If you have had to pay a tuition bill lately, you know firsthand there is a massive bubble right now in higher education.
In fact, it’s obvious to just about everyone except our esteemed college and university deans, who apparently have been so busy padding their payrolls that they have missed out on all those headlines about soaring tuition.
The Bay State’s higher ed sector has gone bananas hiring administrators over the past 25 years, adding three paper- pushers for every new student, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds.
Given what has happened to tuition costs since the 1980s, with the price of a college education at a private university equal now to buying a home, that’s pretty infuriating.
But the weasel-like response of the well-paid college administrators to NECIR’s findings is beyond maddening.
Instead of owning up to a serious cost problem, our local institutions of higher learning are blaming everyone else for their bloated bureaucracies including, you guessed it, everyone’s favorite whipping boy these days: Uncle Sam.
Pointing Fingers At Everyone Else
Overall, Massachusetts colleges and universities have added an astounding 51,000 new employees since the early 1980s, according to NECIR.
Adjusted for inflation, tuition has soared 85 percent during the same period.
The hiring of administrators far outpaced the hiring of faculty by a 2-1 margin, with many colleges and universities increasingly relying on low-paid part-timers, the center found.
And several schools had eight, 10, 12 even 15 administrators. Several local presidents make upward of several hundred thousand dollars to nearly $1 million.
Yet one of the most disturbing things about NECIR’s report was not what’s in it, but what’s not.
Sure, college administrators interviewed for the story grudgingly conceded they have hired more staff.
But in all the interviews with university spokespeople and administrators, there was no mention of the burden these added costs place on students and their cash strapped parents. After all, $60,000 a year in tuition is almost the entire median income of a family of four in Massachusetts, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
No, there was not even the barest acknowledgement the current system might need to be looked at.
Instead, local colleges and the Washington, D.C.-based associations that lobby for them say we have it all wrong, the problem isn’t with them.
The federal government, for example, pushes all this extra paperwork on us, forcing us to hire more bodies to wade through it all, college administrators opined in the NECIR piece.
OK, not to be cynical, but this is a rather creative dodge.
Yes, federal government may very well have a share of the blame here, but it is for opening even wider the spigot of loan money from Washington.
Instead of making college more affordable, all that loan money has simply enabled colleges and universities to keep hiring more administrators and boosting tuition by an average of 7.4 percent a year. That’s faster than even health care or home prices at their peak, writes Glenn Harlan Reynolds, author of “The Higher Education Bubble” and a law professor at the University of Tennessee.
The paperwork is a byproduct of this process, hardly the root cause.
Yet, if that wasn’t bad enough, I just love it when the folks in the Ivory Tower start blaming parents and children for their own mismanagement.
Kind of like a company blaming its customers, or, even more simply put, biting the hand that feeds you.
You see, college costs have been going up, but sorry, it’s your fault, college administrators say.
We have simply been responding to demands of all those pushy parents and students for more luxurious dorms, better food, and even mental health services.
Yes, we spent a lot of money, and had to hire yet more staff to manage all those fancy new campus facilities, but it was all to make our students happier.
What could we do?
“The demands of educating students haven’t gotten less. They’ve gotten more,” Matt Hamill, senior vice president of the National Association of College and University Business Officers, told NECIR.
Of course, I wonder how many parents, faced with a $60,000 a year tuition bill, wouldn’t much rather have junior settle into an old–fashioned, no–frills dorm room and put up with some crappy cafeteria food in exchange for an affordable college education.
Deep Denial
Possibly what’s most disturbing here, though, is the level of denial.
First, given the struggles middle-class families are facing, not acknowledging the cost issue is hardly a winning public relations strategy.
Worse though, the defensiveness with which colleges and universities are displaying about their spending is a clear sign that they just don’t get it, that, in their view, there isn’t a problem with the current cost trajectory they are on.
And that is very bad news, indeed. It means we can expect little if any real effort to rein in runaway administrative costs and, by extension, rising tuition as well. At least until the bubble bursts in higher ed, and that may be sooner than any of us thinks.
Back during the last days of the real estate bubble, everyone knew trouble was brewing, yet real estate market boosters insisted prices would never go down.
I always thought it would be hard to be more obtuse that, but frankly I am now having second thoughts on that score.
Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
