What if We Budgeted in FTE?

Loyal readers familiar with my views on the subject (Hi, Mom!) know that I am not very sympathetic to most of the arguments about the costs of higher education. They tend, for example, to confuse costs to students (i.e., tuition and fees) with cost per student (i.e., spending). At UVU, for example, the latter increased at an annual rate of 7.4% between 1990 and 2010. But real per FTE spending was flat. The additional tuition almost exactly offset cuts in state funding. That's the real story at many regional state institutions and community colleges, the workhorses of higher education in the US.

But that isn't to say that spending doesn't matter. There has also been a shift in where money is spent, with much more money spent on administrative costs and less on full-time faculty. To make up for that shift, more instruction is done by part-time employees, many of whom barely make minimum wage.