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.

LWRT October 6, 2014

Fresh from a hiatus for the Rocky Mountain Association for Institutional Research Conference, this week's Last Week in Retweets covers for-profits, competency-based education, Academically Adrift, tuition, and (like you didn't see it coming) rankings.

LWRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 22, 2014

Topics last week include high-stakes testing, predatory lending, retention alliances, City College of San Francisco's accreditation battle, student evaluations, and (I'll bet you thought I forgot about) college ratings.

LWIRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 15, 2014

Introducing a new feature for this blog: Last Week in Retweets. I'll be consolidating the more interesting items on higher education that I've found via Twitter over the past week with some summary and commentary, and posting them every Monday. Subscribe to the blog for great source for keeping up on news about the future of higher ed beyond the hallowed walls (lawns? parking lots? ring road?) of Utah Valley University.

Topics last week include college rankings, credit hours, civility, rankings, competency-based assessment, nanodegrees, rankings, unbundling, and rankings. Oh, and ratings, because the proposed federal government system will only rate institutions, not rank them. They're very particular about that.

Could UVU Have a Park City Mountain Resort-Level Failure?

Sometimes a business does something so trivial, so careless—and so catastrophic—that the mind fails to understand how the people involved could have reached a position of responsibility in a modern corporation. Powdr, the operators of the Park City Mountain Resort ski area, had a sweetheart lease on its terrain, and the opportunity to renew it on the same terms. Having made massive capital investments in a base right in Park City to access the terrain, you would think they would be absolutely on top of renewing that lease.

You would be wrong.

Powdr missed the deadline by a few days, and spent the last few years litigating to try to win back the terrain that gave their base its value. They lost, and last week sold the base to Vail Resorts, who had leased the terrain while Powdr was litigating.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a crash skiers call a “yard sale.” Such a disaster raises the question of what UVU could do to “yard sale” the university. Let me thus suggest conditions that are (1) either within our control or for which we might adequately plan (2) that have a realistic possibility, however low, of occurring, and (3) pose fundamental threats to our ability to function as an institution of higher education?

Rating the Rankings: University Ranking Processes and Methodologies

With the release of the US News and World Report College Rankings this morning, the annual college rankings season comes to a close. There is a wide range of different rankings, with schools at the top of one ranking looking mediocre in another.
[cough]Yale University
[cough]Reed College
[cough]Babson College
What do we make of these? In the spirit of the forthcoming (and, perhaps, always will be) federal Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS), I rate (but not rank!) five of the more prominent systems, and consider where UVU fits into the rankings.

Lee's Proposal to Deregulate Accreditation Gaining Traction with GOP Presidential Hopefuls

Sen. Mike Lee’s accreditation bill has gained the support of two potential Republican presidential candidates, Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Earlier this year, Sen. Lee proposed allowing states to establish their own accrediting agencies as alternatives to the regional accreditation system. According to a piece on the proposal in Slate today, Senators Rubio and Paul have both incorporated similar ideas into their proposals and expressed support for Sen. Lee.