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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture list <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] hello, and a question about PCD course prices
  • Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:58:28 -0700

On 9/9/04 5:47 AM, "neotern-1@yahoo.com" <neotern-1@yahoo.com> wrote:
> we feel that the prices for the
> Permaculture Designer Course are somewhat exorbitant,

Okay, let's go through this again, with numbers. Most residential courses
cost US$1000. I've seen a few at $1400, though most of those are 3 weeks
(some are not, and I think those are too expensive).

Nearly every course I know of offers work-trade, usually paying $10/hour for
labor for all or part of the course. Many offer scholarships. So we do try
to make them available to people without $1000, which I agree, is a lot of
money for any but rich westerners to come up with. Here's the breakdown of
that $1000:

The instructors usually get about $300 per student, the venue gets the other
$700. There are generally 2 instructors, though always with many (paid)
guests, and there are often 3 instructors or more. I kind of figure I'll get
$100/student when I teach, maybe $150 on courses with minimal help. I
generally work for 12 12-hour days during the course (we do evening sessions
and I am on call every minute--meals are Q&A sessions for me), plus several
full days prep time plus 2-4 days recovery time afterward, during which I am
useless. So figure about 200 hours of my time per course. With 15 students,
all paying (but usually 3 of them are work trades, not included here),
that's $1500-2250, or $7.50-$11 an hour for me. I ain't getting rich. (And
that means the work-traders are getting paid as well as I am--fair enough?)

Venue costs: everybody wants organic food, which costs about $10/day each,
often more since people need cheese, eggs, and other expensive proteins
since they are working hard. Protein gets eaten instantly and people
complain that there isn't more. So minimum $140 per student on food, plus
one full time and one part time cook. The cooks need to be very good, or we
get complaints about the lousy/monotonous food--do we ever!--so they are
usually paid well, $15-20/hour. Thus cooking for a course costs about $2500
or more, or about $170/student. ($12/day to have someone cook all your
[near-gourmet] meals--try that at a restaurant!) So we're up to $610 in
basic costs per student.

Then there's lodging. I usually teach in places where students have a
private or shared room, at $15-20/day, which beats any cheap motel and is a
damn sight nicer. So that's $200-280 or so (pretty cheap for being able to
stay in commercial lodgings for 14 days, right?). So now we're pushing $900/
student and we haven't added supplies, photocopying, advertising,
transportation to field trips, and all the costs the venue has for running
their office and staff. Easily $100 each in raw costs.

So believe me, at $1000/student, no one is doing much better than breaking
even until the course has a lot more than 15 students. We often run courses
with only 12 or so, and everyone loses money, but we believe in doing it
anyway.

Compare the cost of a PDC to any New Age workshop. Shamanism and rebirthing
workshops are $300-400 for a weekend; 10 day programs are $2000. PDCs are a
bargain.

There are ways to make them even cheaper: Some venues offer camping, but
there are still the costs of running the venue (the education centers I know
have overheads of $10,000-20,000 per month; that has to be paid by someone,
even if they are camping). Some courses have tried letting students cook
their own food, but then you've got 20 people in a kitchen all at
once--takes a big, expensive kitchen--or if students rotate cooking, one or
two students miss out on class every session, which is not fair to them.
Some venues try to grow some of the food, which takes planning, labor, and
good weather.

We also offer non-residential courses for $300. That means a student gets
12-14 days of instruction for $25/day. Try and find any workshop that
charges $25/day anywhere else!

We've also gotten grants to pay our wages; we were able to offer a
non-residential course for $40 to low-income people (who turned out to be
mostly highly educated people who were choosing to live lightly, and almost
none of the involuntary poor). Oddly, we had a very high dropout rate, and
learned that since people had so little invested, they saw no reason to make
a strong commitment. There's a lesson there about what we value.

Most teachers are constantly looking for ways to make courses more
available. But brutal economic reality says that it is simply expensive to
run a decent course at a comfortable venue with good food.

I could go on and on, but this is long enough. I hope I've clarified the
basic economics of putting on a PDC. As my buddy Larry Santoyo says, free is
not sustainable.

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com







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