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    A Proposed Heuristic For Academic Budgeting Decisions

    It occurred to me, in the midst of a conversation where folks were marveling at the money being spent by a flagship state university on a marketing initiative, that it should, at this juncture,* be possible to formulate a very simple test for evaluating the wisdom of this and other university spending initiatives:

    "How many part time lines could be made full time and / or how many adjunct lines could be made permanent with the money being spent on this**?"

     

    *A conjuncture defined, let us say, by the circumstance that the majority—or even a significant portion—of  faculty at US universities continue to be employed, against their preferences, in contingent positions without the full measure of academic freedom and the full participation in shared governance afforded by tenure and / or in positions that, by virtue of low salaries, lack of benefits, etc., make their very material existence substantially precarious.

    **Depending on the conversational context, one may wish to add something like "bullshit" here. Use your judgment.

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    2 responses to “A Proposed Heuristic For Academic Budgeting Decisions”

    1. David Wallace Avatar
      David Wallace

      But presumably the University would say – rightly or wrongly – that it expects to increase its income as a result of the marketing campaign by more than the campaign costs, in which case they’d claim that the number would be negative.

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    2. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Hi David, no doubt that would be the justification. In some cases, it might even be true — or true as part of a larger systemic effort that included building projects, a concerted attempt to change the demographic the school was appealing to, etc.
      In fact, part of what I think is going on in the US is that many schools, especially as public funding shrinks, are trying more and more energetically to compete for one pool of ‘ideal’ applications — reasonably wealthy domestic or foreign students who can largely pay their own way without substantial Financial Aid subsidies or tuition discounting — and so they’re trying to find ways of appealing to these folks (with things like branding programs, ambitious building programs aimed largely a student life amenities, etc.).
      The thing is, some — or maybe a lot — of this is just pure pie in the sky fantasy, even if the buildings get built. There aren’t that many of those students, and the vast majority of them are still going to head to the already established high prestige institutions that their money (and the education that money has already purchased them) gains them access to. Meanwhile, the rest of these institutions are tying themselves increasingly to long-term debt-financed obligations, and so becoming subservient to credit ratings that are determined by expected future tuition revenue — and student numbers are actually beginning to decline at a lot of places.
      And a lot of it is also just pure copycat spending. Your state flagship isn’t suddenly going to find its enrollments collapsing b/c it doesn’t devote every waking hour to rebranding itself every other year. The same is true for the big public university in a major city. These places have well-established institution niches that are pretty stable. Changing those quickly is way more expensive than serving them well, and expanding them in at a more moderate pace.
      So if this were all really about figuring out a plan for long term institutional viability (including ensuring stable tuition revenues), I’d argue that the move should have been — and still should be — to cultivate the quality of the faculty, by hiring more of them, on better contracts, and supporting them better in their engagement with students. Doing so would certainly represent a more substantial commitment to the basic mission of education, and to the whole existing student population — rather than just the ideal population of rich folks they think they can attract with slick ads and fancy dorms with marble countertops in the bathrooms (that’s not a made up example).

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