The cost of college education is a hot subject once again as the Obama administration has offered new ideas to address the concern that our system of higher education is not financially sustainable. Instead of seeing the US World and News Report college rankings as the metric for measuring the quality of education, the administration is proposing a new method that uses student outcomes as a function of affordability be used in making federally-backed student loan decisions. The hope is that this will place pressure on colleges and universities to contain costs and seek efficiencies and lower the debt burden on graduating students.
As architects, engineers and builders who have benefited from the competition between colleges to attract students with newer classrooms, student centers, libraries and laboratories, this change may seem to be in conflict with our interests. However, a recent report by the Davis Educational Foundation entitled “An Inquiry into the Rising Cost of Higher Education” suggests a different reason for cost escalation that has more to do with personnel than with bricks and mortar.
By getting direct survey results from 70 college and university presidents, one of the most enlightening and perhaps surprising facts that this report identifies is the gap between the price of college and the cost of education. Despite the public’s concern that college costs are unaffordable, even full-paying students do not fully cover the cost of their education. They are effectively subsidized by gifts, earnings on the endowment and federal grants. The cost of providing the college experience is actually significantly higher that the tuition paid. This gap is hard to imagine for those who foot the tuition bill, because much of the cost is invisible to them. It’s not the new buildings that are driving up the price, rather the number of people employed to educate them. “In a typical college budget, compensation and financial aid account for about three quarters of the operating expenses,” the report states.
Why does the number of people required to provide an education seem to keep going up? The Davis report cites many reasons. One is directly related the US News rating system that values small class size and low student to faculty ratios as a function of educational quality. This metric gives colleges and universities an incentive to increase faculty size without increasing the student population. A second reason is the justifiable reliance of education on high technologies such as powerful software and hardware, reliable IT infrastructure and high-bandwidth, high performance connectivity. To develop, install, support and maintain a secure, state-of-the-art virtual world requires expensive, highly trained person-power, which is an add-on to the faculty count.
A third factor, and most interesting to me, is a concept identified as “mission drift.” The US News rankings place value on the diversity and breadth of programs and courses of study on offer, which encourages the addition of “new majors, programs, centers and institutes at dizzying rates.” The excitement and energy that helps sustain the demand for such new initiatives does not appear to have a countervailing force to shut down obsolete, obscure and underpopulated courses of study. By spreading the institution too thin with the wide breadth of course offerings, the institution may lose focus and allow its mission to drift.
Like the Obama administration, the Davis Foundation challenged the 70 presidents to consider means of reducing the cost of education. Fortunately for us, reductions in capital projects was not at the forefront of their response. Instead they focused on containment of personnel costs and headcount via extending the school year through summer, increasing class size and student faculty ratios, phasing out undersubscribed courses, and fostering cross-enrollment with neighboring institutions. As one respondent said, “Universities should be leaders of change—not victims of it.”
To read a full copy of the Davis Foundation report, please visit www.davisfoundations.org
Mark Reed AIA is a principal at Lab / Life. Science. Architecture, Inc., a Boston based laboratory design firm.