{"id":7427,"date":"2011-11-07T16:21:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T21:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=7427"},"modified":"2011-11-07T16:21:27","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T21:21:27","slug":"making-college-much-cheaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=7427","title":{"rendered":"making college much cheaper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine a college with 1,000 undergraduate students. If they all take eight seminars a year, if every class enrolls 20 students, and if each professor has a very manageable teaching load of five courses per year, the 1,000 students need 80 faculty members. If those 80 professors are paid, on average, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.higheredjobs.com\/salary\/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=18\">national median<\/a> for an associate professor in the social sciences ($60,064) plus benefits ($20,028), then the total faculty payroll will cost $6,407,360. That comes to $6,407.36 per student per year.<\/p>\n<p>Private colleges and universities are now charging almost eight times as much for a year&#8217;s education. Why?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Their usual bill includes room and board and various services, such as health plans and career counseling, as well as courses.<\/li>\n<li>Universities are buildings, labs, lawns, stadiums, and admissions offices as well as courses and teachers.<\/li>\n<li>Lots of people work at colleges beside professors. As I <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5321\">wrote here<\/a>, &#8220;Harvard, for example, employs 5,102 \u201cadministrative and professional\u201d staff (excluding clerical and technical workers and those in \u201cservice and trades\u201d). Harvard has 112 full-time professional and administrative workers in its athletics department alone. This compares to 911 tenured faculty (or 2,163 total faculty).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When I suggested creating a\u00a0 &#8220;no frills&#8221; college from scratch, various friends who work in student affairs, community engagement centers, and other parts of universities wrote privately to ask if I was disparaging their contributions. I would not want to do that. Many adults who work at colleges and universities educate as much and better than many faculty. The distinction isn&#8217;t even important to me. But if 80 professors could teach 1,000 students in small classes, then I think 100 educators (including some deans, coaches, counselors, co-curricular leaders, etc.) could serve a student body of 1,000. Even if those educators were paid $60,000 each plus benefits, the per-student cost would still be about $8,000.<\/p>\n<p>I recognize that rent must be paid, lights lit, and diplomas printed. But would it not be possible to build a private, non-profit college whose base tuition was $10,000, whose curriculum was entirely devoted to seminars and labs, and which could employ students on financial aid to perform a substantial portion of its work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine a college with 1,000 undergraduate students. If they all take eight seminars a year, if every class enrolls 20 students, and if each professor has a very manageable teaching load of five courses per year, the 1,000 students need 80 faculty members. If those 80 professors are paid, on average, the national median for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7427"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7445,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7427\/revisions\/7445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}