[prepend]

> Where is all this tuition even going to?

I have a family member who works in the “alumni relations” department of a small, regional public university. Probably ranked like #300 or something. There are like 5 people in the department. They make a magazine, email newsletter and schedule alumni events.

It was really surreal when they explained their job and that the department exists.

There’s an admin costs problem in this country. There’s no sufficient governance or oversight in controlling university spending. This is even a public university and it’s just bizarre that they can make up positions that shouldn’t even exist.

[nostrademons]

Alumni relations is a profit center for universities, not a cost center. Many universities are funded as much by alumni donations and endowment gains on them as they are by tuition.

[RhysU]

Stop giving the panhandlers money and they will go away.

[newsclues]

Yeah but what is the return on investment?

The incentive to have a alumni department to increase donations clearly isn’t in the best interests of society.

[exhilaration]

Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars [1] so you can't really blame universities for trying to find any and all other sources of funding.

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...

[BitwiseFool]

>"Society has decided that it doesn't want to support American universities through tax dollars."

This is hyperbole, the government is spending billions on American Universities in a myriad of different ways. And, many ways of support are not direct. One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.

[lotsofpulp]

> One could argue that the guaranteed student loan programs are a roundabout way of supporting universities through tax dollars as well.

No, guaranteed student loans are a way to transfer wealth from future taxpayers and borrowers to beneficiaries of tuition such as university staff and whoever is receiving money from the university such as construction companies and whatnot.

The guaranteed loans with no underwriting obfuscate costs and thus result in a mid allocation of society’s resources. Such as leagues of people spending their valuable years learning “communications” or “business” degrees and then sitting in a call center or other role that does not pay enough to make the degree they paid for in time and money to have any decent or even positive ROI.

[engineeringwoke]

Providing education isn't expensive; big campuses and teams of administrators are. Universities could easily return to the old ways, just cap annual loans at $20k per head. It would be painful, but they're fat, and what they're doing is bad for society.

[brtkdotse]

Not to mention sports teams.

[uberman]

You don't understand university sports revenues and expenses.

Feel free to download a breakdown of revenues and expenses for the university of your choice at: https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/

You are going to find that almost every school is net neutral with respect to their sports programs. Football and basketball typically funding all other sports.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Sports teams are a profit center. Season tickets are hundreds or even a thousand dollars. And then there's the absurd money they make at the concession stands and merchandising.

[newsclues]

What about tuition?

Or monetize research instead of gifting it to large (pharmaceutical) companies?

This isn’t the only way for education to fund itself, and the incentives are not aligned with the mission.

[pkaye]

In terms of drug research the value of the discovery rises only after the clinical trials are complete.

[newsclues]

In terms of software services, all the code does nothing until it’s deployed.

Should schools develop software and the pass the code off to Microsoft or Oracle to deploy it on their servers?

A university couldn’t possibly do it themselves, not without giving away billions to industry!!!

[soheil]

> There’s an admin costs problem in this country.

The money goes to the college administrators. They're major bureaucracies that plague and control universities money supply and more or less dictate universities' policies.

[danaris]

The data I've seen doesn't, by and large, bear this out.

The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure. (Not in the sense of "the best infrastructure money can buy", sadly; no, it's more like "raise $300 million to build this new dorm and let the richest donor put their name on it, then spend about 30% of what it needs for maintenance for the next 30 years...and then spend 5x the amount we would've had to if we'd just maintained it in remediation and renovations".)

[adventured]

> The money goes to the athletics and the infrastructure.

Athletics for most schools are a net profit center, even for the #100 football program. The smaller schools aren't spending nearly so much on athletics as the schools with football programs.

[danaris]

First of all, I don't believe that's actually true based on what I've seen: what seems to be more often the case is that the tickets pay for the marketing and some of the athletic infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the coaches are being paid millions of dollars per year. I don't care how much money the athletic program is bringing in; that's not a responsible use of the money. (I get that it's something of a prisoner's dilemma at the individual institution level; I'm more talking about the broader issue.) If you have the money to pay the coaches $2M/year, that means you could, instead, stop paying your adjunct professors and regular staff sub-poverty wages, and/or perform proper maintenance on the buildings.

And do not get me started on the economics of stadium construction.

[triceratops]

They're profitable because they pay their workers (the athletes) next-to-nothing. And even so, colleges would be better off spinning off their teams into professional entities that pay royalties to use the school's name. At the very least, it's one less distraction for the college administration and they can focus on their actual jobs: education and research.

[milesskorpen]

Part of the issue is TOO MUCH governance. We have loaded colleges down with regulations and requirements, which then require administrators to handle these rules. Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued).

Most of these requirements independently make sense, but the sum impact weighs down universities and drives up cost.

[rch]

Factually unsupported cynical take: Without the made up jobs there would be even less of a market for the type of non-STEM graduates public universities like to produce.

The regulations provide the justification for the jobs program needed to soak up the excess supply of non-trade graduates generated by overenthusiastic student loan policy.

[SoftTalker]

> Most of these administrative roles are not optional (at least not if you don't want to get sued.

They are mostly not optional if you want to receive federal funding. There are some small colleges that are totally private, do not take government funds, and so don't have to implement and administer many government regulations.

[Invictus0]

You haven't presented enough evidence to show that there is a problem. If the alumni relations department is bringing in donations greater than their salaries, they are a net benefit to the university. Even if they don't bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus: it might bring in better students, spread the word about the university, and it might lead to big gifts later down the line.

[prepend]

The alumni donations total about $50k/year and I think there’s only like 200,000 alumnis that exist. The department is five years old and the growth is minimal as donations were like $30k with no department at all.

My anecdote wasn’t intended as evidence.

But there’s definitely a problem. You can look at official sources [0] for evidence showing that admin expenses are 21% at public, four year schools.

I found this article while looking for the official stats [1] that claims the average university in the US has 45 people in DEI. DEI is very important, I think, but 45 employees boggles the mind and seems to be more of a symptom of runaway costs and lack of controls that would allow for so many admin staff on a single topic.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75 [1] https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/administrative...

[evolve2k]

I also reject the assertion they shouldn’t exist. The “Alumni network” is listed as one of the additional benefits when enrolling for a degree.

Further when the engineering firm you started after graduation with some of your classmates wines a National science award. Getting that profiled in the alumni newsletter could be unlocking a range of oppprtunities for your firm from grant funder interest to new commercialisation opportunity, all coming out of the alumni network.

Just cause the work is quiet doesn’t mean it’s pointless.

[prepend]

An alumni network is great. I think the issue is having so many admin staff working on low value activities like magazines and newsletters.

I’m a big fan of quiet work, but this is pointless. It’s not pointless because it’s quiet. It’s pointless because it has minimal to no positive impact.

[muh_gradle]

Administrative bloat in higher education is well known at this point, and it's absolutely a part of where student money is going. All I see is a lot of "mights" in your post.

[didericis]

> Even if they don’t bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus

Or it might not.

Thats the root of the problem. The administrators are the people coming up with the metrics and arguments to justify their own existence.

I’m sure many of them believe they’re making a positive contribution, and the situation is more complex and tragic than just “these are the baddies” type arguments suggest, but there’s still an accountability problem that needs to be reckoned with.

[throwaway6734]

Also know someone that works at a large university in alumni relations. Their department doesn't pay great, but the bar for performance is so low.

[prepend]

For my family member the salary isn’t huge, I think like $40k so the whole department is probably less than $500k/year including overhead and whatnot. My assumption was if they are spending stupid money on this they are likely spending stupid money on many other things.

[CydeWeys]

$500k/yr spent on fundraising does not remotely sound like a stupid use of money to me?

[prepend]

It’s stupid because there are no alumni donations for this school. They are nowhere near breaking even and won’t because there just aren’t many alumni.

The problem is that these aren’t efficient dollars anyway. Spending $500k to net $500k is not a good return. Schools should focus on better returns, like teaching and research.

[xyzzyz]

That depends on what the ROI is.

[uberman]

I'm not suggesting that there is not an abundance of staff at some institutions, but at most institutions, "alumni relations" is a profit center not a cost center. At least if they are doing the job that our "alumni relations" department does. Yes, ours produces a magazine as well but their real job is (or should be) to entice giving.

This kind of thing would be like saying your typical account manager's job is surreal and perhaps in some cases that might be true :-)

[Ekaros]

5 people for Alumni relationships if they also deal with some other public relations really doesn't sound too horrible.