June 10, 2018

by Steve Stofka

In the past forty years, inflation-adjusted per student spending on higher education has increased by 40%. Despite this, the number of tenured professors has fallen by half. Two-thirds of instruction is now carried out by adjunct faculty with no job security and few benefits. State and federal dollars subsidize workers training for the banking and insurance industries, but not those entering the construction and manufacturing industries. No wonder people express their grievances at government for a lack of funding (Alternet article) . Where is the money going? Maybe the question is: who is the money going to?

In 1940, just 5% of Americans had a four-year college degree (NCES, Dept. of Ed).  In 2015, 75 years later, a third of Americans reported having a college degree.

A few years after WW2 and the enactment of the GI Bill’s education benefits, 2.7 million were enrolled in a two or four-year degree granting institution. By 1959, enrollment had grown 33% to 3.6 million students (NCES). About 60% were enrolled in a public institution. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), total Federal, State and Local spending in 1959 was $12.4B, about $3400 per student in 2016 dollars.

In 2016, there were 20.2 million students enrolled in college, a third of them in two-year programs. They were sharing a pot of $241B federal and state dollars, about $12,000 per student. That’s inflation-adjusted dollars: apples to apples. Here is a chart covering the past 50 years.

Confronted by escalating Medicaid costs and uncooperative taxpayers, the state portion of higher education spending has fallen over the past two decades.

In Colorado, the taxpayer rebellion started in the 1990s when the Denver Post reported that a University of Colorado (UC) faculty member was retiring with an annual pension almost eight times the average yearly income in Colorado. The abuse has not stopped. Last year, the L.A. Times reported that UC continued to hand out generous pensions to faculty members.

In the 1990s, UC and other public and private universities planned that the future annual investment returns on their endowment funds would continue to be generous. They stopped making contributions to meet the future obligations of the equally generous pensions they promised to faculty. “Our accountants told us we would be all right,” was the lament of one city official in California. After a decade of rock bottom interest rates and single digit returns for college endowments, students, parents and taxpayers must now pick up the tab for the Polyanna thinking of politicians and college administrators.

In 1959, state and local governments spent 98% of higher education funding. In 2016, they spent less than 60%. Because public and private institutions are tax-exempt, state and local governments provide billions in forgone tax revenue that is not counted.

About 9% of total spending goes to private for-profit institutions (NCES). Because the for-profit institutions grab headlines, some might think that they receive a greater percentage of education dollars than they do. I did.

Inflation-adjusted per student spending has risen 27% in the past twenty years. Where is all that money going? Not to today’s instructors. Less than a third of spending goes to instruction (NCES). About 40% goes to administration and student support.

Public and private non-profit institutions do not detail the expenses for maintenance and operation of their buildings and grounds, nor their interest and depreciation expenses. This gap is about 28-30% of spending, so we can conservatively estimate that they spend at least 25% of their budget on these items. As buildings continue to age, operations expenses will grow faster than the rate of inflation and eat up more education dollars. Each year, colleges and universities spend more time and dollars in their outreach to a growing cohort of “non-traditional” students.

An educational system designed for the children of the landed elite in the 19th century is trying to catch up to the needs of a diverse student population in the 21st century. That earlier system wasn’t much good to start with. That’s a topic for another time.  Entrenched political and financial interests now hinder any substantive changes in these institutions as they prepare the students of today for the world of tomorrow.

About 3 million students are graduating high school this year. Two thirds of those graduates are enrolled in a two or four-year college (BLS), and the majority are female. Out of every 100 college students, 56 are female (NCES). There are not enough state or federal educational programs to meet the skills training for the million students who will not go on to college this year, or the million who may drop out before getting a degree.

Discrimination – Education policy in this country subsidizes the training of workers employed by a large bank like J.P. Morgan Chase, but has little support for the workers in the construction and manufacturing industries. The subsidized workers at Chase are more likely to lose their jobs to automation than the unsubsidized workers at a large homebuilder like Pulte.

Fifteen percent of all employees are in the BLS category of Professional and Business Services. This percentage has grown from 8% of the work force in 1980. Employees work for private companies and government, enjoy lower unemployment rates and much higher incomes. (BLS profile ) The great majority have college degrees. College enrollees are attracted by these numbers, but the numbers are changing. The growth of this category in the 1990s lessened during the 2000s and has lessened again since the Great Recession. I’ve highlighted the trend changes in the graph above.

In the past year growth is relatively flat. The number of institutions with job growth has offset those with declining job growth.

The world is changing rapidly, and for some the changes are too much and too quick. That reaction against change underlies the support for Donald Trump in the rust belt states.

Current college enrollees and graduates may find that they have prepared for a world that existed a decade ago, and will be materially changed a decade hence. The college debt is permanent but not the state of the job market. Be versatile, be flexible, be prepared.