Colleges Spend Far Less on Educating Students Than They Claim, Report Says – The Chronicle of Higher Education

A theme we’ve talked about before here: That tuition is subsidizing research.  But now it’s coming from the Chronicle which draws more attention.

There’s an interesting implication of this finding related to the higher-education “Race to the Top” funding and President Obama’s goal of having more college graduates.  If college education is actually much cheaper than tuition would have us believe, the actual cost of generating more college graduates could be made much lower than the cost of sending more kids to college.  Could we create an alternative? Could we get more Americans educated at a college-level by avoiding colleges, perhaps creating some other institution — without research or athletics?  What would it mean culturally to set up something else that doesn’t have the “college” name but has that role?  Would we just be re-creating community colleges?

While universities routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than what students pay, a new report says exactly the opposite is true.

The report was released today by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which is directed by Richard K. Vedder, an economist who is also an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a Chronicle blogger. It says student tuition payments actually subsidize university spending on things that are unrelated to classroom instruction, like research, and that universities unfairly inflate the stated cost of providing an education by counting unrelated spending into the mix of what it costs them to educate students.

“The authors find that many colleges and universities are paid more to provide an education than they spend providing one,” says a news release on the report, “Who Subsidizes Whom?”

via Colleges Spend Far Less on Educating Students Than They Claim, Report Says – Administration – The Chronicle of Higher Education.