June 10, 2019: The partial truth about college stats

For many of my years at Loyola I was an active if not leading participant in the regular open houses offered to prospective applicants to the undergraduate business program and to their parents. The experience resonated with me even more after we started the same search for Jane and Gaby; their college search gave me the chance to see the presentation from the other side, as a parent of a potential student, not as the faculty presenter. My experience at Loyola also made me acutely aware of the college student recruiting process, and made me listen very carefully to not only what the presenters said, but also to what they did not say.

One of my regular concerns was when schools cited the employment statistics for their recent graduates, although none of the presenters ever mentioned that the percentages were based on the respondents to the employment survey and not on the actual number of graduates. If those graduates who did not respond are unemployed -- what do you think? -- are the statistics an accurate representation? And while a 95% placement rate sounds high, that's still a 5% unemployment rate, which is pretty rough after spending $250,000 to be in debt and unemployed or, worse, in graduate school, borrowing even more money.

Private college is expensive primarily because schools use one student's tuition dollars to provide financial aid to other students. When the school has a fifty percent discount rate, that can actually mean that one student is paying 100% and another 0% -- the 'full payer' is actually paying for two students to attend.

The other huge factor is 'administrative bloat.' Only a small amount of the tuition gets expended on the classroom. Instruction costs are often less than twenty percent of tuition and, at times, closer to ten percent. Administrators soak up more funds than faculty.

Of course there are some faculty who teach few courses and sometimes those same faculty have few students in their classes. Faculty are not paid for teaching a large number of students. In my case, my large section sizes meant that the imputed tuition generated by my enrollments (i.e., the annual tuition divided by the number of courses), was four times what I earned.

Now, a month into retirement, I am trying my hardest to disconnect from my academic habits, to ignore the traditional signs of the coming academic year, and to stop reading all the nonsense about the nonsense on too many campuses. It's slow, but the next things I am considering include dropping off of LinkedIn, stopping my Wall Street Journal subscription, asking to be removed from academic mailing lists, and stop reading the leftist and often also nonsensical Inside Higher Ed web site posts.

I find joy in doing one 'adult' activity each day -- being responsible, productive -- and taking a two-mile-plus walk. De-coupling.

Loyola Open House, 2018