Trends in Higher Education Economics

This week I reviewed "Trends in College Spending: Where does the money come from? Where does it go?" This article used a sources of nationally reported data to construct broad conclusions about the trends in higher education finance and economics. It has six basic conclusions:

(1) Higher education is becoming more stratified. Spending is increasing, but only at the institutions which are not growing. The fastest growth in enrollment has occurred in those institutions with the least resources and with the greatest evidence of actual spending cuts in the last few years--the public community college.

(2) Tuition keeps rising. As a proportion of total revenue, tuition has continued to increase since 2002.

(3) Direct instruction expenses have dropped in proportion to total education and related spending. The deepest reductions in spending for instruction has occurred in "teaching" institutions (as opposed to research institutions).

(4) The primary reason for a rise in tuition is a drop in state appropriations. Since 2002, 92% of revenues from tuition increases were the result of "shifts" in costs (from appropriation to tuition).

(5) The student share of the cost of education has continually increased. Notedly, the share of the costs borne by students in private institutions grew more slowly.

(6) There is no good metric for measuring the how institutions do in productivity. Because it is difficult to measure quality or concrete learning outcomes, tying spending to degrees could not only be misleading but dangerous. Nevertheless, just to see out it looks, costs per degree in the public sector increased from 95 to 02 but dropped from 02 to 06.

Nothing real surprising here, but I did enjoy thinking about what metrics should be used. It gives an idea of how complicated higher ed leadership can be. No metric is perfect and only become more so the more of them you compound together.

I think sometimes we (higher ed administrators) get drowned in numbers and data. There are so many ways to say the same thing that it all becomes irrelevant. A institution should decide what it will measure. These should be no more than five general metrics. These should be meticulously tracked and strategically selected. this approach has the salutary effect of focus, but the dangerous complication of leaving out important issues. If you only focus on cost will you forget about the achievement gap? If quality is the pursuit, how will efficiency fair? Not to say anything about the differences in students, classes, and degree types. It all seems overly daunting to try and track and focus on everything; but it's equally as difficult to only focus on a few.

Perhaps a president or commissioner should have a few separate metrics for each cabinet member? This would have the benefit of covering a wide variety of issues and perhaps could provide sufficient focus where needed. A risk would be a disconnected and fractured cabinet. Each would seek to better his or her metric and perhaps even hinder the others. This perhaps, could be ameliorated by a few central metrics that hopefully could correlate across cabinet members.

I guess my bottom line is that goals are good; and for goals to be effective they must be measurable. Leaders must be able to shift through the growing collection of higher education metrics and select those which best fit their situation. They then, must track these and set goals based on them. Seems simple; why is nobody doing it?