Another reader responds to a hypothesized link between tuition support reduction for higher education and the current generation’s lack of interest in driving and owning cars.
Oh it’s Unintended Consequences, all right. Unforeseen implies people making policies tried to consider things carefully, but usually they did not.
There’s a number of things leading to Millennials not driving as much. Big college debut [sic] might well be one of them. However, I disagree somewhat with those who claim the tuition and commensurate debt increases are because states have reduced investment. They may have, but there are other large drivers, including the following.
One big expense for universities is for personnel, of all sorts. And compensation for those people includes health insurance, and health insurance is eating our entire economy alive.
It makes sense that the UofM’s president would claim it’s the lack of funds from the state, since he’s part of one of the other drivers: the huge increase in administrative staff numbers and payrolls over the past 4 decades. Classic case of misdirection to hide one’s own sins.
That’s somewhat unfair to President Kaler on a personal level unless you can prove that he’s aware of the alleged rise in staff numbers and is deliberately not mentioning it. My observation over the years is that it’s a rare person who’s aware of all these factors and can identify and manage them properly. Frankly, how a certain person can be the apex of organizations of this size and responsibility and somehow be effective in all areas boggles me. On the other hand, President Obama has done a damn good job. It’s gotta be the people you hire… like it says in the manuals.
But as far as the general allegation goes, it’s apparently true. In 2011 the Washington Monthly‘s Benjamin Ginsberg covered the topic:
Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.
The balance of the article is quite interesting, if scathing. I wonder if the author has an ax to grind. HuffPost has a more recent article, and I’ll quote the interesting part, even if it’s a little off-topic:
In all, from 1987 until 2011-12—the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day, according to the analysis of federal figures, by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science research group the American Institutes for Research.
“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”
Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show.
“They’ve increased their hiring of part-time faculty to try and cut costs,” said Donna Desrochers, a principal researcher at the Delta Cost Project, which studies higher-education spending. “Yet other factors that are going on, including the hiring of these other types of non-academic employees, have undercut those savings.”
The growth in part-time faculty is quite disturbing, although not new news. I ponder what can be done to reverse it. Back to our reader:
Another is government guaranteed student loans which have resulted in all kinds of “educational” organizations marketing and hard selling their wares to students. They all know that once the student gets the loan and pays their tuition, they’re in the money, no matter what the student does after that point. There have been a number of recent articles about how this inflates the cost across the spectrum.
I’ve posted on this topic before, here. Relevant quote (it was a big post):
I have a related, simple (and no doubt simplistic) view – it’s all simple economics. The seats available are the goods to be bought; the dollars students can bring to bear is the money. It’s well known that printing more money results in inflation, which is the increase in price of the goods. In the college scenario, the Federal aid is the equivalent of printing money, as now the students can bring more money to bear on buying access to education. The institutes notice that the market will bear a price increase, and so boost prices; after all, alumni and governments are currently dicey sources of revenue, and those hard science majors need expensive gear.
Who’s screwed? Anyone who can’t get a grant or a loan. Which means buying access means dancing to the tune of the grant and loan providers; the alternative is, what?
So get rid of the loan programs and, after a lot of hollering, prices will come down – those seats must be filled. In all fairness, I do recall debating this on Facebook (not on my timeline, but someone else’s), and someone who works at a college claimed it wouldn’t work, but whether he (or she) knew what they were talking about is hard to say. But to continue, since prices would come down, funds to pay administrators would begin to disappear – and with them, the administrators themselves.
Back to our reader:
Related to the above, schools of higher education are wasting, er, spending more money on marketing and providing amenities designed to attract students, because even state schools like the UofM are big profit machines. None give a damn about the student debt; they just want their money.
But back to the unintended consequences of fewer people driving amongst the younger generations. I’d say that’s because they’re not as stupid as their forebears, in some ways. The whole sprawling mess of suburbs, exurbs and more highways per capita than every before is part of a radical 50 to 60 year experiment in a new but faulty way of building towns — conveniently ignoring thousands of years of civilization which learned to do it otherwise, in a more resilient and organic manner. Numerous federal policies have driven this, from FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac mortgages, to interest deductions on income tax, to federal spending on interstates and grants to states for more spending on highways, the transfer of general funds to the highway fund, since gasoline and similar road taxes have never paid enough to cover the bill, to zoning which prohibits effective land use, to constant subsidies to suburbs and exurbs for infrastructure, and on and on. I suggest reading Strong Towns to get a clue as how fragile and unsustainable that building model really is. (You know I’m a car guy, and even I see the writing on the wall — and see the increase in traffic, urban area and deteriorating roads all of which make driving less pleasant and more expensive.)
I have learned to be extremely skeptical of claims of the perfection of our forebears, so I’m very dubious about this claim of how we used to know how to build towns and now we don’t – the general case of attributing wisdom to earlier generations is such a widespread fallacy I believe the Skeptics community has even coined a term for it, which I do not recall offhand. In this case, those earlier geniuses never contended with the sheer population numbers, the densities, and the requirements of today. Nor did they have access to the technologies of today, for that matter.
That said, your policy complaints resonate. We’re trying to solve a difficult problem in a society predicated on individualism, and it’s just simply a hard nut to crack. Some policies are certainly counter-productive, and those mentioned certainly fall into the list of common complaints I’ve heard over the years. Our reader concludes,
I thought I had some more ideas, but I’ve run out of gas (no pun intended). Tying reduced car ownership to crushing college debt is something new I haven’t seen before, and it may well be one of the major causative factors. But it’s not the only one. Truly, though, the current and recent past of a huge automobile industry is past its peak. I’ve read that the recent (2014-2015) surge in car ownership is because of another cheap money bubble like the housing bubble — only this time it’s with cheap, poorly vetted automobile loans. Ugh.
Nor would I claim it’s the only one. Perhaps it’s not even the primary cause. But I hadn’t heard about poorly vetted car loans; indeed, I had heard it was because of cheap fuel. I wonder if the amount of money tied up in car loans is roughly the same size as the bad house mortgages that caused the last recession…
