Education: How Can It Cost So Much?

I. College Is Absurdly Expensive

You might have noticed that college education is expensive. It was never cheap, but it’s gotten increasingly ridiculous over the last 50 years. Average tuition rose from about $1,533 for private and $323 for public schools to $32,000 for private and $7,600 for public. (Inflation alone would have taken it up to $10k and $2100.) (See graph, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/203056/average-annual-charges-for-higher-education-in-the-us/.)

You can buy an orange that was shipped halfway across the country to get to you, for $1. For $200, you can buy a handheld device that lets you talk to people all over the world, takes pictures and videos, gets you directions, plays games, etc. Just on its face, it’s shocking that in that same society, one might be charged $32,000 to take classes for one year. The only other things that shock you that much with their price are medical care and government.

What You Get

For those prices, you’d think that you’d get a posh private tutor who would show up at your house. But no. You get to be one of a few dozen to a few hundred students in each class. The professor gives individualized attention to you only a few times during the semester. Most of the time, he lectures to the whole room, then tells you all to read the book (which, when you think about it, you kind of could have done on your own).

Well, ‘College Professor’ is a high-skilled job, and you have to pay for the time of such smart and wise people, right?

Sure … except that only the tenure-track faculty get good salaries, and most classes are taught by non-tenured instructors, adjuncts, and (at research schools) graduate students. Say an adjunct is teaching a 40-person course, and students are paying around $400 per credit (as happens at my school). Then that adjunct is bringing in about $50,000 for the university, out of which he will receive the princely sum of … about $3,000.

II. Where Does the Money Go?

There’s a lot to be said about why college is expensive—the effect of government subsidies, price insensitivity by consumers, increasing demand, etc. But let’s start with this intuitively compelling question: where the hell is all the money going? We’re charging students all this money, to pay for what?

Research

Part of the answer is that significant amounts are going to the faculty with high social status (tenured professors), who commonly get paid two to eight times as much as low-status faculty, while doing half as much teaching. (Even better paid, of course, are the administrators. Plus we have administrative staff/secretaries, who, while not highly-paid, are increasingly numerous.)

The reason we need these tenured professors, at least at the “good” schools, is to do research. Which we need in order to gain academic prestige, so we can continue to be considered a “good school”, so we can continue charging thousands of dollars for tuition.

If you’re an outsider to the academy and also recently migrated to Earth from Mars, you might assume that all these researchers are dramatically pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge every year and bestowing untold benefits on humanity. But if you’ve actually read some academic research, you probably know that most of it is pointless. (https://fakenous.substack.com/p/research-who-needs-it)

Administrative Work

What most outsiders don’t realize is just how much administrative work occurs in the academy. This work is simultaneously the most onerous and most pointless part of the job. Most of it exists because some demon decided to make up the least efficient possible way of accomplishing a given task, which is often a task that never needed to be done in the first place and will benefit no one, and wrote that procedure into the rules at your university. At least, that’s what I assume must have happened.

If you’re wondering how it’s possible to use up tens of thousands of dollars while accomplishing almost nothing, American academia is really at the forefront of this. Here are some techniques we’ve developed:

1. The pointless document. Many people spend many hours writing up “plans” and “reports” on things.

   1. For instance, at my school, every five years you have to write up a five-year plan (reminiscent of those in the Soviet Union) describing what you plan to do over the next five years. “Just do my f—ing job” won’t cut it, so you have to make up a way of saying that that takes a lot longer and uses a lot more five-dollar words.

   2. Administrators and administratively-friendly people write up plans for the university (or parts of it) filled with vague abstractions like “inclusive excellence”. Many people can spend many hours writing up these documents. Then they post the document on the website and let faculty members read it.

   3. There’s a lot of people evaluating things. E.g., every several years, we have to get some outside professors to come and evaluate our department and write a big report on it, including recommendations for how to improve the department over the next several years.

   4. After you get tenure, you still have to go through a “post-tenure review” every five years. If you’re an outsider from Mars, this may sound like a way to introduce some accountability for tenured professors. In reality, it means that a couple of your friends look briefly at what you’ve done and then make up some way of describing it that makes it sound like you’re doing your job and should be left alone.

2. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. I can’t stress this enough. If you want to waste a ton of resources, make many different people do the same task.

   1. For example, when professors write papers, those papers are typically reviewed by two referees plus the journal editor, to decide whether they’re good. That makes sense. But in addition to this, when that professor comes up for a promotion, we will also want multiple other people to each spend many hours reading some of those papers again, to see if they’re still good. Which brings me to…

   2. When someone comes up for tenure or promotion, they are evaluated many times. In my school, the person is first evaluated by a 3-person committee within his department. This committee has to solicit at least 6 outside people to evaluate and write letters about the person (as mentioned above). Then the committee writes their own report on the person, including their assessment of the six outside assessments. Then the whole department reads the report and votes. Then the department chair writes up a letter summarizing all that and giving a recommendation. Then the case goes to the Dean’s Advisory Committee, then the Dean, then the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Advisory Committee, then the Provost, then the Chancellor, then the President (the university president, not Joe Biden), then the Board of Regents. I made a list with my estimate of how many people are involved at each stage (see table).

      

      In total, we make about seventy different people all do the same task. This is not (as might happen in a real business) 70 different people each doing a distinct part of one big task. This is 70 people each making an overall evaluation of the same case.

      In fairness, most of these people are not actually going to read through most of the material. Only about nine people are going to spend many hours reading papers. But the rest still have to spend time evaluating the same case. Every time we decide whether to promote someone, we have to expend 100-200 man-hours just on making that decision. That’s 100 man-hours for each person who is up for promotion, each year.

      And bear in mind that these aren’t 100 cheap man-hours; these are hours of labor of high-paid professionals with PhD’s.

Counter-productivity

Don’t worry; these kinds of procedures are not only time-consuming; they’re also useless for promoting good decision-making. Why? Three reasons:

1. Bias: Many of the evaluations that we do are done by friends and colleagues of the person being evaluated—people who have been working with the evaluated person for many years and expect to do so for many years to come, people who have had dinner with that person, regularly see him or her, and may also expect to be evaluated by that person for something else at some future date. Now what do you think is going to be your priority if you’re a normal person: (a) writing a completely objective report for some administrators whom you’ve probably never met, or (b) writing a report that your friend is going to like? If you answered (a), I recommend catching the next rocket back to Mars; you’re not going to like it here on Earth.

2. Diffusion of responsibility: The level of redundancy doesn’t make the procedure more reliable. It may in fact make it less reliable. With the multi-person votes, no one involved in evaluating the case feels particularly responsible for preventing an error, because there are so many other people and other levels involved. So each gives the case a fairly cursory look (except the first, 3-person committee, who are biased as discussed above). Then, when you get to the upper-level administrators, they mostly rubber stamp the recommendations of the lower-level committees. (Unless, of course, the faculty member has gotten in the news for expressing controversial ideas.)

3. Overload: The people evaluating these cases (e.g., promotion cases or post-tenure reviews) at the university level have to evaluate many cases at the same time every year. This means they have too many cases to spend much time on any one case, besides that their eyes probably glaze over after reading the first few. So we’re not spending a hundred man-hours by having people give a very detailed and careful examination of the case. Instead, it’s mainly by multiplying the number of people who take a superficial look. Which is useless if you’re trying to increase reliability. You could have a million people read the file, and the decision wouldn’t get any better as long as they’re all giving the same sort of superficial look at the case.

It’s like voting in a democratic society: you don’t get better outcomes by just having more people vote. To get better decisions, you need more informed (and rational, and moral) voters. One highly informed voter is better than a billion uninformed voters.