Summary Notes of "Quantifying Cost and Quality – The National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education," by Ruth Flower, ACADEME, AAUP, July-August 1998, pp. 37-41.

Summarized by James T. P. Yao – 9/1/99

"… Congress … established the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education to make recommendations related to college costs. And to its credit, the commission, which consisted primarily of college administrators and education consultants, decided at its first meeting to research the question about college costs and to base its conclusions on that research. … Even before the research was complete, congressional leaders called press conferences to denounce the commission’s early findings, which belied the scare headlines and eschewed simplistic solutions. After seven meetings in summer and fall 1997, the commission issued its final report, Straight Talk about College Costs and Price, in early 1998 [http://www.oryxpress.com click on ‘excerpts’]."

"Findings

• Costs have been going up. …
• Tuition has been going up much faster than costs. …
• College is still affordable. …
• Education is a subsidized ‘product.’ …
• The number of students receiving financial aid increased between 1987 and 1996. …
• State support of public institutions has been decreasing in the last decade. …

These trends add up to one significant fact: students and their families are paying a larger share of the rising cost of higher education."

"The COMISSION PAID CLOSE ATTENTION TO ITS TASK OF identifying ‘cost drivers.’ …

• The cost of student services rose by about 35 percent between 1979 and 1993 (adjusted for inflation).
• Administrative expenditures per full-time student increased by 22 percent in the early 1980s, but stayed level in the late 1980s and early 1990s (after adjusting for inflation).
• About 32 percent of the square footage of buildings on all college and university campus was built new between 1975 and 1990, and 23 percent of the square footage was renovated. …
• Complex regulations, including health and safety requirements, environmental protection rules, mandates of the Americans with Disabilities Act, tax-reporting requirements, and accreditation processes are often financially burdensome for universities and colleges. …

The commission also noted that competition among campuses can drive costs up. …"

"Faculty Costs

…

The facts and figures that the AAUP presented revealed that academics make far less money than comparably educated professionals such as doctors and lawyers. … The AAUP also showed that full-time faculty members work between forty-five and fifty-five hours a week, devoting 40 percent of their time to teaching at research universities and 59 to 68 percent at other types of institutions. Typically, those academics with the lightest teaching loads put in the most time preparing for their classes – an average of 2.4 hours for each class-room hour – while part-time teachers can rarely devote as much as an hour to preparation. … The commission found that (a) as costs rose between 1987 and 1992, expenditures on faculty salaries went down; (b) while full-time faculty salaries just barely kept up with inflation during that period, colleges saved significant sums by employing more part-time and temporary faculty; and (c) faculty "contact hours" with students increased by more than 10 percent between 1987 and 1992. Commission members concluded that ‘there is little evidence to suggest … that changes in faculty hiring practices or workload have driven up college costs in the past decade.’"

"Recommendations

… Specifically, the commission recommended that

• Partnerships and consortia of higher education institutions … ;
• Self-reviews be initiated … ;
• Alternative approaches to faculty careers be developed, from graduate school through tenure and post-tenure review;
• Research grants be devoted to the study of academic cost controls and the development of awards for institutions that manage to reduce cost while maintaining quality;
• Statistics and cost figures be made more easily understandable and more widely available to the public;
• New approaches to safety and environmental regulations be developed stressing appropriate practices rather than compliance with standards written for industry;
• Accreditation processes be revised to streamline much of the time and paperwork now required;
• Accreditation reviews be based more on student performance than on resources (i.e., expertise of faculty or availability of appropriate facilities); and
• Federal aid programs be continued and the processes of getting aid to students be simplified."

"Listed in the report among the unreasonably high expectations imposed on universities was the expectation of faculty that the university would ‘supply space, equipment, and time for their research.’ … But beyond the dollars that research grants bring to the campus, the value of academic research is not immediately visible to funders and legislators. Instead, they often look to classroom hours as the primary measure of performance, unaware of how deeply the marriage of teaching and research has enriched higher education in this country."

"Quality Measures

… The commission, seeking to streamline the multilayered accreditation processes and to minimize the cost pressures that they create, recommended that accrediting agencies look more at ‘outcomes’ than ‘resources.’ The objective is to measure student learning, however achieved, and to rate departments on the basis of student outcomes. … Increased emphasis on measures of student outcomes could have a profound effect on course content and depth. To ensure high quality ratings, institutions and their faculties are likely – perhaps gradually and subtly – to change their course contents and methods to ‘teach to the test.’ This subtle shift of measures may bring about fundamental change in the nature of higher education."

"… Universities and colleges find themselves under pressure from within and without to meet the training needs of industry. … Higher education’s special contribution is to create a place for discovery, synthesis, reflection, and evaluation of knowledge. … But the cost of new specialties and of disciplines that didn’t exist a generation or two ago is troubling to some college administrators. Boards of trustees – drawn increasingly from leaders of successful businesses – sometimes fail to see the value of courses that have no immediate application in a commercial setting. … By redesigning the curriculum to respond to industry needs, administrators could redefine higher education."

"… Full-time professors are the heart of a university. … To remain a place of learning, a university needs to rely on a group of permanent faculty members who interact with each other, with students, and with ideas on a daily basis. … In seeking to preserve and protect attention to academic quality, faculty must articulate the vitality of the fields in which they are immersed. … In the United States, we expect our professors to be alive to their fields, to be awake to new insights, and to interact with students whose questions may just be arising. Parents and students who are considering the cost of college are not asking for a lower-quality education; they want and expect an education from people who reach toward the upper and outer boundaries or their disciplines. …"

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