New York Times, June 19, 2009, Friday

New York Times

June 19, 2009, Friday

New York Times

What Colleges Can Cut
By The Editors

(Photo: David Ahntholz for the New York Times)

Students working at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, this month as part of a campus maintenance program.
Colleges are cutting costs, in big ways (layoffs, hiring freezes) and small (window-washing and free HBO for students).

We asked experts in higher-education finance, college students and recent graduates to suggest ways for colleges to economize.

Cut Bureaucratic Bloat and Duplication

Jane Wellman is the executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, a nonprofit research organization.

Can colleges cut their costs, without harming quality or reducing access to students?

Some can, absolutely. Particularly among the national elite institutions, the last decade has seen increases in spending from an arms race for prestige, not for advancing student success. While these institutions are not characteristic of most colleges and universities, they set the bar for spending elsewhere in higher education and contribute to a growing public belief that colleges have misplaced priorities for spending.

The majority of public institutions have not been increasing spending in the last decade. For them, tuition has gone up in large part because of eroding public funding. That doesn’t mean they are off the hook from having to cut costs and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Read more…

Reduce the costs of producing degrees by cutting out excess college units and decreasing student attrition.
Where should they look to do that? There are four basic areas:
First, start with administration, operations and maintenance. Administrative costs have been rising faster than academic program costs for the last decade. Colleges can achieve savings through attention to back-office functions, through consolidated purchasing, improvements in energy efficiency and by holding the line on spending for administrators.

Second, consolidate programs by eliminating high cost and low demand ones. Every college has high-cost, under-enrolled programs that are not critical for future community or work force needs. These programs should be eliminated or, if they are essential, consolidated and shared between campuses and made accessible through distance learning.

Third, reduce the costs of producing degrees by cutting out excess units and decreasing student attrition. Most students take far more than the 120 units required for the bachelor’s degree. Improving advising and course scheduling and getting rid of excess credits reduces the costs to institutions and to students. The unit cost of degree production can be reduced by getting more students through to the degree.

The majority of colleges have graduation rates below 60 percent — a far too low level if we are to increase attainment levels. Attrition is a particularly costly problem in graduate education, where unit costs are high and the time it takes to get a degree is way too long, especially when fewer than 50 percent of students are completing degrees.

Finally, too many states have campuses with low enrollments and high costs because they have not grown to scale. These are politically difficult to eliminate and represent important economic and cultural assets to their communities. Still, in this environment, nothing is sacred, and if these facilities can’t be made to be economically viable, they should be consolidated or closed.


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We Can Pay for Our Own Laundry
Cindy Hong is a 2009 graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in public and international affairs. She was a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

In the midst of the recession, universities need to cut down on superfluous student services while maintaining academic needs. During the “bubble” years, super-wealthy universities lured students in with their large endowments. The idea was that these schools offered the best financial aid, the best academic resources and the best campus life. In addition to fantastic libraries, no-loan grants and summer funding for unpaid internships, we also enjoy small perks like free laundry, free food at college sponsored “study breaks” and free concerts.

But in recent months, even universities with endowments the size of small countries are tightening their budgets. Unsurprisingly, the first things to go are often big ticket items: new academic buildings, labs and courses. Princeton, my alma mater, has pleaded poverty as a reason to not extend library hours and to cut the number of courses offered next semester.

Read more…

Wealthy universities should cut gratuitous student life services.
Though academic expenses are often the most costly, they are also the most essential part of a university. These expenses are not short-term costs on a university balance sheet, but long-term investments for the intellectual growth of its students. Buildings that house larger lecture halls and classrooms will educate students for years to come; departmental funding will support humanities courses that ask students to question values and meanings in life.

Instead, wealthy universities should cut gratuitous student life services. These services are usually viewed as a small price to pay to promote spirit and unity among undergraduate students, they are often poorly attended and over budgeted. Though $100 saved here and $100 saved there don’t add up to much, there is an additional benefit. In the absence of organized study breaks and free laundry, students may learn to be more self-sufficient — an important recession-survival skill.


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I Didn’t See a Lot of Excess
Hannah Howard is a 2009 graduate of Columbia College and writes a column, “Served,” for Serious Eats.

I graduated from Columbia College in May. Now, I have an Ivy League degree in creative writing and anthropology, and my parents are about $200,000 poorer.

I loved attending Columbia for the same reasons that made the school my first choice four years ago. New York City is the love of my life. I met smart, remarkable people, a few of whom became great friends. I spent a lot of time in tiny classes arguing about Foucault with freakishly brilliant professors and classmates until my brain hurt.

From my perspective, students are the last spending priority at Columbia. In student housing, where I lived for four years, the water in the showers was either scorching or glacial but rarely tolerable. Infestations might be part of New York’s charm, but our cockroach and mice roommates were amazingly abundant. I sometimes awoke at 4 a.m. to find my roommate chasing mice. He was more successful than our traps at catching the little guys.

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At the library, I might wait 20 minutes to print something out. During finals time, it might be an hour to get a nook at a desk in which to study.

The creative writing department bought students pizza to celebrate the last day of classes, until my last semester. We were informed the department was cutting costs. My poetry professor somehow arranged to get us some mushroom and sausage pies. The class cheered wildly.

Columbia College estimates that the average cost of attendance for the 2009-2010 academic year will be $54,789. A large pizza at Famous Famiglia goes for $14.95, and it easily feeds four people

As an undergraduate, I never felt like the recipient of perks or even of generosity. At least at Columbia, there are negligible costs to be cut on student life. I’m not sure where the money is going: Lawyers and public relations people fighting for their Manhattanville takeover? Maybe when the campus expands north in Manhattan, there will be space for students to sit and study.


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Private Schools Have to Set an Example

Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and the director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. He is the author of “Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much” and the editor of “What’s Happening to Public Higher Education.”

The last three decades have seen an increase in the dispersion of spending across academic institutions. Spending per student has grown at private institutions relative to public ones and, within the private sector, at well-endowed institutions relative to less well-endowed ones. Thus, the ability of colleges and universities to cut their expenditures without doing serious damage to their educational missions will vary widely across institutions.

Most public higher education institutions have been cutting costs for years. Their tuition increases have been largely because of efforts to at least partially make up for the failure of their state support per student to keep up with inflation.

Personnel costs make up the lion’s share of their budgets and they most surely need to look closely at their administrative and other non-instructional staffing levels. Forcing them to make substantial cuts on the academic side will invariably mean a substitution of cheaper part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty for full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. Research suggests that institutions that make such substitutions see a decline in the graduation rates of their students.

The subset of richer private institutions has long been involved in an “arms race” of spending to attract top students to their campuses. They have much more fat and hence much more flexibility to make cuts in their operations without diminishing the quality of the educational opportunities that they provide for students. In doing so, hopefully they will focus on their public mission and worry about how they can improve access to, and persistence to graduation, for students from all racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, rather than focusing on how they can maximize their perceived private prestige.

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Colleges Can’t Do It Alone
Molly Corbett Broad is the president of the American Council on Education, the major coordinating body for higher education in the United States. She is former president of the University of North Carolina.

While it is difficult to make broad recommendations about how a college or university should weather this recession, one thing remains clear: bold leadership is required. Each president is guided by the unique mission of their institution, its financial resources and long-term strategic plan.

But while their goals are the same — protecting the academic core and helping students and families weather tough times — colleges are taking different tacks. Arizona State University has fundamentally streamlined its administrative structure. Hundreds of other institutions — as varied as Washington State University, Beloit College, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley — have implemented layoffs, furloughs, wage reductions, program eliminations, and the delay of major construction projects.

Read more…

Despite such moves, campuses face increasing enrollments as students seek retraining and the economic edge of a college degree. In light of this, cash-strapped institutions are increasing student aid budgets and holding the line on tuition. A number of private institutions, like Syracuse University, have announced their lowest tuition increases in decades. Unfortunately, the economic strain on many state governments has caused them to raise tuition for students attending public institutions.

If access and affordability are limited, an entire generation of students could be lost when our country needs them most. I am pleased federal policymakers have boosted Pell grants and created the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and further increases in student aid could be in the offing. While some states, like Maryland, have funded higher education to keep it affordable, far more — like California and New Jersey — have not. To keep the dream of college alive for all Americans, hard choices are being made, but colleges and universities cannot do it alone.


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Deans and the Dining Hall Can Go
Victoria Boggiano is a senior at Dartmouth College. She is the day managing editor at the school’s student newspaper, The Dartmouth.

Colleges and universities should not sacrifice the quality of academics when trying to cut costs, nor should money-saving tactics have a negative impact on students’ day-to-day ability to perform well.

Administrators everywhere are in a bind: revenue coming in is decreasing, while costs are staying the same. They tend to look at the situation a certain way — areas that are the first to get minimized frequently include searches for new faculty and maintenance of 24-hour cafeterias. This is a short-sighted tactic. To save money, schools must instead focus their efforts on cutting extraneous measures that have little impact on the learning process or quality of life.

First, schools often spend thousands of dollars on musical performers or artists. Why? Student bodies are replete with talented young adults who would probably jump at the chance to showcase their abilities on stage or in the student union. There is no need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars when that money could go toward hiring two new paleontology professors or buying more computers for the math department.

Read more…

I don’t mean to say that popular performers should never be hired (I was thrilled when Three 6 Mafia made a trip to Hanover this spring), but limiting quantity and emphasizing student efforts would go a long way.

Second, though I do make reference to “24-hour cafeterias” above, my college — and likely many others — have a few food places that most students don’t know about or rarely visit. Dartmouth decided that they should be some of the first things to go. I agree. If a dining hall is becoming a financial drain and can be excised without inconvenience to the students, it should be eliminated.

Finally, schools can save money by reducing superfluous staff and administrative faculty. Only two deans are necessary — first-year and upper-class. There is no need for a dean for each grade, nor dozens of assistant deans (though a handful is appropriate). In addition, colleges can replace some of the adult employees working at dining halls, athletic facilities and other college buildings with students that work part-time or in work-study programs.

Every college is unique, and students at each school know the best ways to cut costs. Above all, colleges must ask students what they could stand to lose, using either questionnaires or online surveys.


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We Need a Three-Year Degree
Robert Zemsky is the chairman of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.

For 30 years American colleges and universities have pursued the chimera of lower costs through increased efficiencies — pursuing a destination that is ever promised but never reached.

It is not that colleges and universities do not know how to cut costs — they do. As every president and chief financial officer knows, one reduces expenditures by first cutting current expense — events, travel, books, journals, even a sport or two — and then by reducing payroll through delayed hires, postponed salary increases, furloughs, layoffs, even salary roll-backs.

Read more…

When it comes to college, most families shop up, almost uniformly choosing the higher-price option.
And as every admission dean responsible for recruiting a class and college dean responsible for faculty recruitment knows the cumulative cost of those reductions is often prohibitive.

Despite the public’s willingness to tell pollsters they are shocked and dismayed by the unchecked increase in the price of a college education, when the time comes to send their sons and daughters to college, most families shop up, almost uniformly choosing the higher-price option. Students as well as faculty want the prestige money buys having understood that they are more likely to get what they want from an institution that is adding rather than cutting costs.

From these 30 years of false promises I have extracted two basic lessons. First, no one is going to make higher education more efficient one institution at a time. There is neither market nor academic advantage to trying to do with less while every one else is doing with more. What is required is a system solution, one that brings change to all of higher education simultaneously.

Second, making higher education more efficient requires a fundamental change in the production functions that shape higher education’s instructional programs. And that means changing what faculty do, when and where they do it, and the time it takes both faculty and students to complete their assigned tasks. My horse in this race is making the three-year baccalaureate degree the standard across all American higher education.


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Go Green
Edward Mitchell graduated from Morehouse College in 2009 with a B.A. in political science and will attend Georgetown University Law Center in the fall. He was editor in chief of The Maroon Tiger, the student news organization.


Although schools should not hesitate to do what is needed, they must avoid any budget cuts that will make bad situations worse. Avoid cuts that will negatively affect quality of education or scare off prospective students. Cutting full-time faculty must be a last resort, as should any reduction in scholarship funding.

Short of that, though, our tough times call for tough decisions. Smart budget cuts can reduce costs of attendance and compensate for revenue lost in the recent worldwide economic downturn. Start with simple things — reduce campus energy consumption, limit travel, and lower student organizational expenditures.

Read more…

Schools facing substantial, time-sensitive budget problems could reduce the use of adjunct professors, hold off on bonuses, cut funding for school-sponsored campus events and postpone planned administrative or departmental expansions. However, long-term, creative planning is crucial. For example, the use of green technology like solar energy panels on campus buildings could significantly reduce costs in the years ahead.

Different budget cuts will work for different schools, but any cost-cutting measure should be smart and deliberate. Students and families who find it harder and harder to attend and pay for undergraduate or graduate school will likely welcome any action that reduces costs of attendance. However, the key rule of any education-related budget cut must be this: do no harm.


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Forget the Light Show
Justin Guiffré is the opinions editor of The GW Hatchet at The George Washington University.

A college degree is an unusual purchase. Our perceptions are tied to the current quality of the institution. A 1968 Corvette will gain or lose value regardless of how Chevrolet is performing. The same is not true with colleges. In 2006, the University of Chicago jumped from No. 15 to No. 9 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. The value of an old Corvette isn’t tied to the value of a new Corvette, while the value of a 2005 University of Chicago degree has grown in only one year to that of a top ten school.

There’s a growing consensus that these rankings are not perfect. When you purchase a college degree there is an expectation that the institution will strive to at least maintain, if not increase, the value of that degree. This means that a college should avoid cost cutting that affects its reputation, like its research staff, and academic performance, such as class size.

Close

The George Washington University, where I am a student, has a legendary taste for the ostentatious. Only two years ago one of the recruiting selling points was G.W.’s Colonial Inauguration, an orientation that included a laser light show at a price of $2,500 per minute (not including labor costs). Between a dour economy, a new university president and the realization that being the poster child of expensive universities was negatively impacting the school, G.W. cut the laser light show without much objection.

The best advice for schools is simply to go after the extravagant. A good orientation program is necessary, but not if it costs five or six figures when that money could be better spent on improving academics. In recent years, schools have raced to add new perks to their package, but most of spending adds no weight toward the value of a degree.