In March, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released a report titled "Who Subsidizes Whom?" that asserts "between 52% and 76% of all [college] students attend institutions where educational payments exceed educational spending." In other words, most students are paying more in tuition than they are receiving in instruction.
This is a claim that is likely to spark an outcry among students who have seen their tuition rates increase repeatedly in recent years. Yet upon closer review, the report is based upon a highly limited notion of "instruction" that inappropriately writes off opportunities for learning that exist outside of the classroom.
The report aims to debunk the idea that most colleges - public and private - provide students with educational benefits that exceed the cost of attendance. The report states that "colleges spend more per student than what is received in per student tuition payments, but this does not mean students are being subsidized because not all of that spending is used towards specifically educational purposes." Although that seems to indicate there are a number of frivolous outlets for university spending, the report focuses its criticism on one in particular: research.
The report's authors conclude that research is drawing substantial sums of institutional money away from instruction and is a major reason why per student spending figures at most universities appear so high. After redefining educational spending to include classroom instruction and student services but not research, the authors then find that most schools' per student spending levels decline considerably. In fact, they go so far as to say that relying on research spending to bolster per student spending "indicates that there is significant systematic bias or chicanery in the official statistics for these schools, particularly regarding the item of instructional expenses."
Yet this indictment of university spending and accounting practices ignores the fact that research is a valuable instructional experience for many students. At the University, for example, a majority of undergraduate students participate in research, University spokesperson Carol Wood said. "Undergraduate research has increasingly become an important part of our undergraduate education at the University," she said in an email, "giving students the opportunity to work one-on-one with senior research faculty on important academic projects and to develop additional academic skills."
These sorts of experiences are particularly important for science- and medicine-oriented students, many of whom are involved in research at the University Medical Center, but they apply to those studying liberal arts as well. For any student hoping to continue his education on a graduate level, research is an essential part of the undergraduate experience.
Moreover, research offers students the chance to partake in hands-on learning and personal interactions with professors. These are two characteristics of higher education that distinguish it from any other intellectual experience most students are likely to have. Conducting field studies and lab tests, as well as meeting with professors to discuss findings, are tremendous opportunities for students to expand their academic horizons beyond the routinized formula of listening to lectures, completing assigned readings and taking exams. Yet the report's methodology would consider funding spent on the research that opens up those opportunities to be merely "wasteful."
Apart from the irony of a research organization such as the Center for College Affordability and Productivity issuing a report so critical of money being spent on what is its primary endeavor, there is simply no justification for claiming that research is unimportant to the value of higher education. If all that mattered in college was classroom instruction, as the report's authors suggest, then it would amount to nothing more than a glorified version of high school. Administrators and policymakers should keep this in mind and should feel compelled to fund additional research at state universities so that this report's faulty methodological assumptions will not be duplicated in the future.
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