Paul Campos probably does not know the real reason for tuition increases.

The timeframe, here, is absolutely critical. Campos is looking at 1980-present, PPIC is looking at 2002/2006 to present.

It’s like a lot of things (climate change, anyone?); short-term changes and long-term changes aren’t necessarily caused by the same underlying dynamic.

Another key difference is, is the key metric spending per student, or spending per person of college age.

I love how NC is “investing” in the UNC system by slashing half a billion dollars from its budget in the last few years…

In the NYT article, Campos floats this idea: “For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.”

I would love the source for his claim that the US military budget is just 1.8 times higher than in 1960….

Also, I’d like to know how many more students are enrolled today than in 1960. Perhaps the legislative appropriations in education are not necessarily translated into 10x higher spending per pupil. Certainly that money is not going to teachers…

Marina Warner in a recent London Review makes a related anti-administrator argument. Of course, “administration” is a broad category, which includes a lot of people who are bringing in and managing money (development officers, accountants, grants administrators) as well as student services personnel – they aren’t all excess vps and assistant coaches. In my opinion, one significant source of the problem is that faculty have been increasingly unwilling or unable to assume some of these duties.

Campos has done extraordinarily important work on the cost of law schools and the job market for young lawyers – work that has had a direct and substantial impact to the benefit of tens of thousands of young people considering law school . He’s been quite courageous in this work, which has set him against the legal education establishment and the administration and faculty of his own institution (if there’s ever been an advertisement for the benefits of tenure, Paul Campos is it.)

Recently, he has expanded his interests from law schools to higher education generally, as in this article.

I read his piece in the Times yesterday and I was surprised at some of what he says and doubtful of much of it. But his emphasis on the rise of administrative costs and the decline in the amount spent on faculty is, I think, plainly true and also completely missing from the general debate.

I would like to see some numbers projecting what public university tuition would look like if administrative costs had been held to a constant percentage of expenditures.

Eric, the chart you linked starts in 92. Didn’t tuition at California public universities also increase a lot from the 70s (starting from a base of free about that time) through the 80s? Or am I mistaken on that? Although I think for that period too, withdrawal of public subsidies has a lot to do with it. But are we really letting the expansion of administration off the hook here? In some other discussions here, there seemed to be a broad consensus that expansion of administration was eating up much more of the school budgets than previously.

Some might argue that spending an increasing amount on education, as compared to the military, is the sign of a nation that is progressing and moving towards some sort of peaceful prosperity. Some might find this sort of statistic actually heartening, and think it odd that Mister Campos is using it in this manner.

Now, as MSMuse notes above, he is either oblivious to the truth or being actively deceitful here. But still.

Campos’ piece also didn’t distinguish between published tuition and net tuition (the former minus financial aid). Don’t know how big a difference there is between these (what they call the ‘discount rate’) in a big state system, but at some schools it’s huge. No estimate of tuition revenue levels makes any sense without observing this distinction.

rea @8

Just to be clear, you are linking to an article titled “Ward Churchill’s Cult of Personality” on Fox News, with Bill O’Reilly as the host. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the fact Bill O’Reilly has had his own problems with journalistic integrity and honesty in the past, which I am sure that Campos is himself very concerned about.

Do you honestly believe that Churchill’s firing was not directly related to his statements about 9/11? Do you believe that going on the national news media in the wake of those statements and arguing for him to lose his job was unrelated to those statements, and could be done in an objective way focused solely on his academic work? Do you believe that Fox News with Bill O’Reilly is the place for that sort of sober argument about academic ethics and integrity?

Because I can’t imagine that you believe any of those things, but they seem to be necessary for you to make the defense you are trying to make. At best, it seems you end up with a situation where Campos is merely being a cold opportunist: with totally legitimate aims for either personal advancement or personal vengeance, and just jumping on the bandwagon of hate in order to accomplish them. Which is still not the profile for someone I want to be getting, say, advice on for professional school.

And Bloix @10, please elaborate on this notion that “his statistical sophistication isn’t what it could be”. If the meaning of this statement is something closer to ‘he sometimes gets his statistics wrong or uses them disingenuously to prove his point’, well, we should be upfront about that before we start to take this person – whom you praise – at their word.

Bloix

First of all, get that chip off your shoulder about the whole legal/lawyers thing, you are projecting and it is unseemly.

Second, the debate on the ‘value of law school’ is its own independent issue, quite distinct from the question about the cost of undergraduate education, and of little interest to a vast majority of the population. It is a highly specific issue that only a select set of people know or care about, so I understand why you want to drag the discussion onto that terrain. But please realize that this outside expertise is not a defense against in-text errors in his present work on a different subject. So don’t try to leverage it as such.

So it is entirely possible that his work on that question is flawless, but to be perfectly frank I just do not care about that work and have no interest in clicking those links.

Then you make moves toward this characterization of him as a sort of ’embattled crusader’ . The fact that he is going against the majority of his profession is good for him and all, but hardly makes him a crusader for truth and justice in general. There are plenty of analogies one could use to draw this out, but you are just waving your hands here and it is not worth the distraction it would bring.

MSMuse:
” to toss around military spending budgets – without noting that current military spending figures do not include the WAR SPENDING we’ve invested in since 9/11/01 is beyond misleading and ventures into the ‘lie zone’.”

I share your sense of exasperation, but in his defense this sort of budgetary three-cup-monte was sanctioned at the highest levels of American government.

He’s been quite courageous in this work, which has set him against the legal education establishment and the administration and faculty of his own institution

Once you realize that the purpose of Paul Campos doing something is to draw attention to Paul Campos, you’ll see that this is wrong. As you yourself note, his work isn’t of very high quality. He doesn’t “partner” with someone who could do things better, because he’s not really trying to get to the bottom of things. His work isn’t important, because it’s mostly about Paul Campos. You can see this in his op-ed here, but the same thing is apparent in all his work. Of course, his tendency to think that all other academics are as big of frauds who don’t want to work as he is makes it harder for him to do anything good. It’s not “against his self-interest” to do this, because without this, he’d be completely ignored as the academic non-entity he is. Producing grand-standing, shoddy work is the only thing he can do to draw attention to himself, something that seems to be his biggest interest. He should just be ignored. It’s too bad he was given a high-profile platform to show off in. He doesn’t deserve it.

Does “administrative bloat” mean the same administrators are now paid excessively, or that rather that there are now too many administrators? If the latter, and if “administration” means “non-teaching professional staff”, I wonder how much the “bloat” is due to increased student services. Eg, IT budgets used to be tiny, compared to what they are now. Many schools now offer pretty generous counseling services to students, unlike in the past. Career services offices have grown many places. Or to take another sort of example: schools are more dependent on philanthropy now- advancement departments are much larger, correlatively. How many of these non-teaching services can one imagine seriously paring down?

I followed some of Campos’ writing on “the value of law school” and was disappointed by his purely lawyer-centered perspective. I asked him how he would explain that despite the alleged “glut” of unemployed or underpaid lawyers, legal services in this country are still essentially unaffordable to the vast majority of the population. No response, apparently it’s just none of his concerns. I suppose his criticism of the law schools is half right just as his criticism of University administrations is half right. But a serious analysis – one that has a chance to be more than half right – he does not offer, which is a pity because it makes it easy to dismiss the half-truths he does offer.

Gianni: “Just to be clear, you are linking to an article titled “Ward Churchill’s Cult of Personality” on Fox News, with Bill O’Reilly as the host

The reason I linked to that is that Matt, above, had said: “in the days shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he went on the Bill O’Reily show to argue that it would be just fine, and even desirable, to fire Ward Churchill for his constitutionally protected speech,” and it therefore became topical to see what Campos had actually said on the show.

Churchill was formally fired for fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in his scholarship. It’s unfortunate that it took him calling the 9/11 victims “Little Eichmans” to draw attention to his deficiencies, but those deficiencies were very real, and he shouldn’t get a free pass for them just because he said something offensive and political.

I would argue that there are problems at all levels: with higher education appropriations; with the managerial transformation of the university; with the demands that the university take on functions, in particular with regards to student life, unrelated to education or science; with the skewing impact of grant “outside” funding (grants, fundraising gifts, industry funding) on the way money is spent. Any article that tries instead to reduce the problem to merely one of these issues (state funding, or fancy dorms and gyms, or new VC’s, or too many new labs) to me is not serious. Some causes are of course bigger than others – in my opinion, declining public funding is the biggest and to an extent a driver of the others – but we need to walk, chew gum, breathe and talk at the same time here.

Just this week a Seattle City Council member announced she’s leaving the council to take a new position at the University of Washington, Director of Regional and Community Relations, at a salary of $155,000. This for a totally ineffectual public official seen as likely to lose in the next election.

The UW is loaded with similar administrative fluff. But tuition increases have tracked long-standing reductions in tax support for the UW. The administrative bloat just adds to the underlying problem.

As for Campos, I wouldn’t trust anything from the man given his arguments on obesity (The Obesity Myth); a contrarian patchwork of overstatement, straw men, and false correlation.

I asked him how he would explain that despite the alleged “glut” of unemployed or underpaid lawyers, legal services in this country are still essentially unaffordable to the vast majority of the population

Because the problem isn’t that a shortage of lawyers keeps the price of professional services high–it’s that operation costs (including payments on law school debt), and the fact that lawyers don’t like working for less than minimum wage mean a lot of things can’t be handled economically.

If you have a $1000 case that I can win with a week of hard work, how is that ever going to work out?

33

UW, like most big universities, definitely has administrative fluff. So do most large organizations. It may be a large percentage of the budget or it might be quite tiny. It may be possible or impossible to eliminate that fluff. But no one seems to have any data that answers any of those questions, least of all Campos.

I’m with B. Yomtov at #33 here.

More generally, I’m with Compromise. As a longtime habitue of Lawyers, Guns, and Money I know Campos of old, and it’s wrong either to venerate or to excoriate him. He’s often hugely important on the issue of law school (less so the more personal it gets), and he’s sometimes just inexcusable (on Elena Kagan in particular he was not just wrong but incredibly wrongheaded, subscribing to inane arguments possibly from some personal animus). So, given that Campos is smart-but-unreliable, can we move on and seek points of agreement?

1) Over the last generation, tuition has skyrocketed.
2) State funding for higher education is way down over that time frame.
3) In at least some and possibly many cases, faculty costs per student haven’t risen significantly, or have fallen.
4) Administrative costs are way, way up.
5) Not mentioned, I think: facilities costs are often also way up, especially recreational and “student athletics” facilities.

Now, maybe we can make a case for the increase in administration costs. There’s a lot more IT issues, there’s a greatly increased recognition of and institutional efforts to deal with issues of bias and of diversity – important issues that are worthy of engagement and of expense, whether or not you think the university is doing a good job with them and getting its money’s worth. Maybe the rest of the ballooning administrative costs can similarly be justified. Still, they are ballooning, and this really should be explained, especially when the professoriate who presumably directly perform the univerity’s core functions (teaching, research, establishing a community of scholars conducive to both) haven’t seen similarly increased finances.

Since we all I think agree about the above factors, if not about the relative contributions they make to the problem, can’t we stop calling people names and discuss the relative contributions and merits of these components of the problem?

Warren Terra @ 39: “1) Over the last generation, tuition has skyrocketed.
2) State funding for higher education is way down over that time frame.”

The decline in state funding explains skyrocketing costs for public university tuition. What explains the astronomical increases in private tuition? Average tuition is $32K a year at many of the private colleges!!! (And that figure does not include room and board.) Certainly not professor salaries, as the dreaded “grad student/adjunct/lecturer” as teacher notion has infected even private campuses.

“Didn’t tuition at California public universities also increase a lot from the 70s (starting from a base of free about that time) through the 80s? ”

Only slightly. In 1976 fees were ~$600/year. In 1986 fees were ~$1600. In 1996 fees were ~$4,300. Those are actual prices, btw; it’s just keeping up with inflation during that period.

Cal-State (*not* UC) Tuition & Fees in 1977-78 were $195 per academic year.

It seems to me that it is perfectly sensible to normalize revenues and expenditures per student, and especially appropriate, if we are concerned with the extent to which tuition increases are attributable to a reduction in public funding. That Campos scoffs at this, as if this convention was creating some sort of shell game, is not to his credit.

Increasing administrative costs does deserve more attention as a factor in the both the cost and structure of higher education.

Increased compensation for the highest level of administration — the higher ed equivalent of the C-suite — ought to be a concern, but that phenomenon is hardly isolated or endogenous to academia. Rising compensation for the executive class is destroying the economy; if anything, academia lags significantly behind the general trend. The predatory capitalists inhabiting boards of trustees and advisory committees and sports are a significant source of contagion. Some parts of the system — sports — seem close to collapse already and some areas of research spending may already be hopelessly corrupt.

Two other factors driving administrative costs include the oft-mentioned shift from full-time, tenure-track faculty toward the use of under-paid, over-worked adjuncts as well as the financial aid offsets to increased tuition. Both these developments entail increased administrative resources. The political implications of both are malleable. The senior faculty might be irritated, or not. The parents and student bodies might be irritated or mollified, depending on how things are managed.

Gianni comes closest.

College education has a large positional component–i.e. much of the value is not intrinsic, but is rather gained from one person having it and another person NOT having it. This plays out both on a college educated/not-college educated scale scale, and on a scale of various ‘ranked’ colleges.

College education is also government subsidized in the US, through government guaranteed loans. Since college education has a large positional component, those with money will tend to bid the price up in order to have a degree that is ‘better’ than that held by poorer people. Poorer people will take large loans out, which are given freely by the government. This allows the price war to continue upward. Colleges could use the money to educate more students. But largely they don’t. They increase the amenities, they hire more non-teaching staff, and in hundreds of other ways they capture the government subsidy rather than allowing it to actually lower costs. This plays out every year as a drastically increasing price.

That is the dynamic. The particulars of where this money is spent varies from school to school.

Gianni is very likely correct about the halo effect to 2nd and 3rd tier schools.

You can’t adequately analyze the problem if you don’t notice the positional component. (It ties into inequality much the same way. It isn’t that poorer people can’t get good educations. It is that they can’t get positionally good enough diplomas–an entirely different thing.)

Revenues and expenditures per student is problematic, because universities do things other than educate students, especially undergraduates. Maybe you could come up with a formula that included number of postgraduate students, further broken down by degree and general area (arts, physical sciences, medicine, law, etcetera), number of postdoctoral researchers, size of sports program, etcetera – but it won’t be simple.

On the other hand, a lot of those goals other than undergraduate education are intended to be self-funding (for example by research grants, or in the case of sports by television contract); in theory they sort-of cancel out. It still makes sense to normalize some things to student body size; tuition revenue, obviously, but also including state funding (last time I looked, it’s common for states to basically provide funding equal to the number of in-state students multiplied by the amount of in-state tuition discount), and possibly including spending on faculty (keeping in mind that a lot of faculty in the sciences pay their own salary from grants, and medical faculty likely earn their salary on the wards). B

Faculty at all 23 California State University campuses in the state are represented by our union, the California Faculty ASsociation: CFA just published three white papers illustrating increases in administration positions and salaries and concomitant declines in faculty salaries and the proportion of full-time, tenure-level faculty showing very clearly that faculty compensation has not been responsible for increased costs. Faculty just got a 1.3 percent raise – the first since 2008, when CSU faculty salaries were already 20 percent below the national average: That year, the state suspended our 5 percent raise in our contract; the year after, faculty voluntarily went on furlough and decreased our salaries 10 percent across the board. During this time, student fees increased and a significant number of campuses have introduced a “new” campus fee that raised the costs of higher education by going around fees (tuition). Staff salaries are, of course, even worse, but most adjuncts are protected by the union, for what that is worth.

Too bad Campos did not think to access and use this important resource. Here are links to the first two of four (the third and fourth are being released soon):

Race to the Bottom: CSU’s 10-Year Failure to Fund its Core Mission
http://www.calfac.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/race_to_the_bottom–csus_10-year_failure_to_fund_its_core_mission.pdf

Race to the Bottom: Salary, Staffing Priorities and the 1 Percent http://www.calfac.org/post/race-bottom-1

Net tuition at private 4-year schools has fallen since 2007.

In a need-blind admission, full-need met, need-only aid context (which is virtually extinct), the high price/high aid model can be beautifully redistributive- from each according to their ability to pay.

I should add that it’s at least three areas – health care, law, and of course education – where the US stands out in international comparison for being exorbitantly expensive. These may be entirely different phenomena but I suspect there are quite a few similarities. I wonder if anybody has a plausible theory that covers all three.

“Interestingly you are not disputing my claim but what is your point?”

To refresh your recollection (that’s Lawyer Speak!)

1. You argued that Campos said there were too many attorneys, but legal services cost too must for most people so mumble mumble something, possibly that we don’t have too many attorneys? Hard to say exactly, but somehow Campos was wrong about something.

2. We remind you that the number of attorneys has nothing to do with the cost of legal services.

3. You now say that’s not the point because lawyers have something to do with many people being unable to afford legal services because mumble mumble mumble. And mumble!!!! Don’t forget mumble!!!!!

So let’s break this down!

1. The private cost of legal services IS, INDEED, too high for the average person in all but life or death situations (criminal, divorce, UD, stuff like that.)

2. The private cost of legal services has a floor that has nothing to do with the number of attorneys offering to do work, and that floor is well beyond what the average person can pay.

3. So moving on to your NEW point (the fees are too damn high!), there is no way on God’s green earth for the private sector to provide legal services to the average person. It will cost an entire year’s salary for the average person to litigate any but the easiest of cases even if the lawyer charges nothing except covering costs – literally working for free.

4. If you don’t believe me, look at any public interest firms spending on cases.

5. In sum, you’re an idiot.

@59:

I sometimes wonder whether treating legal services like insurance would work. A group of people pools together to have an attorney on “retainer”, with the understanding that most may never actually need her services. I guess the trouble is keeping people from using the services unless they really need them. Despite what right wing hacks and libertarians seem to think, very few people go to the doctor’s office for fun. But people might well start indulging in legal BS just because they can.

@ academiclurker, legale insurance has its problems. It adds a layer of complication to already complicated situations: the insurer pushes to settle the case too early, the insured push to keep going too far. Both happen in practice.

And professionals who often deal with legal situations can smell when a legal service is provided by an insurer, and they will play to cut a deal early.

The trouble here is that if you hardly ever you a legal service, you will also lack the expertise to judge the quality of a legal insurer.

Labour unions can work well as legal insurer (for workplace cases). They still have the pressure to keep costs down, but also a wider reputation to protect. And in my experience, their lawyers are a tad more driven than those of insurers.

Another game are the lawyers of insurance firms… I know companies who insure certain risks, not because of the risk itself, but because of the potential cost of legal issues. Better to turn over the risk to the insurer (and their reinsurer), who is much better in lawyering up. And quite often, the reinsurer finds that it covers both parties in the issue, and settles with itself.

A couple of years ago I visited the campus of the SLAC where I completed my undergraduate degree for the first time in a decade. I barely recognized it: there were many gorgeous new buildings and many older buildings had experienced large renovations. This is not an institution that could live off its endowments. Over the same decade the tuition sticker price went up by ~60%. With a combination of scholarships and a few generous relatives I managed to graduate without student loan debt. I doubt that someone with the same advantages could do the same today. I think I got the better deal, even if the library wasn’t an open, airy architectural delight of color and light when I was a student.

Of course this is just more anecdata.

Is anyone out there collecting longitudinal data about budgets within higher education, where the money goes and where it grows? One good spreadsheet should be worth several hundred pages of narrative-construction.

Relatively, buildings are incredibly easy to fundraise for. (Especially if they can be named!)

“Is anyone out there collecting longitudinal data about budgets within higher education, where the money goes and where it grows?”

The funny thing is there is hardly any part of the economy better documented than higher education. There are extensive, publicly accessible data sets about salaries, tuition, student numbers, state spending, and on and on, both at the state and federal levels (IPEDS). And experts still don’t agree on what causes the cost explosion, or even whether there is a cost explosion. Go figure.

Lets not kid ourselves about the political nature of problems in public higher education funding.
For data see Chris Newfield here:
http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/
His critique of “new university” programs here:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/new-new-american-university/

and his Unmaking the Public University
http://www.amazon.com/Unmaking-Public-University-Forty-Year-Assault/dp/0674060369/

Two years ago I attended a seminar by a health education economist who noted that tuition inflation at US universities had been pegged, for a couple of decades, to the rise in median family income.

As long as the latter kept increasing, the education consumer could be expected to absorb the increased tuition. And s/he did. Meanwhile, in this environment state legislators were happy to unload the cost burden onto the shoulders of families and received relatively little push back from voters, principally because their cuts only affected the poors.

Then one day, median family incomes stopped rising.

a glut of lawyers desperate to pay back their debts but charging say $100 an hour as opposed to $200 or $300 somehow is not an option

It is not that it isn’t an option–it’s that it doesn’t help. If your lawyer charges you $100 per hr. (I actually often charge less) you only get 10 hours of work for a thousand dollars. There are not too many cases I’m physically capable of handling on a 10-hour budget. If you need a hundred hours of attorney work, you’re out of pocket $10,000.

TM: Most law school graduates are not capable of independently practicing law unless they were in a clinical law program. Law today is highly specialized, be it criminal defense or estate planning. It can take years of experience to develop reasonable competency in some fairly narrow area of law. Competent attorneys are reluctant to take on clients in an unfamiliar practice area because it takes too long to reach competence. Either the lawyer works for free in getting up to speed or the client pays. If you get a bad outcome you may be looking at a malpractice suit no matter how little you charged the client.

Even if the lawyer works at a greatly reduced rate, experts, court reporters, investigators and paralegals expect to be paid. Good paralegals often make more than many attorneys.

Legal problems are usually adversarial which means costs are not under the control of one party. The other side can be unreasonable or even frivolous in driving up costs. You can win at the trial level and still have to fight appeals.

You are correct that most cases don’t go to trial. Trial is easy compared to getting prepared for trial. Cases are won on preparation more than brilliant trial tactics. Trip preparation is time intensive.

The legal system is slow and congested. This morning I was in court for four hours to do a 15-minute hearing. On a criminal case motion I can wait half a day only to be told that the calendar is overset and the motion has to be continued to next month. (Most criminal practitioners charge a flat fee per case because clients won’t tolerate paying for hours of useless wait time. The flat fee has to be high enough to account for the uncertainty of time needed to complete even a “routine” case.)

As rea at 74 points out, a little money really isn’t sufficient to do anything in most cases. And most people have no money budgeted for legal costs.

It is all well and good to point to factors outside the lawyer’s control but it’s way too easy to pretend that that is the whole story. In the lawyer-client relationship the lawyer is by far in the stronger position and their incentives are not exactly aligned with those of the client. In the vast majority of cases, the lawyer gets paid not only whether or not they lose but also whether or not they are competent. (*) As of malpractice lawsuits, come on. How is the lay client supposed to be able to prove malpractice, and what lawyer is going to take such a case?

(*) In my anecdotal experience, I found it frustratingly common that lawyers – both sides’ layers as well as the judge – couldn’t care less about the details of the case. They mixed up numbers and dates, ignored documentation prepared by the client, and so on. It would go too far off-topic to expand this further. The point is that there is neither quality control nor accountability from the point of view of the client. The way the system works is that lawyers can charge high rates just because and the client either pays up or gets lost. I find it tiring (to get back to where this thread originated) to witness these lawyer debates (“is law school worth the money” etc.) where lawyers are painted as victims and the interest of the general public in affordable legal services isn’t even mentioned in passing. Apparently we are supposed to accept that the legal system exists for the benefit of lawyers and corporations and any suggestion that it should serve the public is to be ridiculed.