Higher ed never sleeps
but after one long semester, I needed to.
While I took a break from College Ave, higher ed news came more quickly than ever. I’ll spend the next few weeks trying to bring everything up to date.
But for now …
As colleges and universities prepare to release budgets (read: tuition hikes) for the next academic year, a new study may give students a better idea of where their money is going — and what administrators are doing with it.
The study — analyzed in an article in The New York Times last week — showed students are not only “covering more of what it costs to educate them,” but also that what they do cover might not go toward what they thing it does.
The report, sponsored by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, examined nearly 2,000 private and public non-profit colleges and universities, which amounts to more than 75 percent of higher education enrollment, from 2002 to 2006.
The study found a number of trends , including:
* Most of the new money in higher education is coming directly from tuition and fees — and the private gifts, grants and contracts colleges do receive is restricted by the donor, and therefore, not available for “core educational programs.”
*Nearly 75 percent of spending increases at private research universities were fueled by an increase in tuition.
*The share of costs represented by student tuition rose from about a third to nearly one-half at public four year institutions, and at private colleges, students pay between 75 and 85 percent of the full cost.
* Nearly all of the revenue institutions did receive from student tuition increases (about 92 percent)
were used to offset other losses
The authors of the study wrote they hope their research forces colleges and universities to be more “transparent” with, and more accountable for, their spending. But the study’s data is from records predating the country’s current economic recession. Were they to analyze data from the past two fiscal years, the results would inevitably be worse. Either way, nothing is likely to change unless students start to demand some transparency, too.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Comments that do not abide by our Comments Policy may be deleted.
Feed for College Ave.