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Comment by BvS | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why the cost of the universities have skyrocketed? Do they offer a better staff/student relation, better equipment, better buildings, do they pay their staff better...? I honestly don't know but since a lot of the universities are non profits the money is not going to their shareholder's and if I understand the article correctly the (inflation adjusted) amount of money the government provides also has not decreased.

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Bigger, newer buildings. Lots more administrators paid much higher salaries. Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams. Gourmet food and single rooms for students (so they can attract the best and brightest!) rather than hash-slinging cafeterias and dormitories. Fancy gyms for the same reason.

Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.

I should have said that median faculty salaries are much lower. A few stars get big salaries and more than half get starvation wages.

We have been moving to the pro sports salary model, not just in pro sports, but obviously already happened in .edu and is more or less along that path everywhere else.

I'm sure there's startup opportunities and risks in this cultural and economic system change.

At my school, a lot of the instructors (at least the non-research instructors) are people who hold 9-5 jobs at a private company in their field of instruction as an adjunct professor. They're willing to work for a lot less pay, since it's a second job.

Yes, the schools are trying to make college teaching into a hobby rather than a profession.

//Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams.//

I'm happy to say that at my alma mater (Purdue) the athletic programs are run as a separate business. They don't get one penny from the University general fund. I think they are one of 5 schools like that. Personally, I think every public school should be required to fund athletics separately.

The accounting for college athletics is weird. Do you only count tickets/TV/bowl $$ in? Or do you try and include alumni donations directly or indirectly linked/influenced by sports? How do you know whether or not the alumnus/a would have donated if not for the team? Do you count sports individually or as a whole? - under title IX you can't just cut the women's programs outright. You can manipulate these variable to claim almost anything you want about profitability in either direction.

Normally when athletics are profitable, the athletic dep't grows. When they are not, the college makes up the difference. I've never heard of an athletic department that contributed anything back to the college, at least not willingly.

Well, Purdue does take a big chunk of the Big 10 Network proceeds for the University, when that money is almost entirely the result of the athletic program. However, I wouldn't say the athletic programs are willingly sharing it.

>Does anyone know why the cost of the universities have skyrocketed?

Administrators always claim their biggest expense is faculty, I remain skeptical.

>Do they offer a better staff/student relation,

No, worse.

>better equipment,

No, and equipment is almost always paid for with grant money.

>better buildings,

My own Ivory Tower is a cold-war era brick dungeon with not a single damn window. The A/C system, which used to be great, was designed for 2.5cent/kW/h electricity, and still uses quite a lot of power even though they have disabled the dehumidifier functionality. Buildings are usually bought with local bonds, grants, or endowments.

do they pay their staff better...?

Staff, maybe, faculty? no.

>if I understand the article correctly the (inflation adjusted) amount of money the government provides also has not decreased.

Negatory, at least in Texas, the state has been slashing funds each year for at least the last 4 years. (Texas A&M, UT, were exempt, I think)

The explosion in costs isn't merely on the tuition side. Being on a college campus is to be a captive consumer. Lots of McDonald's, Burger King, Coke/Pepsi, the bookstore is a BN franchise and they get practically exclusive access to students' money. Fin-Aid makes it easy to spend money at the campus bookstore and much harder to use Fin-Aid money outside that ecosystem.

Examples of bloated salaries for non-faculty: The president of Penn State who was fired made $3mill his last year and could only be 'fired' to the extent that he now makes $600k as a professor who does no teaching at all.

And college coaches usually make a lot more than college presidents.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/public-college-pres...

The academic staff are certainly not paid better (relatively). Indeed, there has a been a profound shift from teaching being done by professors to being done mostly by those less qualified and paid the least: grad students and postdocs. The salaries of proper academic staff, and the ratio of staff to students also have not increased. What has increased, though, is the number and salaries of administrative staff.

What is shocking is that in disciplines like CS, profs are expected to pull in grants that cover their salaries. So effectively, the tuition students pay isn't even paying for the salaries of the professorial staff. Also, the University charges an overhead percentage on grants received. Of course, different universities do it their own way. But the money side of academia is dark and dark indeed.

Yup, overhead ranges from 40-70%

I'm guessing it is more buildings, more administrators, and less money from the state. My alma mater (Virginia Tech) had buildings going up in growth spurts for a while; late 19th century, late 1930s, late 60s. Since the late 90s it's averaged one new building a year. And now, some of those 19th century buildings are being torn down or gut reno'd for more buildings. And it's not like they have 20-50 million on hand to break ground. Everyone one of those new buildings has a 30-50 year mortgage. Some might get a donor to put their name on it, later. But this only offsets some of the costs.

I believe outside the Postdoc instructors, they pay the market rate for staff. You can't get good sys admins on $10/hr but you can make a PhD candidate practically beg for every dollar.

Does anyone know why the cost of the universities have skyrocketed?

Because for a generation the customers didn't care about the cost. And since they saw cost as positively correlated with quality, any college that attempted cost control was shooting itself in the foot.

(I'm not saying the generation that didn't care about price was stupid; they were responding mostly rationally to other perverse incentives.)

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