Pretend you run a business. Pretend that business puts on seminars and lectures for young adults wanting to better themselves and learn about the world.
If you had $1,650 per 55-minute seminar, what kind of service would you provide your starry-eyed customers? Would you serve lobster bisque and steak while teleconferencing with scientists at the International Space Station?
Would you have artifacts shipped in from the British Museum to inspect while you pick at your hors d’oeuvres? Certainly, if this business model was run by your average Kelley student, customers would come to expect this high of a level of service.
What if, for all this money, all customers received was your average IU class, complete with buzzing cell phone distractions and the eternal struggle to stay awake? Because that is exactly what we as students are getting for our, and sometimes our parents’, money.
Two thirds of IU classes have between 10 and 49 students. Admittedly, the average class size is a difficult number to find, but if anything, my experience has been slanted towards the higher end, so I use 25 as a compromise number.
Out-of-state students pay $33,000 per year in tuition and fees, and in-state students pay about $10,000. Out-of-state students make up 43 percent of IU’s student population, and in-state make up 57 percent.
If students typically take five classes a semester, each class meeting twice a week, for sixteen weeks. Assuming students attend eight semesters, they will have attended about 1,200 classes.
Multiply the respective tuition bills for in- and out-of-state students by four, and then account for the percent of the average 25-student class in-state and out-of-state students are, and you arrive at about $1,650 per every class IU puts on.
Since the average IU class does not include expensive cuisine and costly miracles of the modern age, one has to ask where the money is going. A New York Times op-ed from April 2015 provides some insight.
“According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.”
The article refutes the common claim from administrators and their defenders that reduced state funding is really to blame. Adjusted for inflation, public expenditures on universities have increased tenfold since the 1960s, over five times the rate of defense spending.
Therefore, if a college education is to be affordable, the university bureaucracy must be curtailed. Schemes that simply throw more money at the problem are band-aids at best and catalysts for wasteful spending at worst.
It’s time to trim the fat. As a business student, I have full confidence the business of education can operate with less than $1,600 for every 55 minute class.
zaochamb@indiana.edu
