Affordability Means Controlling Administrative Costs

The biggest challenge facing higher education is affordability. Increasingly, college tuition is more difficult for middle class families to afford. Fifty years ago, my mother paid for her tuition, apartment, and all living expenses without aid or parental help by working as a waitress and in the college print shop. That's not close to possible today. Little of the public debate about college funding is correctly focused.
 
At the state level, much is made of the small fraction of revenue represented by the state grant. Yet the state grant has little or no effect on the affordability of college. In the 1960s, the state contribution was about a third of the University of NH's budget. That state payment increased nine fold over 45 years (much faster than inflation and in-state enrollment) but today it represents less than 10 percent of the budget. Whether the state pays 7 percent or 9 percent of the budget has little impact on whether or not you can afford college. The rise in in-state tuition in just the last 15 years has been 300 percent (inflation just 40 percent).
 
At the end of the day, college is about students learning from professors, but professors are a smaller part of the picture than they were decades ago. The biggest difference between now and then is a growth in administration. The relationship between professor and student should be the central feature of a college and administration merely support that enables it. What percentage of tuition is teaching and what percentage is administering today? The latter should be reduced.
 
It doesn't take a huge administration to make a great college. UNH, for example, could follow the lead of successful businesses and focus on core mission with less middle administrative management. No one would suggest they move from more than 100 majors to 12, but perhaps the top 60 or 70 makes sense. The administration won't be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, but surely it could be reduced from where it is today.

Charlie Arlinghaus is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in Concord, a nonprofit, non-partisan, independent think tank. He can be reached at 603-224-4450 or jbartlett@jbartlett.org. For more information, visit www.jbartlett.org.