that would lower the cost of university education.  Post-tenure review would remove some of the non-productive dead weight in some departments.  Or requiring every administrator to teach at least one class a semester, which would allow the university to offer more classes without additional payroll expense and simultaneously remind the administration of the real purpose of the university.  And while universities do need new buildings periodically, every new university president immediately develops an Edifice Complex, knowing that the best way to be hired away by a bigger and more prestigious university is to build a new stadium or athletic facility.  Since I have been at Enema U, I’ve lost track of how many times the coaching staff has moved into new offices.  

Which, of course, brings up the subject of the monstrously high cost of collegiate sports.  Did you know that the highest paid state employee in 43 states is a coach?  Did you know that, while the average state employee’s salary is $63,000 a year, the average college football coach brings down $3.4 million annually?  It is also sometimes a little hard to discover just how much that coach actually receives, since their pay is frequently hidden among multiple accounts such as shoe contracts, summer camps, Foundation subsides, Alumni Association speaking fees and multiple other accounting tricks.  There are nuclear secrets that aren’t as carefully hidden as the salaries of university coaching staff.  Isn’t it strange that they don’t have to pull the same bookkeeping stunts for a really good math professor?  Why don’t we ever hear about recruiting scandals in the English Department?

If you want to cut the cost of a college education, you have to address the incredible amount of money spent on collegiate athletics.  At some state universities, this can amount up to 20% of the university’s total budget.  That’s an incredible amount of money to spend on something that has nothing to do with the core mission of education and, more often than not, lends itself to corruption, scandals, and lawsuits.  

As a nation, we need to stop the conversation about who should pay for college and instead focus on why we have allowed these costs to rise to the level where government assistance is being seriously considered.  Nor should we expect that the solution will come from within the university system itself:  it has to be an initiative led by the state legislatures.  

Expecting the universities to solve their own budget problems is like expecting the drug cartels to develop a better version of Narcan.