At 09:43 PM 9/5/96 -0700, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Speaking of union-busting universities, I'd like to do a piece in LBO,
>maybe several, on university-as-business: patent portfolio, endowment
>capital, etc. Yale, for example, has a spectacular investment record,
>outperforming all averages for the last 1, 5, 10, and 20 years. One
>suspects, but can never prove, that alums throw the university sweet
>private placements and choice bits of info. Its physical plant needs some
>serious work, but Yale plans to pay for this by cuts in the operating
>budget - which is why it wants to cut pay of dining-hall workers from
>$23,000 to $10,000 - while continuing to "grow the endowment." Its
>management is indistinguishable from that of a large corporation.
>
>Any thoughts/reports anyone has along these lines - very broadly defined -
>would be welcome.
>
>And why *has* tuition gone up so much?
We received a full packet of materials from Research Associates of
Washington about higher ed costs, spending and price indexes about a month
ago. The reports are generally quite thorough but these reports are used by
university administrators so they cost about $20-$50 a piece. The relevant
info:
Research Associates of Washington
2605 Klingle Road, NW
Washington, DC 20008
Phone: (202) 966-3326 Fax: (202) 966-0309
I don't have much time to go into any grand synopses but I can address
Yale's endowment vs. others and the relative wage indexes at universities.
In RAW's *Higher Education Revenues and Expenditures* Yale ranks 7th in
Gifts/Endowments per FTE student for 1991-2. The top 10 (after which there
is a considerable drop off):
California Inst. of Tech. 29,489
Mass Inst. of Tech. 29,485
Columbia U. 27,618
Princeton U. 25,699
Harvard U. 22,444
Johns Hopkins U. 22,143
Yale U. 20,458
Duke U. 19,525
U of California-San Francisco 19,443
Stanford 19,214
I have no idea how UCSF sneaks in there but they do have a low enrollment
and no other public university even comes within one third of UCSF [note:
my spell checker suggested UCLA for this!]. Also, there is a lot more juicy
data in this including good evidence that medical schools help hide limited
resources for the general education of their affiliated universities.
In RAW's *Inflation Measures for Schools, Colleges, and Libraries* you can
see that tuition increases swamp inflation (about double CPI since 1967).
If you look at the wage sub indexes you can see that Faculty are taking a
slightly higher percentage of professional salaries and contracted services
generally shrank in the 70's but have been growing slowly since the
mid-80's. The compensation indexes indicate faculty salaries grow faster
than other professional and non-professional (research faculty the highest
and student workers the lowest). The 1995 indexes (1983=100) for a few
select subindex:
Research Faculty 180.3
Faculty 176.1
RA's 171
TA's 171
Library Pro Staff 167.2
Admin Pro Staff 179.7
Clerical 159.6
Student Workers 145.2
Service 149.2
Operator/Laborers 146.7
In RAW's *State Profiles: Financing Public Higher Education 1978-1995* you
can see that the share of revenue collected by tuition has gone up
dramatically while the share from general revenues is down (although
trending up slightly over 1993-5). I think that it is fair to interpret the
increase in tuition at Public Universities as a response to cuts in general
revenues. I would speculate the increases in private university tuition as
a result of a variety of factors including following the public trend
("repostitioning the position good"), collusion, and demand factors.
Hope this helps,
Jim Westrich
University of Illinois at Chicago
Institute on Disability and Human Development
"How was I to know that gravity and rhythm were linked?"
--Dickie Diamond
