The Midterm Exam. Election. I mean Election.

In a profoundly moving tribute to the American spirit of civic duty, the barely one-third of eligible Americans who bothered (or were allowed) to vote gave control of both houses of the US Congress and the majority of state legislatures to the Republican Party. The last polls closed less than 12 hours ago, but that hasn't deterred the higher education punditocracy from declaring last night either the end of the world or the end of history.

Nor, of course, will it stop your intrepid higher ed futurist. UVU put that in my job description, after all, and part of that job is to cut through the sensationalism of the higher ed punditocracy. There are usually some gems beneath the hype, and election analysis is no exception. There are some things that we can expect, and we do need to understand why many of the dire/triumphal predictions aren't likely to come through.

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.