A Modest Budgetary Proposal

[Note: I originally wrote this post a year ago, but decided not to publish it because I was paranoid about the fact that I was getting close to submitting my tenure file.]


When administrators cut liberals arts budgets, they generally cite low enrollments in liberal arts majors; we're not pulling in as much money as other divisions within the university (though it's worth noting that our overhead tends to be considerably less than theirs), so we don't get funded the way the more "popular" divisions do. In a previous post, I made a case for why the university should be willing to subsidize the liberal arts even when our enrollments drop--we may not have the majors, but, unlike the other divisions, we serve the entire campus. Here I want to take a look at a cause of the enrollment problem in order to suggest that university administrations are cutting our budgets for a problem they created, and that the solution to the problem lies in cutting their budgets, not ours.

The usual argument against a liberal arts (and particularly a humanities) major is financial: the question is always, "What are you going to do with a [insert liberal arts discipline here] degree?", implying that a degree is only worth the employment prospects it offers. Those of us who work in the liberal arts are always quick to point out that our disciplines give students the communication and critical thinking skills to excel in a wide variety of careers. But the fact that a philosophy or a history or an English degree doesn't have clearly-defined a career path for many students makes the liberal arts look like a bigger gamble in terms of future prospects. I've had more than one conversation with a student or a prospective student in which they expressed interest in the humanities but were concerned about their ability to find a job out of college. 

At the end of the day, as much as I think this way of thinking is a bit short-sighted, I can't blame students (and their parents) for being worried about their financial futures. The main reason I can't blame them is because of the debt burden most of them take on by going to college. When the average student can expect to leave university nearly $30,000 in the hole, the question of finding a reasonably high-paying job right out of college becomes much more pressing. The student debt problem is of course a product of skyrocketing tuition costs. A Bloomberg report states that a college education costs now nearly 12 times what it cost in 1978, which far outpaces inflation. In a very real way, then, students have been priced out of liberal arts degrees. When obtaining any college degree requires students to mortgage their futures, it's hard to blame students when they focus on majors that give them the best chance to dig themselves out of that debt as quickly as possible.

So if we're looking for a cause of declining enrollments in the liberal arts (or at least enrollments that don't keep pace with enrollments in other divisions of the university), tuition seems like a plausible culprit. If students could leave college with less (or--just imagine!--NO debt), the pressure to choose majors that lead to lucrative careers or that have the highest job placement would be considerably less, and students would be much freer to follow their interests rather than money. Then the question becomes, what has caused tuition to reach these absurd levels?

This is a question much written- and much opined-about, but a recent article in the New York Times makes the case that the real culprit is administrative bloat. This is a point that has been made more than once in the last few years, but it bears repeating (and repeating and repeating) because the problem doesn't seem to be getting better. Administrators make a lot of money--according to this chart, only a tiny handful pull down fewer than 6-figures per year--and their ranks over the last 25 years have been increasing at a rate that far outpaces every other kind of employee within the university. When a school decides to increase the number of highly-paid administrators it employs, this has a much greater effect on the school's budget--and therefore on tuition--than faculty hiring. And hiring administrators does nothing to improve the quality of one of the two primary services universities offer--education--because these administrators (and their staffs--they all come with staffs) don't teach. Neither do many of them support teaching. So students are paying more not for improved quality of education, but to support the administrative hoard that administrators made the choice to hire.

Those of us in the liberal arts should therefore be outraged when administrators cut our budgets not just because this is a short-sighted approach to managing a university, but because they are making us --and our students--suffer for a problem they have largely caused. Administrators make decisions to swell their ranks and hire more administrators; as a result, tuition goes up. Rising tuition creates a strong financial incentive for students to choose majors outside the liberal arts. And then administrators cut liberal arts budgets, citing low enrollments. There are two ways to interpret this chain of events. The more charitable way to view the situation is that administrators are clueless about all of this, that they don't recognize the correlation between their larger salaries and increased numbers, tuition increases, and enrollments. The other option is that business-minded administrators, who may have more in common with Scott Walker and the North Carolina legislature than with the core faculty of the university, want the liberal arts to fail. Neither of these options bode well for us in the liberal arts, or for the health of the university overall.

In light of all of this, I'd like to make a small proposal about how budget shortfalls in liberal arts divisions should be managed. As things currently stand, when budget cuts affect personnel, the first to go are the adjunct faculty. This is a wildly inefficient way to cut budgets, because they make so little money in the first place. A generous estimate of an adjunct wage is $4,000 per course. If you have a budget shortfall of, say, $250,000, you have to cut a lot of adjuncts to get to where you need to be. A deanlet, on the other hand, makes a six-figure salary; a provost-level administrator might make a quarter of a million a year or more. Instead of firing 16 adjuncts (assuming a course load of 4 classes per year)--which affects the quality of instruction either by lowering the number of courses offered and raising course caps, and/or by adding to the workload of already over-burdened full-time faculty, which gives them less time to devote to each student--a university could instead choose to fire two deanlets or a single vice-provost, and the problem would be solved--without affecting instruction at the university at all. Which of these seems like a sounder solution at an institution whose primary mission is education and research?

As faculty, I think this should be our message. Our universities have been mismanaged by people who think the solution to every problem is to hire another 6-figure administrator, and their mismanagement has directly affected our ability to teach and our students' ability to follow their interests rather than their debt burden. So when they come for us, and try to make us do more with less and fire our colleagues, I think we need to come back at them and point out--to students, to alumni, to the community--that they are the problem, not us. Before they start culling our herd, they need to prune their own overgrown, bloated numbers, whether through deep salary cuts or simply firing administrative personnel, re-bundling unbundled tasks and consolidating their work into fewer offices. It's time they started doing more with less. And it's time we as faculty got aggressive about this.