Here's a question for economically-minded readers: If all college and university teaching were done by tenured or tenure-track faculty, how would tuition for undergraduates be affected? This question assumes that the (bloated) bureaucratic structure of today's higher ed institutions would remain constant, and that tenured faculty members' teaching loads and salaries would, too. It also accepts the current estimate that between 40 and 60% of college and university teaching is done by graduate students and adjunct lecturers.

I pose this question partly out of sheer curiosity, and partly out of a desire to estimate the economic impact of the oft-heard argument that the solution to the academic labor crisis is to eliminate adjunct labor and to secure enough tenure-track faculty lines to cover all the teaching there is to be done (I'm setting aside for the moment the problem of how graduate student teaching, as a necessary part of graduate education, would factor in here, but others are more than welcome to comment on it).

Thanks to Maurice Black for asking the question originally, and for giving me permission to pose it on Critical Mass.

This is a good question. I for one think that a complete shift to tenure track, which it seems a lot of people assume is feasible financially, would be tough for Mom and Dad Tuitionpayer to swallow.

How it would work in terms of actual economics would vary greatly institution-by-institution depending on a host of factors such as level of subsidy provided by endowment or other sources (such a government), average cost per course for non-tenure track faculty, average cost of a tenured faculty member, etc.

(Actually, I'd think any faculty member in this discussion who is interested in the answer for their particular institution would just have to call their CFO. Colleges duck the fully tenured option for reasons that are calculable. I'd think most places probably have already calculated the hit. Ask 'em.)

Here's one back of the envelope, though.

Assume part-time course costs $2,000

Assume 6 courses to equate to one tenured position, or $12,000 for six courses

Assume average tenured position costs four times that or $48,000 (don't know if this is reasonable for you or not, but remember benefits and such go in here. Seems like an OK guess to me)

Assume 50% of courses taught be tenured; 50% by non

Conversion of the non-tenured half quadruples the cost of that half, meaning that the cost of faculty overall doubles

Assume faculty salaries are a third of the institution's cost structure and that you can allocate a student's tuition accordingly

Doubling faculty salaries would then equate to an increase of tuition by 33%. A tuition bill of, say, $20,000 might have to go to round $27,000?

How would this go down with Mom and Dad?

Remember, Congressman McKeon almost got federal price controls enacted in DC this year. A widespread move on the part of colleges to add this kind of increment to tuition to rectify labor imbalances would be met with a lot of skepticism on Main Street and, in turn, on Capitol Hill.

I graduated from Mississippi University for Women in 1982, majoring in chemistry and math. I had exactly one class taught by a graduate student: beginning swimming. Tuition was pretty low then, and still is. How do they manage? Maybe they don't pay their professors anything. Over the years I've worked with people who went to other schools, and my education as manifested in my ability on the job compares pretty favorably to theirs.

First of all, at state and other research institutions, the ratio of teaching done by teaching assistants and/or grad students is indeed high... however, when overhead is taken into account, they're not nearly as cheap as it might seem at first. At Northwestern when I was a TA (mind you, we NEVER actually taught lectures, just discussions/recitations) our stipends and tuition, plus overhead, amounted to something of the order of $50,000-60,000. Not that much less than the average professor.
So, it's not THAT much cheaper to hire TA's - I sincerely doubt that it makes THAT much difference in the end.

Is it possible that part of the solution might not be (God forbid) to accept fewer students into college and university programs? Endowments could then cover more of students' education, and tuition might (I say might because anything can happen) not be so inflated year to year. The number of students over the years that I have come into contact with who have no business being in college is astounding... but we have this idea that somehow everyone deserves to go, and should go, regardless of their academic abilities. I think (am quite persuaded, in fact) that this factors heavily into many of the problems/issues we have in higher ed today.

I think that is like the question of have you stopped beating your wife. The whole premise is that the high costs of a college education hardly seem justified if all the teaching is being done by adjuncts and graduate assistants. If the tenured professors were doing the teaching they are supposedly hired to do then we wouldn't need all the adjuncts and graduate assistants and we could get rid of a lot of the bloated overhead at the universities. In that case there would probably not be any difference at all.

Why would you need the bloated overhead if the tenured professors were doing their job?

If this were to happen, I see tuition going through the roof, especially at elite private institutions. At my own elite private institution, tenured faculty spend six hours per week in the classroom (when they're not performing some administrative duty, in which case they spend even less). If tenured professors' salaries across all departments average $75,000 -- probably a low estimate where I work, considering what the profs in law, business, and medicine command -- then 100 hours of teaching per week will cost $1,250,000 a year in salaries alone. Factor in the cost of benefits, research budgets, travel allowances, and other professorial perks, and you're well over 1.5 million a year to cover about 32 courses each semester.

If the proposal here is that tenure is economically unsustainable without an army of lowly-paid invisible adjuncts taking up the slack, then I buy that.

This is a question I've been thinking about a lot since last week's debates. I think it's not just a tuition cost issue--or more, we'd need to work through a number of scenarios that have different costs. To keep tuition even modestly close to what it is now, what would have to happen is that tenured and tenure-track faculty would have to up their teaching loads to 2/3 at a minimum (assuming a semester system). That's 2/3 undergraduate in departments that teach undergraduates--in professional schools with grad-only enrollments, there are different questions. Probably it would have to be 3/3. This would have to be universal--there could be no sweetheart deals for the Mighty Famous Bigshot where he/she doesn't have to teach. Sabbaticals and course releases would have to be made less frequent than they are now for the elite. Essentially you'd have to capture most of the labor time of your faculty for teaching to make a go of it without increasing tuition dramatically.

There are other ways to come at it--caps on the top level salaries, etc.--but something very dramatic in the contemporary picture of academic life would have to give.

Don't forget that a tenured faculty member can effectively teach a lot more students at once than a graduate student or maybe even an adjunct. Also, in my opinion, teaching loads for tenured faculty are much too light in general.

Low teaching loads are sometimes used to compensate for the relatively low salaries universities can offer.Universities usually have caps on how much they can pay entry-level faculty members, especially at state universities. This amount however may not come close to what phds make in industry.Lighter teaching loads, higher startup funds etc become perks to lure qualified candidates.

Besides, professors have the additional responsibility of finding grants to pay their grad students, especially in summers where there are fewer classes to TA for. Unless there is effort to suppliment grad students in summers, additional teaching loads will adversely affect grad students.

Forget professor salaries. Want to cut tuition? Start spending money on education rather than all-inclusive resorts. In my ten years in higher education, I've seen a shift from multi-student dorm rooms to single rooms (just like they had when they were living with mommy and daddy!); all-you-can-eat, resort style residential restaurants (can't call it the "cafeteria" anymore!) priced at around $8 or $9 PER MEAL; student athletic facilities that would rival those of, well, just about any place, that necessitate a three-figure semester/quarter fee; multi-million dollar student-athlete centers built for a handful of athletes and off limits to the general student population, even in the evenings when the athletes are all snug in their single-bed dorm rooms.

Etc., etc.

But, of course, it is much easier for parents to complain about professor salaries (as if they should teach for free) than to complain about amenities that we all seem to think we deserve anymore. When a kid grows up eating at TGI Fridays every night, should we expect them to eat square pizza and tater tots? CAN we?

And it is much easier for administrators to cut salaries rather than cut those things that look pretty in the admissions flyers...

A bit off topic perhaps, but thank you for allowing me to get that off my chest...

Somebody pointed out on IA's blog that most of the tuition costs to a university for graduate RA's/TA's is pure intra-organization accounting fiction. It's a rare Ph.D. program where even a substantial minority is paying their own way, for the simple reason that it'd be economically crazy.

Five to seven years of 'list price' tuition + living expenses would run from $50K - $150K [in the US]. Even a highly marketable degree, such as engineering, wouldn't be worth it. And when the probability of not making it is factored in, it becomes a very bad investment. For the humanities and liberal arts, of course, it'd be almost guaranteed bankruptcy.

This person described system as a way of moving money from the undergraduate courses, to subsidize the graduate courses, which most professors would rather teach.

I agree with those who say it would depend on the institution. A considerable, and for many years increasing, part of tuition is overhead, which includes the diversity deans, sensitivity training, and the like that are in fact quite expensive. A second issue is that if all universities switched to tenured faculty, there would be some adjustment in TAs and adjuncts leaving the business, and some effect on graduate school enrollment. If you could issue a ukase that all teaching was done by tenured faculty, then you could issue a ukase reducing grad school enrollment by a proportionate amount. Result: transfer of personnel from graduate classes to Bonehead English and Western Civ, Cro-Magnon to the Edict of Nantes.

So it would depend on the institution, but I think the effect might be less earth-shattering than some would predict.

Short answer: "Same as today: Whatever the market will bear".

I firmly believe that tuition is demand-driven, not supply-driven. Colleges are still turning away students, and every person who has the money can find a nice college willing to take the money. That said, colleges busy themselves with adding facilities to a) use the windfall, b) support the demand, c)and, justify next years twice-the-CPI increase.

IMO, the dark secret of college is that the purpose is to soak up the middle-class surplus. If it were about education, I reckon a sizable portion of accounting and sociology professors would be looking for work, not to mention entire faculties of the various "oppressed"-studies programs. Just have a test (the ultimate high-stakes test), and take the "x" highest raw scores. Then "educate" them. Vocational training and indoctrination can be done far more cheaply elsewhere. And tenured professor's could teach students that really wanted to learn.

If you really want to rattle cages, drop the bottom 10% of each class each year, either recruiting transfers or reducing class size.

And, finally, eliminate varsity athletics (or to say the same thing a different way, have athletics "schools" (aka olympic training centers and/or farm team facilities) and academic schools, each in separate leagues).

I'm with Hugh about resort-style education. I already think too many people are going to college (like we're ever going to get the toothpaste back in *that* tube), but by turning college into a giant funhouse resort adventure, we're kneecapping ourselves. Governmental support of academia was a lot higher when Joe and Jane College were envisioned as hard-working young people whose parents were proud of them, rather than plagiarizing rowdies who spend more time in Greek meetings than in class.

I'm not saying that college needs to be intellectual boot camp. But far too great a percentage of institutional budgets is being spent on student activities and facilities. Student activities can occur without lavish support from general funds.

Yeah, I know. Grumpy as I wanna be.

I believe that costs would go up considerably, and that includes costs at public, taxpayer funded institutions, but, hey, I'm no economist. I do know however, that, ca 10 years ago, when over-crowding forced Florida to add a tenth state university, tenure was not part of the deal. After a lot of turmoil involving the faculty union, the Ft Myers school opened as a 'teaching' (as opposed to 'research')institution where faculty are employed on fixed period contracts (five years?) and teach more than two classes per semester.

Extending tenure to all current instructors is cost prohibitive and unnecessary. From what I saw as an adjunct and TA, we have way too many unqualified students in college anyway. (And I won't get started on the fact that taxpayers are funding 'area studies' and humanities research that no sane person would voluntarily support.)

No Effect

First, you are making an assumption: The purpose of a university is to educate the young. This may not be true. The purpose of a university may well be (de facto) research or publishing.

Either way we can say with confidence:

No change in teaching loads would effect undergraduate tuition.

The reason is that tuition is not regulated by the Free Market, but is set the way that the railroads set their rates in the days of the Robber Barons. It would be illegal price-fixing in any other business--a clear violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Very few students actually pay the posted tuition--this is a very important point. The posted tuition is just the starting point.

The key is having the students apply for financial aid. This requires that they and their parents submit a complete account of the family's finances: savings, house, other assets, debts, other children to be educated, etc. At this point, the university owns the family.

The reason the university owns the family is found over in the Sociology Department. American families, as a whole, are willing to spend a certain amount on college education. This varies from family to family based on a number of factors such as income, assets, social background, number of children, etc. This varies significantly from family to family. Using sociological research and the right information, this can be estimated for a given family to a reliable degree. This is the information required by the Finance Office. (NB: I omit the word ëAid.í)

With this information, the Finance Office then calculates what they can squeeze out of a given family. This is done carefully for each individual family. The ëFinancial Aidí given is simply the difference between this amount and the posted tuition.

This is normally illegal for a good reason: the customer can not shop around. These formulas are tied into government programs and the Finance Offices of the nationís universities work together. The result is that each college will charge a given student the same amount.

For example: College A has a tuition of $20,000 and College B has a tuition of $25,000. Say a student and his family can, with great exertion and debt, scrape together $15,000.

All colleges will be given the necessary information to calculate that this student can pay--at maximum--$15,000. The result will be that College A will offer $5,000 in ëFinancial Aidí and College B will offer $10,000 in ëFinancial Aid.í The student cannot shop around and will pay $15,000 no matter where he goes.

In the absence of ëFinancial Aidí the colleges would have to set tuitions that students could pay. College A, for example might charge $10,000 and College B might charge $15,000. This would give the student a choice. If their academics were roughly the same, and too many students chose College A over B, then College B would have a strong incentive to LOWER tuition or IMPROVE its teaching. This would enforce better budgeting at College B and waste and bloat were cut and the money released for professorís salaries or for lower tuition--or a combination of the two.

This is the sort of cynical customer shearing that Anti-Trust laws are designed to prevent.

Also, For a different--and very un-PC--take on the problems of the boomer generation and their monopolization of resources, see the blog Boomer Deathwatch

I also think that there are extra-economic issues involved in your hypothetical, Erin. If adjuncts were to be eliminated at many large universities, teaching the same entry-level courses again and again would become a major job responsibility for tenured profs. My sense is that most longtime profs hate teaching those courses. Once word of that got around, might the pool of aspiring tenure-track professors dilute itself, thus changing salary demands? Just a thought.

Here's an even more radical proposal: don't hire more tenured faculty, just make the ones there already teach more. Faculty have no business teaching a 2-1 course load, or whatever it is at the large universities. Make 'em work for a living, like those of us in the real world. Heh.

AB's cynical description of college finances from the tuition-paying parent's point of view (2:49pm) is not wholly accurate.

For example: explicit collusion among financial aid offices is limited, and the net 4-year expenses do vary among institutions.

But. Speaking as one who just joined the ranks of the FAFSA and CSS-PROFILE filers, AB is not wholly wrong, either. The stated tuition at colleges like Erin's and Tim Burke's is more--much more--than most American families can afford. And also more than many top-quartile families can raise without emptying retirement accounts and liquidating home equity. And, I hear, some families have more than one child.

There is an element of kabuki in private liberal-arts college tuition-setting, discussed in *this 2002 Slate article*.

Relating this back to the topic at hand: per AB's and other posters' points, the relationships of institutional costs (including payroll) to tuition-as-advertised and to actual costs borne by students' families are not straightforward. Some of the reasons are honorable, some result from colleges playing-by-Society's-rules, and some are sleazy. The absence of transparency makes Erin's query about the costs of tenure- versus adjunct- track much harder to answer, and a problem in its own right.

AMac,

I have no doubt that prices charged vary somewhat from college to college. But by how much? I would wager that it is only by a few percent, enough to make it look good. College officials are not stupid.

My point about collusion still holds. It doesn't take much collusion to fix prices.

The manufacturers of steam turbines, which drive huge 300 ton generators, once fixed prices based on the phase of the moon on the day that a contract was announced.

It was simple. It worked. A very high executive of GE went to jail.

The same is true with colleges. The information needed to fix prices is in the open. Even so, ten years ago, the Finance Offices of leading universities were found to meet yearly. They fixed the prices for students by name.

This is not something that I came up with myself. I heard it explained by more than one business professor. My brother, at a top 5 b-school, was told exactly the same. I presume that these professor know the inside story.

AB,

My point about collusion still holds.
Agreed.

[By how much do] prices charged vary ... from college to college?

Since you asked, here are some figures. These are only for schools where a position in the freshman class was offered. The (unexpectedly?) wide range may be due to the geographical and type-of-school range here. But the figures are still breathtakingly high for the naive, e.g. me a few months ago.

ëComprehensiveí (tuition, student fees, room, and board) yearly fees. Loans and Federal grants not included.

'Very selective' (not Ivy or almost-Ivy) secular Northeast liberal arts school: $38,900 = four-year tag of $159,200, ignoring increases.

'Very selective' secular Northeast liberal arts school: $38,500 less $7,500 merit scholarship = $124,000.

'Selective' religious Midwest liberal arts school: $32,400 less $5,000 merit scholarship = $109,600.

'Selective' public Northeast liberal arts college, out-of-state: $29,600 less $4,000 merit scholarship = $102,400.

AMac,

We may be going past each other.

The schools range (roughly) from $100,000 to $160,000 for the full ride. That is the posted tuition.

There is a limit beyond which the middle class can not be squeezed. I suspect that it is something less than $100,000--two kids being nearly a quarter-million and three kids being a third of million!

Take three examples:

Family A can afford the $160,000. They have a genuine choice in terms of reputation vs. price. They are few and far between.

Family B can be squeezed for $70,000. In this case, the Ivy's would offer aid of about $90,000. The Selective colleges would offer aid of about $30,000. Net cost: $70,000, no matter where the kids go.

Family C can be squeezed for $50,000 and so would be offered $110,000 and $50,000. Net cost: $50,000

The result is that the posted prices are irrelevant and that the real price paid by individuals is fixed across the board. There is no competition on price.

I was wondering how many comments I'd have to read through before someone pointed out that tuition costs rise to the point the market will bear. I'm glad to see a few people got it, at least.

May I also point out the utter economic illiteracy standard in universities that allows this ludicrous fiction of "rising costs in education" to go unchallenged?

Well, is anyone going to do some basic analysis?

First, assume a program loses all of its graduate students and the professors all teach three classes each semester for the two "main" semesters and two in the "off" semester (that is, they work full time like everyone else).

What happens when profs go from teaching graduate students who teach the undergraduates to teaching the undergraduates directly and to teaching "real" loads (not a full 4/4/4 like some community colleges, but more of a load than 2/1 or such).

Lets work from there.

Price Fixing

JSinger,

Tuition is not a market driven. Universities fix prices. This is forbiden by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Corporate executives would go to jail for this.

The Posted Tuition is irrelevant. Even Penn agrees with me. Scroll down to "Comparing Penn's Cost"

http://www.admissionsug.upenn.edu/paying/facts.php

Note that the expected family contribution is $10,000. Penn expects either Penn or College X to pay for any cost above $10,000.

The posted tuition of each institution is clearly presented as irrelevant.

BY THE NUMBERS
From Pennís 2002-3 Annual Report & Web Site

Revenue from Tuition and Fees: $486 Million ($486,065,000, Grad & Undergrad)

Number of Students: 20,447 (Grad & Undergrad):
-------------------
Avg Tuition: $486,065,000 / 20,447

Average Tution: $23,771 per yr. ($95,087 per 4 yrs) (Grad & Undergrad)
--------------------
UNDERGRAD ONLY

Posted Tuition: $39,634 per yr. ($158,566 per 4 yrs)

Avg Freshman Aid: $25,411
Actual Tuition: $39,634 - $25,411
Actual Tuition = $14,233 per yr. ($61,479 per 4 yrs)

80% of Freshmen receive financial aid and Penn advertises, ìPenn is committed to meeting your full need throughout your undergraduate years. If family circumstances remain stable, your financial aid will remain relatively constant."

YET, only 60% of all undergraduates receive financial aid. Something is dragging down that average over four years. Go figure.

http://www.admissionsug.upenn.edu/paying/faq.php60
http://www.finance.upenn.edu/comptroller/accounting/AnnualRpt/Financial_Report_03.pdf