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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
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(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
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40%↓
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(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
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40%
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(D) A. Gonzalez
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50%↑
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(D) Brianna Titone
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(D) Jerry DiTullio
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CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
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2%
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
December 04, 2008 06:44 AM UTC
37 Comments
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1. Not at all. What are we actually paying for? Anyone ever seen a breakdown of what tuition actually covers?
2. Absolutely. And our economy will suffer because we’re not educated enough to obtain jobs that will eventually be outsourced to a country that cares about education and makes it affodable to everyone.
3. An audit of what is paid for in tuition, and an analysis of what can be done to lower college tuition rates.
And at this point, I’ll have to beg for a deferment on my student loans until I can get a job that pays me enough to pay them off.
And on top of all that, I’m getting my application together for grad school. but this time, I’m going for grants and scholarships.
I want a job that can take care of me and my eventual family. For what I want to do at the level I want to do it, a Master’s is required.
CD, are you seeking government sector employment or a professional license that is portable to the highest bidder (total package) for your services?
There was more to the statement.
I’ll go where I would be welcome, and would best use my abilities.
With the modern fact of life that people job-hop, I want to work somewhere I could work for 5-10 years. I’ve been at my current job 7 1/2 years.
I would prefer public sector work for the stability and benefits.
They are the only ones I see getting good pay, good bennies, good retirement. Forty yours ago it was understood that said workers got lower wages than the private sector for the job security. Now they get it all.
Here in Sarasota a “mere” lieutenant tenant in the Sheriff’s department with about 25 years makes $85K and incredible benifits like a free “company” car and free gas. Basically, this person costs the taxpayer about $100K a year. Upon retirement (early compared to us private sector suckers), about $60K. Not bad for not working.
down there for 20 years. He still has some friends in the department who keep him amused with stories about the department these days. He’s glad he retired when he did, though.
I’m swimming in dark waters here, I have no references. But I do recall reading several years ago a comparison of a typical university’s staffing “back when” and now.
Look at any directory of staff and it’s easy to pick out the positions that did not exist twenty or fifty years ago. Positions having to do with diversity, sexual issues, environmental issues, development (i.e., fund raising), remedial work, ethnicity, affirmative action, federal compliance, and so on.
The Iliff School of Theology where I got my masters had more people doing administrative work than FT professors. I doubt if that is atypical.
And let’s not forget that “back when” most professors were tenured or on track to be. Now many professors are adjunct, i.e., temps. Lower pay, no bennies, and yet….. In theory, the faculty portion of the budget might well have decreased since those good old days.
The obvious, to me, way of getting some handle on this is to look at budgets from “back when” and compare them to now. What costs have increased so out of proportion? Why? Are they justifiable? (And perhaps they are.)
All this ditto public K-12 education. Why are 18 teachers making over $100K here in Sarasota? Can that be justified? I remember 25 years ago that some 100 bureaucrats in the LA system were making that much then.
“Executive Director of Nutritional Imperitives,” any one?
The same thing occurred to me regarding K-12. Too much government regulation and new overhead.
Two issues that are both separate and intermingled.
To the extent that we can, we must keep them separated in any examination. The school district itself may create an unneccessary position for some long time loyal employee. Other positions may be created to deal with some federal or state mandate.
We also need to keep in mind how many students are being served divided by bureacrats. The University of Florida had 18,000 students when I went in 1964. I think they are at 40,000 now, over several campuses. Is it not unreasonable that a doubling of management has been necessary?
The company I last worked for went from about 300 to over 1000 clients in the five years I was there. I saw many new positions created and only one would I have called “fluff.” (And on a personal level I really liked and admired that woman.) One network engineer guy was it for IT when I came aboard, then an IT manager was hired, the phones became part of IT (VoIP), formal support ticket procedures were implemented, three more IT support folks hired. Not only did we support more people, we had more geographic sites to serve with increasing uses of technology.
So, there can be a reason.
Some of the increased overhead of positions that never existed years ago is the result of every one having a masters or PhD. That education does not good for the holder unless there is greater pay. And one way is to make jobs that need that particular education.
But probably not for the reason you’re thinking. A big reason college tuition has grown so rapidly here in Colorado is the decrease in state support for higher ed. 12 years ago, 22% of the state budget was directed to higher education. This year, it was less than 11%.
Yes, C.D. I have seen a breakdown of what college tuition covers. The two biggest items are personnel costs, and infrastructure support. I know, I know, Ward Churchill was paid too much. But for the most part, Colorado college faculty and staff are paid far less than their counterparts around the country.
Where we once had to outfit classrooms with a chalkboard and maybe an overhead projector, we now have to install smartboards, laptop carts that connect to wi-fi networks. It simply costs more to run a university.
And you’re right David, it is getting harder for lower and middle class students to afford ANY kind of higher education. Our economy will most certainly suffer, as we live in a high-tech, service economy. A bachelor’s degree is becoming the minimum for someone who wants to succeed.
There are creative ways to deal with it like Service Learning, Americorp, programs where students work off their tuition debt.
We also have to convince our legislature that it is as good an investment as any other they can make.
State funding has gone down significantly in many states. And private fund-raising seems mainly tied to the success of football teams. Even then, private fundraising of course costs money.
And then people like Bruce Benson, who were hired specifically and explicitly to raise money, have decided it’s much easier to just raise tuition by 10% a year.
Scholarships can help, although as some have pointed out, if you give too many scholarships, the nominal cost of tuition goes up. I wonder if the numbers cited in the study are nominal tuition or actual tuition paid on average.
Many of the pollsters say that Higher Ed polls like crap in Colorado. The Higher Ed crowd should be selling their value to the public … that includes selling the public on the value of a dollar invested in growing capacity and what the future product will deliver/cost if the state doesn’t step it up.
The real problem lies in our public education system, but I believe we can address the problems that currently face Colorado families who want their kids to go to college. Just keep in mind that these are band-aids, and we can’t make higher ed work without making K-12 work too.
1. The tuition increases as you lay them out are outrageous. Four times, including inflation? That’s not right. It can’t keep going up like that. The problem, of course, are the financial shortfalls of being tied into an inconsistent state budget. We need to find a way to take the burden off of the parents and students. Barack Obama’s idea of tying it in to national service is a good start (who knows when we’ll actually see that plan take shape though. This is obviously something that must be dealt with at a statewide level, because we can’t afford to wait for Washington to act.)
2. If we want to compete globally we need to make college affordable to everyone who wants to go. So to answer your second question, it is absolutely imperative that college be within reach of most, if not all, Americans. The middle class is already starting to shrink because of the recession, and if college becomes just another thing that used to be affordable, but is now a luxury, we’re in big trouble. We are better than Canada people.
3. I’ve always wondered why textbooks are so ridiculously expensive. It seems like a pretty sweet racket for Messrs. Mcgraw and Hill, but it’s killing parents and students. I know that the Cult of Ayn Rand would say, “Buy used books dummy,” but they’re not that much cheaper. A funny thing about textbooks: they always come out with a sparkling brand new edition every year, and for some reason the profs require the students to get the new edition. Granted, eventually you’re going to have to upgrade, but most of the time there’s not new information. It’s small, but it’s one of those things that adds up.
The cycle of buying and selling used books actually plays a big role in new editions coming out even when they’re not needed. The publishers aren’t seeing any of the money bookstores get when they sell us used books, so for them to make (more) money they put out new editions rendering the previous editions useless. If it was up to the CU Bookstore, for example, they’d sell nothing but used books and make a killing. No bueno for publishers…
On top of that, a lot of profs don’t really care. When bookstores send out “textbook adoptions” (forms for profs to request books) the newest edition of whatever book it was they last used it usually pre-printed on the form. That makes a huge difference in the Core classes almost everyone ends up taking because; one, they have the biggest, most colorful and expensive books; and two, they tend to be taught by grad students and/or a rotating group of profs that have bigger fish to fry than a 1000-level Chemistry course.
and we actually debated whether to switch to the new edition, because it seemed very similar to the old edition, and didn’t seem to justify the additional expense.
The problem was that once they stop publishing the old edition, you get a gradually decreasing supply of books, since not everyone sells back their book. Couple this with the fact that publishers often just rearrange the homework problems and you can see the difficulty with allowing students to have two different editions of the text. Just makes everything a pain in the ass.
I used to work at the “indpendent” bookstore at UNC, so I know that they make all their money off of used.
It’s still a racket though.
and after working for the man at his “racket” you grabbed your fake ID and headed off to the State Armory to drown your sorrows?
is the textbook companies, not the book sellers.
And the Armory is wayyy too cool for me. Bears was my bar.
Those textbook companies must have some deal cut with the professors who write them.
Too bad you weren’t one of the cool kids at the Armory, but you probably got more tail at Bears and had way more fun too.
Now, obviously I have no idea what CU was like 27 years ago, but I have a hard time believing the sheer level of services offered now are the same as back then. In the 6-odd years I’ve been here, things have changed quite a bit…and things have gotten more expensive.
Is a 439% increase justified? Probably not. But, as Parsing and comnc pointed out, there are tons of new things Universities are spending money on that weren’t on their radar decades ago.
What’s funny to me is that, as liberals, we always want more money to go towards education. This year, CU is in fact putting more money “in the classroom” than in previous years without a substantive increase in state funding. But that money is coming from tuition and fee increases and all sorts of folks crying foul. We always want more money for education…as long as we don’t directly have to pay for it…
As for Colorado specifically, we’re not going to do anything to “fix” higher ed funding until TABOR is gone and the state does away with it’s ridiculous system of electing Regents in partisan elections. Not so simple, but of supreme importance, IMO.
And a quick plug for something I had chance to work on w/ the University, CU’s “Flagship 2030” plan. http://www.colorado.edu/flagsh…
from talking to my daughters is… Better food in the dorms. And the students all show up with a lot more crap (TV, microwave, etc).
But what’s there, how the classes are offered, etc – seems to be pretty much the same.
From distance learning, to blackbord (a common online course management tool), to the design and construction of classrooms, the classes offered today have a much different feel than they did 30 years ago. And learning has become a more efficient process because of it. As far as actual content, I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect linear algebra or pre-civil war US history (except revisionist history:) to be materially different.
In math, for example, students use Maple software to visualize things or solve more complicated equations than can be done by hand. Because of this, we avoid teaching really obscure techniques that only work on one equation, and focus more on the bigger picture stuff.
Class notes and homework/exam solutions are often online, and you can easily incorporate audio of speeches or photographs or whatever into a history class without having to shut the entire class down to wait for the A/V guy to bring the TV.
And if you DON’T do that sort of technological stuff, college students will go somewhere else.
As you said, no more waiting for the A/V guy – which really means no more staffing the A/V position. Grades etc. are now online, but that has to be less labor intensive than the old way of teachers reporting them in to the central records.
The whole computer infrastructure is certainly a new cost – but it should at least partially pay for itself in efficiencies of how they do things.
I’d sure like to see where the additional costs are – and where we have savings over the past.
So you know better than most how computers constantly need to be fixed. There are still A/V people to deliver equipment, but remember that those have always been minimum wage (or less, with work-study) jobs. So the labor cost is not terribly high. On the other hand, equipment cost is quite high, as is upgrading and maintenance and such.
In my experience, putting class materials online is substantially MORE labor-intensive. In the old days I might have scribbled solutions on paper and hung them outside a door for students to read; now I have to actually make the equations look nice as a printable documents.
And remember, automating everything just means people have to go to more trouble to fix their records when something unusual happens, which is quite frequent.
Reminds me of a story: I spent a summer working as a shipping clerk at a big company. They were running SAP software, into which I’d enter all raw materials used and all shipments made and everything recycled and etc. Fine and good, and I got pretty good at coordinating all the numbers, so that the people reporting raw materials used would tell me their numbers before the people shipping final products out would, and thus I wouldn’t end up with negative numbers screwing up the whole system; this was a serious issue I had to work to resolve.
Now at the end of my first month there, it was time to submit the report to the corporate people. That day, everyone with any kind of power at all at the warehouse/factory came into the office and stood behind me and told me how to change the various numbers in the spreadsheet so they’d look better.
So clearly computerizing the system resulted in substantially more work, since instead of just putting in fake numbers on a piece of paper at the end of each month, you now need an employee who will constantly be worrying about putting real numbers into the system which just have to be faked anyway at the end.
Now your average school is much less blatantly dishonest than your average corporation, but the same sort of things happen.
College is still a great value at its current costs, especially if you look at the total expense versus the marginal cash flows that a graduate would receive over the course of his career because of his degree.
Think of all the ways college today is far better than it was in 1981: IT (you could fill a book about improvements in this area), expanded subject areas, lab and facilities improvement, nicer dorms, improved public safety, better athletic facilities, expanded study abroad and exchange student opportunities, and I’m sure there are many more improvements that I have not listed.
If you don’t think it is worth the money, don’t go. But as the Suburu bumper stickers say “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Several comments:
“Nicer dorms:” Yes, I was miserably packed into two small 35 year old rooms with two strangers. It was fine. Now kids expect Martha Stewart living because that’s what they had at home. If we made the dorms more Spartan, they would not attend that school. So, yes, increased cost w/o benefit.
“Improved Public Safety:” Hmmm….no blue light telephones in 1964. Was there more, or less, or the same of sexual assault? I’m going to wager far less. More public safety needed due to more miscreants. Increased cost due to necessity. (And I won’t get into self-expanding beaucracies. A flashing light on a car won’t, do, it must be Times Square.)
“Better Athletic Facilities:” The old field at Sarasota High looks like the UF one in 1964, the UF one looks like Mile High, although smaller. AC’d dignitary boxes, cushy seats, all this costs money. More money, no return.
Mi do centavos.
Now that everyone has a cell phone (and students are physically incapable of breathing without one), there is no need for the emergency phones placed on campus.
Some costs decrease over time – or at least should.
Back in the day, every graduate in the top ten percent of their class got a tuition free scholarship to any public college or university in Colorado. Would something like that solve the problem? Absolutely not. But it would be a start.
In Oklahoma, every student who scores a 29 on the ACT, goes to OU or OSU tuition free.
I like the idea of linking scholarship help to achievement or course of study. The old National Defense program offered scholarship and loans to students in math, science and education….with a liberal loan forgiveness policy based on employment. Bring that back.
Administrative salaries are sky high in the education field. That is outrageous…Increase in tuition should be accompanied by a corresponding percentage decrease in administrative salaries…
And of course, make football and basketball self supporting..
Eliminate football & basketball. They cost money (at C.U. they have to keep giving the football dept additional loans) and they take up way too much mindshare from the administration.
I was at a school that was not known for sports at all, and the new President decided to start a football team, on the theory that football bonds alumni to the school and makes them give money. A new stadium was built and everything.
After the first season, the football team was in dead last place. But that was the thinking.
I’m not saying it was a good idea for that school (I always thought it was stupid), but I don’t think it’s unusual. And I imagine some schools have made it work.
None of the sports at CU are profitable. Football at least has a chance of making money like at most Big XII schools.
You drop football, you also drop the Boosters that give money to things other than football. It could end up being a wash…and you lose the chance of a profitable athletic department (or at least football program)…
1) What has the actual cost of educating a student increased? As state funds for students have dropped, that has increased tuition, but no the cost. And private schools may have increased the official tuition in part just to get more from the very rich.
2) Assuming the actual cost has increased – where has it gone? If you do a comparison of the costs in 1981 vs today, where are the differences?
And if our educational establishment has it’s act together – they should have answers to these two questions as they are central to our funding of higher-ed. I know a couple of Regents lurk here – do you have this data?
haha, funny. I think we all know that’s not the case. 🙂