Notable serie de siete columnas de opinión experta sobre el costo siempre creciente de la educación superior, aparecidas recientemente en The Chronicle of Higher Education [Copyright 2009. All Rights reserved].
Ver a continuación la introducción a esta serie y, más abajo, las columnas de opionión.
Why Does College Cost So Much?:7 experts offer answers to one tough question
Christophe Vorlet, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2009
Why does college cost so much? That seemingly simple question, which may be one of the most perplexing of our time, was the motivation for a series of reports The Chronicle has published over the past year. The series culminates here with a set of commentaries by academic leaders and other experts exploring ways that colleges can contain costs while preserving the integrity of their academic missions.
We started this debate by asking a handful of people—some on the streets of Washington, others in the corridors of power—why tuition has increased faster than the cost of nearly any comparable good or service, including health care, over the past few decades. The question stumped even the most-polished policy wonks, and continues to frustrate everyday Americans.
To solve the problem, colleges may have to consider radical changes in the ways they do business. If they don’t, many observers have noted, they could face public outcry and government intervention.
But how to fix the cost problem? (And is it really a problem?) Should colleges cut programs that are not productive? Should they redefine their view of prestige? How should they measure the work they get from professors?
And, as institutions pursue new directions, how do they preserve what made them great in the past?
Those are but a few of the questions discussed in this final installment of our series. Many of the ideas for the concluding essays originated in an online discussion group that The Chronicle established to inform the series. The group included more than 40 leading administrators, faculty members, economists, and consultants.
While the series is ending, the debate on college costs shows no sign of relenting. With the country in the middle of a rancorous dispute over the cost of health care, people in higher education may be wondering: How long before members of Congress turn that same scrutiny on colleges and the sums they charge students? — The Editors

Take a Hard Look at Academic Programs, and Weed Out the Weak
By Charles Miller
There is severe pressure to reduce the cost of college. To achieve that, institutions must go far beyond traditional cost-cutting and embrace a broader concept of improving productivity—paying attention to not just what we spend, but what we get for funds expended.
There are aspects of the financing system of higher education that can be considered dysfunctional. Traditionally, higher education operates on a revenue-based model, focused on top-line income, with very little capacity or interest in outcome measurements. This has been lightly, but accurately, described as, “Get all the money you can, and spend all that you get.” There is no bottom line in this financing model.
As a result of this structure, specific spending decisions lack the kind of discipline urgently needed when both cost pressures and financing pressures are severe.
One powerful way to attack costs—or improve productivity—is to examine academic programs that constitute a major portion of costs and are a major cost driver, and develop a culture of program accountability.
Many academic programs operate with negative margins. Costs are rarely allocated fully or directly or appropriately to academic programs. Research is often cross-subsidized by teaching revenue. Some programs with large enrollments and lower costs, such as education, have a positive margin—they are the cash cows—and they subsidize smaller, expensive programs, such as the sciences.
Colleges often maintain academic programs with small enrollments, high costs, and questionable academic purpose if those programs serve the overall mission of the institution. However, without methods applied in a regular and rigorous fashion to reduce, improve, or eliminate weak programs—a strong system of accountability—most programs continue simply because of inertia or politics.
As a result, limited resources are very poorly allocated, and institutions become inefficient and less effective.
In the broadest sense, institutions without program accountability experience mission creep, in which resources and management are spread among too many programs. That leads to poorer program quality on average and few programs of the highest quality.
A systematic review of all programs—in which both specific direct and estimated indirect costs are calculated and allocated to each program and compared with the revenue derived from that program—would bring to light the true program costs. An evaluation of programs as cost drivers, placed in the context of the academic mission, would allow college administrators to set priorities and make additions and reductions.
Over time, this process could produce the highest quality at the best cost, creating a much more efficient and productive financing system for the institution and higher education as a whole.
But academic-program accountability is a difficult process. It could be considered the “third rail” of academia. It would require a change in culture and a departure from the current revenue model, including the use of more and better analytical tools to allocate costs and measure outcomes.
As difficult as this process might be, it is common in most successful organizations. Without academic-program accountability, cost drivers will remain disguised, management decision making will remain clouded, and the providers of funds will remain uninformed about the results of their expenditures.
In a period of inexorably rising costs and inevitably declining revenue, it is dangerous for higher education to maintain its dysfunctional revenue system of financing. After all, no academic programs, or even institutions, are guaranteed their existence.
Charles Miller, a former investment manager, was chairman of the secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education during the George W. Bush administration.
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Hysteria Over High Tuition Distracts From Real Solutions for Students
By Sandy Baum
Prices at public colleges and universities have risen rapidly in recent years largely because state financing has failed to keep up with growing enrollments. Of course, if colleges were more successful at finding ways to reduce their costs—as they must—they could live with lower per-student appropriations. But cost reduction could lead to further reductions in appropriations, rather than leading to lower prices for students. As we see all too vividly in the current recession, severe budget cuts have a tendency to reduce both the number of students who can be accommodated and the quality of the opportunities available to them.
There is no question that tuition increases must be slowed. But before colleges consider ways to do that, they should keep several things in mind.
To begin with, holding tuition down gives the same benefit to the wealthiest students as to the poorest, and it is an expensive way of assuring that students at the margin will not be priced out of college.
Need-based financial aid is a more appropriate tool, and the price students pay after taking grant aid into consideration is a more appropriate measure of college affordability than is published tuition.
Surveys consistently reveal that people believe tuition is higher than it actually is. This is partly because a tiny number of expensive private colleges make the headlines so frequently. It is also because our complicated financial-aid system makes it virtually impossible for people to predict how much they will have to pay. Simplifying the financial-aid system, and providing more information in advance about what students will owe, would go a long way toward correcting this problem.
People also misperceive the financial benefits associated with education and tend to think of college as an out-of-pocket expense in the year it is due. That makes no sense. No one could imagine buying a house, and few people would own cars, if they thought of those purchases that way. How much you can afford for college depends both on current resources and on the amount of debt you can reasonably pay back out of future earnings. Pinpointing what is affordable is not easy, but it is surely higher than what people would say if stopped on the street and asked how much they could afford to pay for college tuition this year.
Living costs are the largest expense most students face. And little that colleges and universities do to hold down tuition will make the rent cheaper.
Even a 20-percent cut in average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities would leave the average price close to $5,500. Many would still feel burdened. Real solutions have to include protecting borrowers who can’t afford to repay loans, and helping both students and the general public think of higher education as an investment—one of the best investments both society and individuals can make in the future.
The impressive characteristics of American higher education include the variety of institutions and educational offerings available to students, and the range of price tags. The focus of those concerned with access and affordability should be on assuring the existence of good, reasonably-priced options—not fretting over the existence of high-priced options that may be out of reach for some students.
Sandy Baum is a professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College and senior policy analyst for the College Board.
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Don’t Let Cold Cost-Cutting Endanger the American Model of Higher Education
By Warren Bennis and C. L. Max Nikias
Can the best system of higher education in the world be done “on the cheap”? And can the United States adequately invest in new leadership by bringing a coldly calculating cost model to its chief intellectual and cultural asset?
To preserve the best within the American model—while making it accessible to as many of our citizens as possible—we feel compelled to emphasize that cost-cutting must be done without losing sight of higher goals that are unique to the mission of higher education. America’s colleges and universities are not revenue centers. They are investment centers, reflecting a broadly shared covenant to prepare future generations to lead successful lives and create healthy societies.
One often hears of “opportunity costs” related to education—cold calculations of, say, whether a B.A. or M.B.A. will yield a dollar return in excess of the tuition tendered and time spent. This factorylike accounting does not serve our students, our colleges, or our country.
We believe that one encounters something singular and distinctive at America’s leading universities—an electric interaction of intellectuals from various disciplines in the pursuit of new knowledge, which drives American innovation, compensates for the weaknesses of our elementary and secondary educational system, and keeps the United States poised as a pacesetter.
When a reporter suggested to the great hitter Ted Williams that he could raise his batting average even higher if he swung at more pitches, Williams was circumspect: “You gotta draw the line somewhere.” Similarly, we at universities will have to draw the line in cost-cutting with great tact.
American higher education has less fat than some realize; as such, wise administrators and trustees should cut surgically with a scalpel rather than aggressively with an ax. Competition among state-subsidized public universities and private universities has already maximized efficiencies as much as possible without sacrificing our distinctive edge—unrivaled academic quality.
Let us also take seriously solutions beyond cost-cutting. We recommend that our societal investment in leadership be shared more broadly, by the very American for-profit industries and sectors that require such leadership.
Such organizations should be granted special federal tax incentives for that investment. And those organizations should proudly trumpet their investment to the American public as an essential element of their own brands.
A grand, covenantal approach can expand access to higher education while preserving academic quality and the greater ideals that fuel our society.
As the recent economic meltdown has shown, some treasures can be erased instantly. They existed only on paper. The treasures of the mind, however, cannot be lost. As we seek greater efficiency, let us be mindful above all of the need to protect the unrivaled treasures found at America’s colleges and universities.
Warren Bennis, professor of business administration at the University of Southern California, is the author of a new 20th-anniversary edition of “On Becoming a Leader.” C. L. Max Nikias is the university’s executive vice president and provost.
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Colleges May Have to Consider Scaling Back Their Ambitions
By J. Douglas Toma
When considering cost in higher education, institutional ambitions matter. Colleges and universities, at least those that are even somewhat selective, are fixated on enhancing their prestige, believing it helps them attract resources. Accordingly, their willingness to spend money in the hopes of making money has never been more pronounced.
Despite significant diversity in audiences served and resources available, higher-education institutions across types tend to arrive, independently, at what amounts to a common aspiration. They are eerily similar in vision, in fact, seemingly obsessed with “moving to the next level,” seeking to become more like those directly above them on the prestige hierarchy, no matter where they begin on the ladder.
Institutions not only portray their ambitions using similar rhetoric, but also attempt to achieve them through a rather generic set of strategies. Those include efforts to attract more-accomplished students and noteworthy faculty members, as well as to start academic initiatives intended to appeal to each.
Strategies also involve investments in “collegiate” infrastructure—building or renovating student residences, dining facilities, fitness centers, and even commercial districts. (Some institutions are also enhancing athletics.) Constructing academic buildings with similar “curb appeal” is also popular.
Granted, the energy that the aggressive pursuit of prestige is bringing to campuses has some real value, making individual institutions more dynamic. Colleges are working harder and are more focused than ever—and perhaps even more disciplined. In competing to attract more-demanding students, campuses are challenging themselves to do everything better. Also, projects like fitness centers and student residences have revenue streams—as do star faculty members (although the revenue they generate is far less certain).
The psychology of moving forward is important—essential, really—in any organization. Is it even realistic for an institution or college president not to engage in positioning for prestige? Is it possible, in effect, for any institution to simply maintain its status, even if justified by the need to keep costs in line?
But whether institutions will actually realize the advantages they seek through those investments is uncertain. Even if they rise in reputation, will more resources necessarily follow? There are also legitimate concerns about whether the cost of such aspirations and strategies diminish access and equity. And mission inflation skews the balance and disrupts the efficiency of our overall system of higher education.
The obvious question is whether institutions, in response to the current economic crisis, will scale back their efforts to realize their ambitions, if not the rhetoric around those ambitions.
Institutions have frozen discretionary spending, reduced budgets across departments, and held off hiring permanent faculty members in favor of using adjuncts. But will institutions begin suspending building projects? Will they ease off on purchasing the most-desirable students and faculty members? Will different types of institutions begin to act differently? I suspect not. Organizations naturally tend toward replicating market leaders, and they gain legitimacy in doing so.
J. Douglas Toma is an associate professor at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
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Superstar Professors Renowned for Teaching? Pay Them per Student
By Mark B. DeFusco
When discussing productivity and performance at colleges and universities, the conversation often quickly moves to faculty output. This focus seems senseless.
The professors I know, tenured or not, seem to be extraordinarily engaged in their work, and seem to work plenty of hours, either at home or in the office. But many colleges use an outdated model of productivity that measures output against time on task and considers input as the best predictor of output. This was a useful model when engineers were looking for efficiencies and organizations were designed to look like the machines of their day.
The academy must find a different way to measure productivity. Bankers in my firm measure success (for better or worse) by the fees they generate; fees are generated only when the clients’ goals are accomplished, so the bankers can see the fruits of their work in specific, rewarded outcomes. In other disciplines, like law and medicine, professionals earn more billable hours and higher rates with better performance. Markets determine the value of their outcomes.
Outcomes are not related to rewards at universities. Colleges have yet to apply standards to the three main tasks of professors—teaching, research, and service—with anything but very gross subjective measures during promotion and tenure.
Without a better way to measure outcomes, I am afraid that professors will fight an uphill battle of explaining how hard they work. (The middle-class families paying college bills won’t be sympathetic.)
Why not pay a superstar faculty member, renowned for teaching, on a per-student basis? Why not pay the faculty member who draws the finest graduate students accordingly? Why not give an equity interest to faculty members who boost college rankings so they can share in the success they bring an institution? Why not pay a faculty member better if her class learns the course objectives in nine weeks as opposed to traditional 15 weeks? While all this goes against centuries of tradition, it is how we now judge professionals in a postindustrial age.
In many ways, for-profit colleges have a much simpler scorecard. Shareholders are legitimately concerned that decision makers tie investment to payoff, and in this case the shareholders are the most important constituents. The notion that students represent “customers” is important insofar as they have impact on the scorecard.
These scorecards are not so simple for traditional colleges and universities. For-profit colleges have been designed in large measure with the customer in mind. Throughout history, traditional universities have been built around their most important asset: the faculty. Colleges continue to operate on the quaint agrarian cycle, with summers off, and the most prestigious institutions are essentially shut down on Fridays. (What business would give up 20 percent of its earning time?)
The challenge: How does one develop a scorecard for product ivity in the academy? Each institution will have to find ways to judge the effectiveness and value in the holy trinity of teaching, research, and service.
A 21st-century approach to productivity is founded on incentive pay for performance. Until the academy designs measures of performance, the folks footing the bill will find it hard to know what they are paying for.
Mark B. DeFusco is managing director of Berkery, Noyes, an investment-banking company based in New York. He has also worked for the Apollo Group and was president of Vatterott Education Holdings, a for-profit educator in the Midwest.
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Reward Colleges Not for Rankings but for Social Responsibility
By Gary Rhoades
American institutions of higher education have long been driven by an aspiration to move up the prestige hierarchy, in what David Riesman called a “snakelike procession.” Ranking systems such as U.S. News & World Report’s have recently intensified this status-seeking; the education-reformer Lloyd Thacker has said institutions are “driving under the influence.”
They are driving toward higher costs, larger shares of money spent on noneducational matters, smaller shares on educational expenditures, and less access for lower-income, minority students, the fastest-growing populations.
Although aspiration is good, we are at the point at which the frenzied chasing of status is counterproductive for institutions, the system, and the society we serve.
For three decades, the drive for institutional status-seeking has been part of the drive to generate revenue, a pattern I call “academic capitalism.” As colleges and universities have sought to generate more of their revenue, they have substantially raised tuition, worked to maximize net tuition revenue by chasing students who do not need aid, become more aggressive in fund raising, expanded auxiliary enterprises and contracts with business, invested in facilities to attract students who will pay (and donate) more, undertaken online and overseas educational ventures seeking new markets, and directed more money to research and technology transfer. All of this has led to rising costs, tuition, and fees.
Institutional costs in American higher education are related to college and university ambitions to gain status and revenue. Not only do institutions spend all the revenue they receive, they also spend revenue they have not yet received, in the hopes of gaining greater prestige and revenue—what I would call an aspirational venture theory of cost. Colleges often make bad investments in ventures driven by (often unfulfilled) ambitions, paying too little attention to costs, proffering too much faith in the hoped-for benefits, and passing along costs to students.
Paradoxically, as costs to students have been rising, investment in the academic work force that produces higher learning has been falling. The labor cost of the faculty, now generally less than a third of institutional costs, has been declining, as faculty members have become an increasingly part-time, contingent, low-paid work force. Moreover, the average age of faculty members in four-year institutions is now over 50, compromising the system’s ability to accommodate future demand and to engage students for educational success.
Our system is out of sync with societal needs. And our mechanisms of public finance promote the pattern of ambition and institutional misinvestment. More money to students for financial aid encourages states to reduce their investment in higher education, which has been declining on a per-student basis for decades, and encourages institutions to further increase their tuition.
We need targeted reinvestment in institutions and in academic and professional positions, giving priority to those colleges that serve first-generation and diverse students, displaced workers, returning veterans, and older students. Our policies should support institutional movement more toward social responsibilities than organizational ambition.
Gary Rhoades is a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona and director of its Center for the Study of Higher Education. He is also general secretary of the American Association of University Professors.
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In Search of Efficiency, We Shouldn’t Surrender Our Soul to ‘University City’
By Ronald R. Thomas
The relentless rise in the cost of college tuition has been a source of high anxiety for students, parents, and politicians, and for those of us working to find the answers on our own campuses for a long time. But as we wrestle with ways to reduce our budgets, increase need-based aid, and find innovative efficiencies, we must also avoid creating a problem of equal or potentially even greater concern. Simply put, in making tough choices to contain costs and increase access, we must not surrender the soul of the enterprise that has made American higher education the envy of the world.
Like it or not, education has become a principal economic player in a highly competitive, knowledge-based economy. This is evident in emerging economic giants like India and China, which are making large investments in higher education and threatening the historic global dominance of American colleges and universities. A powerful lesson on the subject was offered on a recent trip I took to China to learn how that country is tackling the demands of an ever-expanding technological world.
It was also a lesson in just what we have to lose if we act without caution.
I visited a city of several million people, where in a single year a four-square-mile University City has risen out of the farmlands (and outside the city) in the shadow of a new superhighway. Ten huge new university campuses, one after another, each housing tens of thousands of students, reach out as far as the eye can see: one campus for engineering; another, just steps away, for tourism; others for business, aeronautics, technology, agriculture, education, and so on. All of them are built on land confiscated from farmers, some of whom are still squatting in a few scattered shacks on the plots they were forced to evacuate with little compensation, surrounded by a forest of towering dormitories and construction cranes.
As I compare this futuristic vision of efficiency and state planning with the jumbled patchwork of American higher education—from community colleges and technical schools to Ivy League and liberal-arts colleges, and land-grant state universities and research institutions—I cannot help but wonder if University City represents the efficient and affordable future of higher education, and we represent its quaint past.
And if that’s true, I wonder about the cost to the Chinese—about the quality and value of the education those students will receive, the sense of meaning and worth they will develop in those anonymous places, the values they will cultivate, the vision and solutions for the future they will invent, the understanding and appreciation for human possibility that will live in them.
The Chinese educators with whom I spoke, while publicly proud of their achievement, privately grieve over the cultural emptiness in which their plans are being carried out—the lack of free and independent thought being nurtured on their campuses, and the intense focus on public institutions without anything like our private colleges to promote innovation and choice. Those regrets hang like the cloud of pollution that obscures the sun on most days in many Chinese cities and hovers over the skyscraper campuses they build with such efficiency and speed.
As we in America seek to recover from the blows our economy has taken, China offers a cautionary tale about both cost and value. And as we make the hard decisions to contain costs and improve access, we must not surrender the fundamental values that have won American higher education the esteem of the world. We must remain open to change and pursue new ideas, and we must also commit to advancing the fundamental American values of choice and free inquiry that created the strength and variety of educational options we have built. A great education for times like these will not be cheap. And it must not be cheapened.
Ronald R. Thomas is president of the University of Puget Sound.
Copyright 2009. All Rights reserved