Rising College Costs, Falling Investment in Faculty

Today, the Delta Cost Project, an initiative of the Lumina Foundation for Education, released The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance.  Jane Wellman, executive director of the project, told Inside Higher Ed that “while the data are not shocking to those who work in the field, ‘a lot of people will be surprised that the big driver of spending is not instruction.’”

Not surprisingly, if you read the report, specifically the section on Direct Instructional costs which are “those [costs] going directly to faculty and departmental administration,” you find that the academic staffing trend away from full-time, tenure-track faculty to underpaid contingent faculty is a key factor.

If you don’t have time to read the report, follow me over the jump for a few key findings.

For starters, it is important to understand that while college costs are rising, the authors of the report find that spending per student FTE in the public sector is not.

Since 2000, however, public associate’s and master’s institutions have reduced expenditures per FTE student, and spending has remained relatively flat among public research universities.

And direct instructional costs have declined proportionately across all sectors.

The proportion of total spending going for the direct cost of instruction has declined since 1998 in both the public and private research sectors.

And, of course:

But some of the lower costs seem attributable to real cost reductions from a continuing shift from full- to part-time faculty and staff. The periodic National Study of Postsecondary Faculty shows that, in 1987, two-thirds of faculty and staff were employed full time. By 2003, that had dropped to 57 percent, with declines widespread across all sectors.  A similar decline appeared in the number of faculty with tenure. Less than one-half of higher education faculty had tenure in 2003, compared with 58 percent in 1987. And the share of full time faculty not on the tenure track nearly tripled during that time, reaching 21 percent in 2003. [snip]

At least partially as a result of these shifts in tenured and tenure-track faculty, the share of direct instructional costs claimed by faculty salaries has steadily declined among all sectors over the past two decades. In 1987, faculty salaries accounted for roughly 73 to 75 percent of direct instruction costs, and had dropped about five percentage points by 2005. While rising benefit costs have offset some of these declines, it is still clear that faculty costs are not what is driving spending increases. [emphasis added]

This linkage (or lack thereof) between college costs and investment in instruction is going to be an important one as we try to shift the discussion about academic staffing trends (and ultimately the priorities).  So make sure you pass this one around.

Comments

[maggie]

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Maggie