university

Where is the money going in academia?

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 19 JDN 2459995

A quandary for you:

My salary is £41,000.

Annual tuition for a full-time full-fee student in my department is £23,000.

I teach roughly the equivalent of one full-time course (about 1/2 of one and 1/4 of two others; this is typically counted as “teaching 3 courses”, but if I used that figure, it would underestimate the number of faculty needed).

Each student takes about 5 or 6 courses at a time.

Why do I have 200 students?

If you multiply this out, the 200 students I teach, divided by the 6 instructors they have at one time, times the £23,000 they are paying… I should be bringing in over £760,000 for the university. Why am I paid only 5% of that?

Granted, there are other costs a university must bear aside from paying instructors. There are facilities, and administration, and services. And most of my students are not full-fee paying; that £23,000 figure really only applies to international students.

Students from Scotland pay only £1,820, but there aren’t very many of them, and public funding is supposed to make up that difference. Even students from the rest of the UK pay £9,250. And surely the average tuition paid has got to be close to that? Yet if we multiply that out, £9,000 times 200 divided by 6, we’re still looking at £300,000. So I’m still getting only 14%.

Where is the rest going?

This isn’t specific to my university by any means. It seems to be a global phenomenon. The best data on this seems to be from the US.

According to salary.com, the median salary for an adjunct professor in the US is about $63,000. This actually sounds high, given what I’ve heard from other entry-level faculty. But okay, let’s take that as our figure. (My pay is below this average, though how much depends upon the strength of the pound against the dollar. Currently the pound is weak, so quite a bit.)

Yet average tuition for out-of-state students at public college is $23,000 per year.

This means that an adjunct professor in the US with 200 students takes in $760,000 but receives $63,000. Where does that other $700,000 go?

If you think that it’s just a matter of paying for buildings, service staff, and other costs of running a university, consider this: It wasn’t always this way.

Since 1970, inflation-adjusted salaries for US academic faculty at public universities have risen a paltry 3.1%. In other words, basically not at all.

This is considerably slower than the growth of real median household income, which has risen almost 40% in that same time.

Over the same interval, nominal tuition has risen by over 2000%; adjusted for inflation, this is a still-staggering increase of 250%.

In other words, over the last 50 years, college has gotten three times as expensive, but faculty are still paid basically the same. Where is all this extra money going?

Part of the explanation is that public funding for colleges has fallen over time, and higher tuition partly makes up the difference. But private school tuition has risen just as fast, and their faculty salaries haven’t kept up either.

In their annual budget report, the University of Edinburgh proudly declares that their income increased by 9% last year. Let me assure you, my salary did not. (In fact, inflation-adjusted, my salary went down.) And their EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization—was £168 million. Of that, £92 million was lost to interest and depreciation, but they don’t pay taxes at all, so their real net income was about £76 million. In the report, they include price changes of their endowment and pension funds to try to make this number look smaller, ending up with only £37 million, but that’s basically fiction; these are just stock market price drops, and they will bounce back.

Using similar financial alchemy, they’ve been trying to cut our pensions lately, because they say they “are too expensive” (because the stock market went down—nevermind that it’ll bounce back in a year or two). Fortunately, the unions are fighting this pretty hard. I wish they’d also fight harder to make them put people like me on the tenure track.

Had that £76 million been distributed evenly between all 5,000 of us faculty, we’d each get an extra £15,600.

Well, then, that solves part of the mystery in perhaps the most obvious, corrupt way possible: They’re literally just hoarding it.

And Edinburgh is far from the worst offender here. No, that would be Harvard, who are sitting on over $50 billion in assets. Since they have 21,000 students, that is over $2 million per student. With even a moderate return on its endowment, Harvard wouldn’t need to charge tuition at all.

But even then, raising my salary to £56,000 wouldn’t explain why I need to teach 200 students. Even that is still only 19% of the £300,000 those students are bringing in. But hey, then at least the primary service for which those students are here for might actually account for one-fifth of what they’re paying!

Now let’s considers administrators. Median salary for a university administrator in the US is about $138,000—twice what adjunct professors make.


Since 1970, that same time interval when faculty salaries were rising a pitiful 3% and tuition was rising a staggering 250%, how much did chancellors’ salaries increase? Over 60%.

Of course, the number of administrators is not fixed. You might imagine that with technology allowing us to automate a lot of administrative tasks, the number of administrators could be reduced over time. If that’s what you thought happened, you would be very, very wrong. The number of university administrators in the US has more than doubled since the 1980s. This is far faster growth than the number of students—and quite frankly, why should the number of administrators even grow with the number of students? There is a clear economy of scale here, yet it doesn’t seem to matter.

Combine those two facts: 60% higher pay times twice as many administrators means that universities now spend at least 3 times as much on administration as they did 50 years ago. (Why, that’s just about the proportional increase in tuition! Coincidence? I think not.)

Edinburgh isn’t even so bad in this regard. They have 6,000 administrative staff versus 5,000 faculty. If that already sounds crazy—more admins than instructors?—consider that the University of Michigan has 7,000 faculty but 19,000 administrators.

Michigan is hardly exceptional in this regard: Illinois UC has 2,500 faculty but nearly 8,000 administrators, while Ohio State has 7,300 faculty and 27,000 administrators. UCLA is even worse, with only 4,000 faculty but 26,000 administrators—a ratio of 6 to 1. It’s not the UC system in general, though: My (other?) alma mater of UC Irvine somehow supports 5,600 faculty with only 6,400 administrators. Yes, that’s right; compared to UCLA, UCI has 40% more faculty but 76% fewer administrators. (As far as students? UCLA has 47,000 while UCI has 36,000.)

At last, I think we’ve solved the mystery! Where is all the money in academia going? Administrators.

They keep hiring more and more of them, and paying them higher and higher salaries. Meanwhile, they stop hiring tenure-track faculty and replace them with adjuncts that they can get away with paying less. And then, whatever they manage to save that way, they just squirrel away into the endowment.

A common right-wing talking point is that more institutions should be “run like a business”. Well, universities seem to have taken that to heart. Overpay your managers, underpay your actual workers, and pocket the savings.

Why does nobody want to become a teacher?

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457366

The United States is currently suffering a large and growing shortage of qualified teachers, particularly in grades K-12. In some particular areas, this shortage is extremely acute; high schools are not able to teach some courses because there is simply no one qualified to teach them. Science and math teachers are in particularly high demand, because these programs are being expanded even as the people qualified to teach them are shifting over to working at the college level or in the private sector.

Other countries are also suffering severe teacher shortages, including the UK and several other countries in the EU.
The problem is projected to get worse: Enrollments in teacher training are rapidly declining. Meanwhile, because somewhere along the way people got convinced that the problem with education is that our teachers aren’t smart enough (this is completely, totally wrong by the way), standards for becoming a teacher are becoming ever more stringent, narrowing the pool even more.

This is a very serious problem, because education—often called “human capital investment” in economic jargon—is one of the most important investments any society can make. Indeed, it may be the most important, the one factor of production that is absolutely indispensable. If you run out of one raw material, you can make products out of something else. Manual labor can be replaced by machines. If you don’t have enough machines, you can build more. But if you find yourself without anyone who knows how to read and do arithmetic, how are you going to replace that? If we imagine a scenario like being trapped on a desert island or colonizing Mars where we have to start from scratch and we are only allowed to have one factor of production, education is the one we would want to have. (I guess if it’s Mars you do need a certain bare minimum of physical capital, like a spacesuit.)

The teacher shortage is most acute in high-poverty areas, where educational outcomes are terrible. Indeed, the most important cause of the failings of the US education system has always been poverty.

Why are teachers in poor schools so underqualified? Because their working conditions are terrible. Turnover is extremely high because teachers are underpaid, the schools are undersupplied, and their administrators do not support them.

Why are there so many teachers not qualified to teach their subjects? Because people who are qualified can find better jobs in other places. Jobs just as rewarding, that make just as large a contribution to society, which are more pleasant, offer more autonomy, and pay a lot better.

If you are an expert in physics, you could become a physicist and make a median income of $106,000.

If you are an expert in economics, you could become an economist and make a median income of $92,000.

If you are an expert in biology, you could become a biochemist and make a median income of $81,000.

Or, instead of all those things, you could become a high school teacher and make a median income of $55,000. Gee, I wonder which one you’re going to do?

Keep that in mind if it sounds ridiculous to you to pay teachers $100,000 salaries.

Even in wealthy schools, teachers are miserable; I have this on direct testimony from my father, who has taught high school in Ann Arbor for almost 20 years now. There are a lot of teachers who believe in making a difference through education, but quickly become burnt out and leave for better working conditions.

I know in my own case that I’m not planning on teaching high school, even though I know I’d be very good at it and I’ve always found teaching very rewarding. I’d actually be qualified to teach several subjects, from mathematics to social studies and even including physics and Latin. Any public school would be thrilled to have me—but probably not thrilled enough to pay me as much as I’d get from a university, international institution, or policy think-tank. So it’s hard for me to justify the career decision of going into public education.

The absolute highest-paid teacher in the Ann Arbor Public Schools is paid $109,000 gross—and Ann Arbor is one of the highest-paying school systems in the nation, and not coincidentally also one of the best. Most of the professors at the University of Michigan are paid over $100,000 gross and some are paid over $300,000. (As a public school, the University of Michigan releases all its salaries.)

So, you’re living in Ann Arbor… you have a graduate degree… you want to work in education; you could either start at $40,000 and maybe work your way up to $100,000 by teaching high school, or you could start at $100,000 and maybe work your way up to $300,000 by teaching college. (Admittedly, to teach in college you generally also need to do research work and probably get a PhD; so it’s not quite an equal comparison. But the most-qualified educators would be good at either job.)

Economics, along with most science and math fields, pays particularly well outside education. This senior economist position at the World Bank pays at grade GG, which is a minimum starting net salary of $102,000.
How can we solve our teacher shortage? It’s really quite simple: Offer higher salaries for teachers. If you want the best-qualified people in your classrooms, you must pay salaries that attract the best-qualified people. If you pay substandard salaries, you’re going to attract substandard talent. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” isn’t a law of nature; it’s a result of public policy decisions to keep teachers systematically underpaid.

Most of the time when people say “It’s just ECON 101”, they don’t actually understand economics very well and likely have not actually taken ECON 101. But this really basically is a question of ECON 101: Supply and demand. If you have a shortage of something, not enough people willing to produce it compared to the number of people who want to buy it, you must raise the price.

Would that be expensive? Yes it would. Doubling the salary of every teacher would raise total spending on education by about 75%, because teacher compensation is about three-quarters of education spending. This would raise US K-12 education spending from about $600 billion per year to more like $1.05 trillion per year, an additional $450 billion per year in public spending, or a little less than $1,500 per American per year. That is not a small amount of money; indeed, it’s about three times what we’d need to end world hunger. And this is actually an underestimate, since we also hope to hire more teachers and should also improve facilities while we’re at it. So a truly comprehensive educational reform project could very well double our total spending on K-12 education to $1.2 trillion.

And if you want to go up there on a podium and actually tell people, “It would be nice to improve our educational system, but we simply can’t afford to do it without raising taxes unreasonably high!” then that is absolutely a reasonable argument to make. There are always tradeoffs in life. At some point, maybe it really isn’t worth spending an extra million dollars to educate one more child. (Is it worth an extra million dollars to educate two more children? Based on net present value of earnings, yes. And frankly I don’t think net present value of earnings even gets close to assessing the true value of an education; it’s a very weak lower bound.)

But I am sick and tired of people saying “Education is our highest priority!” and then refusing to actually spend the money it would take to improve our educational system. This is not a question of “finding solutions”; we know what to do. Raise teacher salaries. Improve schools. Buy new textbooks. People just aren’t willing to actually pony up the cash to do it. They want an easy way out, some simple way of making education better that somehow won’t cost anything. But we’ve been searching for that for awhile now—don’t you think we’d have found it by now?

What’s wrong with academic publishing?

pnrj public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457257 EDT 14:23.

I just finished expanding my master’s thesis into a research paper that is, I hope, suitable for publication in an economics journal. As part of this process I’ve been looking into the process of submitting articles for publication in academic journals… and I’ve found has been disgusting and horrifying. It is astonishingly bad, and my biggest question is why researchers put up with it.

Thus, the subject of this post is what’s wrong with the system—and what we might do instead.

Before I get into it, let me say that I don’t actually disagree with “publish or perish” in principle—as SMBC points out, it’s a lot like “do your job or get fired”. Researchers should publish in peer-reviewed journals; that’s a big part of what doing research means. The problem is how most peer-reviewed journals are currently operated.

First of all, in case you didn’t know, most scientific journals are owned by for-profit corporations. The largest corporation Elsevier, owns The Lancet and all of ScienceDirect, and has net income of over 1 billion Euros a year. Then there’s Springer and Wiley-Blackwell; between the three of them, these publishers account for over 40% of all scientific publications. These for-profit publishers retain the full copyright to most of the papers they publish, and tightly control access with paywalls; the cost to get through these paywalls is generally thousands of dollars a year for individuals and millions of dollars a year for universities. Their monopoly power is so great it “makes Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.”

For-profit journals do often offer an “open-access” option in which you basically buy back your own copyright, but the price is high—the most common I’ve seen are $1800 or $3000 per paper—and very few researchers do this, for obvious financial reasons. In fact I think for a full-time tenured faculty researcher it’s probably worth it, given the alternatives. (Then again, full-time tenured faculty are becoming an endangered species lately; what might be worth it in the long run can still be very difficult for a cash-strapped adjunct to afford.) Open-access means people can actually read your paper and potentially cite your paper. Closed-access means it may languish in obscurity.

And of course it isn’t just about the benefits for the individual researcher. The scientific community as a whole depends upon the free flow of information; the reason we publish in the first place is that we want people to read papers, discuss them, replicate them, challenge them. Publication isn’t the finish line; it’s at best a checkpoint. Actually one thing that does seem to be wrong with “publish or perish” is that there is so much pressure for publication that we publish too many pointless papers and nobody has time to read the genuinely important ones.

These prices might be justifiable if the for-profit corporations actually did anything. But in fact they are basically just aggregators. They don’t do the peer-review, they farm it out to other academic researchers. They don’t even pay those other researchers; they just expect them to do it. (And they do! Like I said, why do they put up with this?) They don’t pay the authors who have their work published (on the contrary, they often charge submission fees—about $100 seems to be typical—simply to look at them). It’s been called “the world’s worst restaurant”, where you pay to get in, bring your own ingredients and recipes, cook your own food, serve other people’s food while they serve yours, and then have to pay again if you actually want to be allowed to eat.

They pay for the printing of paper copies of the journal, which basically no one reads; and they pay for the electronic servers that host the digital copies that everyone actually reads. They also provide some basic copyediting services (copyediting APA style is a job people advertise on Craigslist—so you can guess how much they must be paying).

And even supposing that they actually provided some valuable and expensive service, the fact would remain that we are making for-profit corporations the gatekeepers of the scientific community. Entities that exist only to make money for their owners are given direct control over the future of human knowledge. If you look at Cracked’s “reasons why we can’t trust science anymore”, all of them have to do with the for-profit publishing system. p-hacking might still happen in a better system, but publishers that really had the best interests of science in mind would be more motivated to fight it than publishers that are simply trying to raise revenue by getting people to buy access to their papers.

Then there’s the fact that most journals do not allow authors to submit to multiple journals at once, yet take 30 to 90 days to respond and only publish a fraction of what is submitted—it’s almost impossible to find good figures on acceptance rates (which is itself a major problem!), but the highest figures I’ve seen are 30% acceptance, a more typical figure seems to be 10%, and some top journals go as low as 3%. In the worst-case scenario you are locked into a journal for 90 days with only a 3% chance of it actually publishing your work. At that rate publishing an article could take years.

Is open-access the solution? Yes… well, part of it, anyway.

There are a large number of open-access journals, some of which do not charge submission fees, but very few of them are prestigious, and many are outright predatory. Predatory journals charge exorbitant fees, often after accepting papers for publication; many do little or no real peer review. There are almost seven hundred known predatory open-access journals; over one hundred have even been caught publishing hoax papers. These predatory journals are corrupting the process of science.

There are a few reputable open-access journals, such as BMC Biology and PLOSOne. Though not actually a journal, ArXiv serves a similar role. These will be part of the solution, most definitely. Yet even legitimate open-access journals often charge each author over $1000 to publish an article. There is a small but significant positive correlation between publication fees and journal impact factor.

We need to found more open-access journals which are funded by either governments or universities, so that neither author nor reader ever pays a cent. Science is a public good and should be funded as such. Even if copyright makes sense for other forms of content (I’m not so sure about that), it most certainly does not make sense for scientific knowledge, which by its very nature is only doing its job if it is shared with the world.

These journals should be specifically structured to be method-sensitive but results-blind. (It’s a very good thing that medical trials are usually registered before they are completed, so that publication is assured even if the results are negative—the same should be done with other sciences. Unfortunately, even in medicine there is significant publication bias.) If you could sum up the scientific method in one phrase, it might just be that: Method-sensitive but results-blind. If you think you know what you’re going to find beforehand, you may not be doing science. If you are certain what you’re going to find beforehand, you’re definitely not doing science.

The process should still be highly selective, but it should be possible—indeed, expected—to submit to multiple journals at once. If journals want to start paying their authors to entice them to publish in that journal rather than take another offer, that’s fine with me. Researchers are the ones who produce the content; if anyone is getting paid for it, it should be us.

This is not some wild and fanciful idea; it’s already the way that book publishing works. Very few literary agents or book publishers would ever have the audacity to say you can’t submit your work elsewhere; those that try are rapidly outcompeted as authors stop submitting to them. It’s fundamentally unreasonable to expect anyone to hang all their hopes on a particular buyer months in advance—and that is what you are, publishers, you are buyers. You are not sellers, you did not create this content.

But new journals face a fundamental problem: Good researchers will naturally want to publish in journals that are prestigious—that is, journals that are already prestigious. When all of the prestige is in journals that are closed-access and owned by for-profit companies, the best research goes there, and the prestige becomes self-reinforcing. Journals are prestigious because they are prestigious; welcome to tautology club.

Somehow we need to get good researchers to start boycotting for-profit journals and start investing in high-quality open-access journals. If Elsevier and Springer can’t get good researchers to submit to them, they’ll change their ways or wither and die. Research should be funded and published by governments and nonprofit institutions, not by for-profit corporations.

This may in fact highlight a much deeper problem in academia, the very concept of “prestige”. I have no doubt that Harvard is a good university, better university than most; but is it actually the best as it is in most people’s minds? Might Stanford or UC Berkeley be better, or University College London, or even the University of Michigan? How would we tell? Are the students better? Even if they are, might that just be because all the better students went to the schools that had better reputations? Controlling for the quality of the student, more prestigious universities are almost uncorrelated with better outcomes. Those who get accepted to Ivies but attend other schools do just as well in life as those who actually attend Ivies. (Good news for me, getting into Columbia but going to Michigan.) Yet once a university acquires such a high reputation, it can be very difficult for it to lose that reputation, and even more difficult for others to catch up.

Prestige is inherently zero-sum; for me to get more prestige you must lose some. For one university or research journal to rise in rankings, another must fall. Aside from simply feeding on other prestige, the prestige of a university is largely based upon the students it rejects—its “selectivity” score. What does it say about our society that we value educational institutions based upon the number of people they exclude?

Zero-sum ranking is always easier to do than nonzero-sum absolute scoring. Actually that’s a mathematical theorem, and one of the few good arguments against range voting (still not nearly good enough, in my opinion); if you have a list of scores you can always turn them into ranks (potentially with ties); but from a list of ranks there is no way to turn them back into scores.

Yet ultimately it is absolute scores that must drive humanity’s progress. If life were simply a matter of ranking, then progress would be by definition impossible. No matter what we do, there will always be top-ranked and bottom-ranked people.

There is simply no way mathematically for more than 1% of human beings to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. (If you’re curious where exactly that lies today, I highly recommend this interactive chart by the New York Times.) But we could raise the standard of living for the majority of people to a level that only the top 1% once had—and in fact, within the First World we have already done this. We could in fact raise the standard of living for everyone in the First World to a level that only the top 1%—or less—had as recently as the 16th century, by the simple change of implementing a basic income.

There is no way for more than 0.14% of people to have an IQ above 145, because IQ is defined to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, regardless of how intelligent people are. People could get dramatically smarter over time—and in fact have—and yet it would still be the case that by definition, only 0.14% can be above 145.

Similarly, there is no way for much more than 1% of people to go to the top 1% of colleges. There is no way for more than 1% of people to be in the highest 1% of their class. But we could increase the number of college degrees (which we have); we could dramatically increase literacy rates (which we have).

We need to find a way to think of science in the same way. I wouldn’t suggest simply using number of papers published or even number of drugs invented; both of those are skyrocketing, but I can’t say that most of the increase is actually meaningful. I don’t have a good idea of what an absolute scale for scientific quality would look like, even at an aggregate level; and it is likely to be much harder still to make one that applies on an individual level.

But I think that ultimately this is the only way, the only escape from the darkness of cutthroat competition. We must stop thinking in terms of zero-sum rankings and start thinking in terms of nonzero-sum absolute scales.