Prioritizing Teaching (or the Lack Thereof)

As I was reading Ben Wildavsky’s intriguing new paper on for-profit higher ed (“Crossing to the Dark Side? An Interview-Based Comparison of Traditional and For-Profit Higher Education,” published by AEI), I was particularly struck by the following passage:

More broadly, for-profits’ emphasis on faculty as classroom instructors is quite different from the conception of a professor’s core job at many research universities. [Jorge] Klor de Alva [former president of the University of Phoenix] says he saw this firsthand at Berkeley, where, by his account, the reward structure for professors was based almost entirely on their professional advancement as scholars, both on campus and beyond. “The percentage of folks who focused on research to the near total disregard of students was pretty high,” he contends. Though many would dispute this view, Klor de Alva asserts that the general attitude among Berkeley faculty was that students “were a bother, and they took up time” that could otherwise have been devoted to research. (He recalls that teaching was considered a higher priority at Princeton, where he taught before moving to Berkeley.) (emphasis added)

What intrigued me wasn’t so much Klor de Alva’s assertion about the for-profit sector as much as the distinction he drew between Princeton (the crème de la crème of private, not-for-profit research universities) and Berkeley (similarly situated amongst public research universities). Could it be that the prestigious public research universities are the ones who are throwing teaching to the side in their quest to catch and overtake the most prestigious private research universities? Are these public institutions the ones who view their missions even more in terms of scholarly research than do the elite private institutions with which those public institutions compete, both for students and faculty?

If Klor de Alva is correct, and if his insight is broadly applicable to public research universities vis-à-vis private research universities, then perhaps that is the prism with which we should view data suggesting a relative decline in public institutions’ spending on instruction compared to spending on research. According to data published in the Delta Cost Project’s latest iteration of its “Trends in College Spending” report, the growth in real per student spending on instruction was 9.9% from 1999 to 2009; real per student spending on research, however, grew by 22.1% over the same period (see Figure 7 in “Trends in College Spending: 1999-2009“). In contrast, real growth rates in per student spending during the same time span was 24.5% and 29.8% for instruction and research, respectively. Meanwhile, growth in total per student spending (that is, total operating expenditures per student) was 13.0% at public research institutions and 26.3% at private research institutions from 1999 to 2009.

The trend we see, looking at just instructional and research spending, is the prioritization of research over teaching at both private and public institutions, though the trend is much more noticeable at the public research universities than at their private, not-for-profit counterparts. Whereas spending on research was 52.3% of instructional spending at public institutions in 1999, by 2009, research spending was 58.1% of spending on instruction (at private institutions, the comparable percentage for 1999 was 53.4% and for 2009 was 55.7%).

It is certainly true that a wide variety of factors (including external factors entirely outside of universities’ control) affect institutional spending; nevertheless, it is striking that, during a time when real per student total revenues rose by 11.8% at public research institutions (without the 2007-09 recession, they likely would have risen more), spending on research outpaced revenue growth while spending on instruction lagged revenue growth. The fact that spending on research grew so much faster than spending on instruction is, in my view, strong evidence against the claim that public institutions have needed to hike tuitions to make up for shortfalls from other revenue sources. If revenues were the real problem public higher ed faced, could these institutions not have adjusted by cutting down on their research spending (or at least bring it more in line with instructional spending growth) rather than further burdening those students they are supposed to be serving?

While we may often view the elite private institutions as the primary drivers of cost escalation in higher ed (Professor Ronald Ehrenberg, remember, likens the administrators of such institutions to “cookie monsters… seek[ing] out all the resources that they can get their hands on and then devour[ing] them”), it may rather be the elite public institutions which are the ones really behind both a loss of focus on the instructional mission as well as the upward spiraling of costs in the pursuit of prestige in academic research.

This post originally appeared in CCAP’s “Higher Education and the Economy” blogspace for Forbes.com.