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joy
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 09:04 pm |
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I saw in a Swarthmore Bulletin recently that their actual cost of educating one student, excluding financial aid, is $78,427. Wow! They report that 39% of this comes from student charges, 54% comes from the endowment and annual fund, and 7% from other sources.
How can I learn this actual cost of other schools? Is it only self-reported, or is there an independent source of this info? Do only a few schools choose to publicize what they actually spend per student? Are schools with grad students able to separate out how much they spend per year on undergrads?
Lots of questions!
Joy
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Mon Jun 2nd, 2008 09:26 pm |
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As far as I know, there isn't a list for true costs for all schools. You will sometimes find this information on individual school's websites (often in the financial section talking about cost of attendance) and published material. I have also sometimes found it in alumni magazines and news releases.
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Mrs. Aardvark
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 02:04 am |
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Does the "Student-Related Expenditures / FTE student" parameter provided at http://www.collegeresults.org give some sense of what an institution spends per student?
The number for Swarthmore is given as $39,175, and, just as a fun comparison, the number for University of South Florida is $9,441.
(I did try and locate a definition of this parameter at the web site, but couldn't find it.)
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joy
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 04:02 am |
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I never knew about that web-site, thanks so much Mrs. Aardvark. I did look around the site a little and found this explanation of the data. I think this could be really useful after I understand it better! Check out the amount for Caltech
Instructional Expenditures / FTE: “Instruction expenses” is a discrete reporting category. It includes expenditures for the colleges, schools, departments, and other instructional divisions of the institution and expenses for departmental research and public service that are not separately budgeted. It also includes general academic instruction, occupational and vocational instruction, community education, preparatory and adult basic education, and regular, special, and extension sessions. It also includes expenses for both credit and non-credit activities. It excludes expenses for academic administration where the primary function is administration (e.g., academic deans). Information technology expenses related to instructional activities if the institution separately budgets and expenses information technology resources are included (otherwise these expenses are included in “academic support”). (IPEDS)
Educational and General Expenditures / FTE : This is a broader category, which includes the instructional expenditures listed above, plus expenditures for research, public service, academic support, student services, institutional support, plant operation & maintenance, and scholarships. (IPEDS)
Student and Related Expenditures / FTE: This is an intermediate financial measure, including instructional, student services, and academic support expenditures. The specific formula was developed by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). Student-related expenditures are calculated as (Instruction + Student Services + Academic Support*(Instruction /(Instruction + Public Service + Research))). (IPEDS)
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 05:41 am |
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Mrs. A, thanks for reminding me that CollegeResults has that data. I had forgotten about it (for anyone looking - it is hidden away in the vital statistics link if you enter a college name. It also shows if you hit the link for "similar colleges")
Interestingly, Swarthmore is listed as spending $39,750 per student on instructional costs, student services, and academic support. Of course, that doesn't include the cost of maintaining Swarthmore's beautiful campus, so that could account for some of the difference between Swarthmore's published "what we spend per student" and the College REsults number, which only looks at actual educational costs.
Last edited on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 05:43 am by CarolynLawrence
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joy
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 01:09 pm |
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Yes, this number includes far less than what Swarthmore included in their estimate. I think the value of this data is only in comparing one school to another on the list, assuming they all calculated the data in the same way.
I did a search for all schools which spend over 15,000, then had them arranged in rank order. Yale is tops, spending 101,000 per student. I was surprised at how much the top schools on the ranked list actually spend. I was not surprised to see most public schools lower on the list, but was shocked to see some fairly expensive private schools way down there too!
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Lupine
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 08:01 pm |
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joy wrote: Yes, this number includes far less than what Swarthmore included in their estimate. I think the value of this data is only in comparing one school to another on the list, assuming they all calculated the data in the same way.
I did a search for all schools which spend over 15,000, then had them arranged in rank order. Yale is tops, spending 101,000 per student. I was surprised at how much the top schools on the ranked list actually spend. I was not surprised to see most public schools lower on the list, but was shocked to see some fairly expensive private schools way down there too!
I'm not familiar with this particular dataset, but I do a lot of work with K-12 public school expenditures in our state, and I'm wary of placing too much weight on the numbers. Despite having a standard chart of accounts for every public school in the state, and a finance manual that explains in 45 pages of detail how everything should be coded, the resulting dataset yields very wonky numbers that I just don't believe -- both way too low and way too high for many of the districts. Even with the largest school districts, which presumably have the most extensive and qualified finance staff, the numbers aren't always reasonable and even the head of the school finance unit of the state has cautioned people against drawing many conclusions from the numbers.
Colleges don't generally share the same chart of accounts, or have a finance unit that tries to tell them how expenses should be coded, which starts the problem. I'd also expect that the large public research universities would have a much lower expenditure per pupil than LACs in part because of overhead allocation issues -- When you're Grinnell, and you only mission is undergraduate education, virtually everything you do is in support of that. When you're UCLA, and the campus includes both undergraduate colleges and a full range of graduate programs and a huge medical/dental campus (schools & hospitals), law school, business school, film school - how exactly do you allocate all of the overhead to identify how much you spend per undergraduate?
I'd almost prefer a simpler measure: how much does each school spend on teaching per undergraduate? Of course, even there, you have lots of courses that are enroll both graduate students and undergrad students, and some taught by TAs, and questions about how to charge expenses for a faculty member who is on sabatical but still being paid even though he isn't teaching this year, but I expect that you could probably get to a more stable measure with the cooperation of a group of schools.
Last edited on Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 08:02 pm by Lupine
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CarolynLawrence
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 11:38 pm |
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Lupine, I think you are right: Caution should always be used in using data to draw any conclusions. However, I do want to point out that the data used in the CollegeResults.org site is provided by colleges directly to the Federal Department of Education as part of their eligibility to receive financial aid. The NCES (the DOE department which collects it) has established guidelines about what and how financial information is to be submitted. Of course, you are certainly right in that colleges can and sometimes do manipulate things in their favor.
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Lupine
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Posted: Tue Jun 3rd, 2008 11:50 pm |
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CarolynLawrence wrote: Lupine, I think you are right: Caution should always be used in using data to draw any conclusions. However, I do want to point out that the data used in the CollegeResults.org site is provided by colleges directly to the Federal Department of Education as part of their eligibility to receive financial aid. The NCES (the DOE department which collects it) has established guidelines about what and how financial information is to be submitted. Of course, you are certainly right in that colleges can and sometimes do manipulate things in their favor.
Carolyn --
I don't want to suggest that colleges are intentionally manipulating the data -- I've no idea at all about that. But, knowing that the federal DOE has been involved makes me even more wary: having banged my head repeatedly against the wall while trying to complete the Federal title grant application for our school, my experience is that the federal folks who write these instructions never, ever worked in anything related to school finance. (From some of the questions, I'm unconvinced that they ever had any experience running a school.) At least our state finance unit tends to hire people who were grown working for local school departments.
Call me cynical, but that's my experience with the DOE.
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Descartes
Super Moderator
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 02:18 am |
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I just want to add that College Results was just updated in the past week with data for the entering class of 2006. It runs behind a little, but still a very useful site.
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InterestedDad
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 05:38 am |
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joy wrote: I saw in a Swarthmore Bulletin recently that their actual cost of educating one student, excluding financial aid, is $78,427. Wow! They report that 39% of this comes from student charges, 54% comes from the endowment and annual fund, and 7% from other sources.
How can I learn this actual cost of other schools?
Find their most recent Annual Financial Statement on their website. Take total operating expenditures and divide by the fall enrollment or Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) enrollment.
If you can't find the Annual Financial Statement on the website (Finance Office, President's Office, etc.) consider that a fairly strong indication that they don't want you to know. It is mandatory for tax-exempt non-profits to file their annual reports, so there are places to find these other than the website if you really want to dig.
On the "instructional and academic support" sub-categories: I've seen where one college inludes the library in these categories and another includes the library budget in "institutional support". Compare this number at your own risk.
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InterestedDad
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Posted: Wed Jun 4th, 2008 05:50 am |
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CarolynLawrence wrote: However, I do want to point out that the data used in the CollegeResults.org site is provided by colleges directly to the Federal Department of Education as part of their eligibility to receive financial aid. The NCES (the DOE department which collects it) has established guidelines about what and how financial information is to be submitted. Of course, you are certainly right in that colleges can and sometimes do manipulate things in their favor.
It's not even that they are manipulating things. From what I've seen, colleges just have different ways of accounting their expenses. Some break things out in more budget categories, some lump things into broader categories. Where I've seen huge variation between similar colleges, there was no intent to mislead or paint a rosey picture or any games at all. The two schools just had different accounting buckets, more as a matter of tradition than anything else.
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