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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Cost of College
  • Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:30:41 -0800

Marie wrote (to paraphrase):

>No one could afford any college without subsidies.

To get an idea how much college costs, I went to a California Community College website. They currently reimburse colleges at around $4400 per year for every full-time student. This is the only money a college officially receives, other than local donations, independent grants, etc. That's around $150 a unit. The college I attended here in Oregon has tuition almost equal to that. I think you'll find that most states' tuition to be similar. Where subsidization is greater, as in California, the fees charged to the enrollee are but a fraction of that.

But there's no doubt that $100 a unit is about the minimum you could run a college for, especially with fewer suits running around scheduling faculty meetings. It's the same number you get if you figure from the point of view of teachers' salaries vs. class size. A teacher is paid $30,000 to manage 30 enrollees in 5 classes per semester, two semesters a year. In a three-unit class, the first unit's worth pays the teacher's salary (or more) and the remainder goes to the Deanery and for building maintenance. Actually they now have a law that forces administrators to spend at least 50% of the monies reimbursed to them by the state on actual instruction in CA. Imagine that. But it's all sucked up by $60,000 a year algebra (a high school subject) teachers who often have no qualms about xeroxing old multiple choice tests anyway. What other job is there where the more parked in a rut you become, the more money you automatically make?

Unfortunately no law yet dictates what proportion of the remainder the administration must spend on building maintenance, which accounts for the crumbling facilities I've seen.

This mock war carried between two groups of government employees, who would ordinarily be labeled "labor" and "management" if they were constrained by anything like real-life accountability, is costing CA about $5 billion a year.

Bill





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