I’m new to your Substack and catching up on prior post. I love the data driven approach. Have you ever seen analysis on what it really costs a high quality university to deliver an education?
John - re: what it costs to run an elite college, much more on this later, but you can just Google the name of any US college and “IPEDS Data Feedback Report” and you’ll have a reasonable X-Ray of some key school statistics.
In terms of the answer, it’s quite difficult, although maybe not impossible, to figure out what a research university spends for undergraduate education on a per student basis. The data feedback report will show you numbers for that. But there’s so much fixed cost that I have doubts about accuracy.
It’s a lot easier to look at Williams or Amherst or Carleton or Grinnell, because the only thing they do is undergraduate education. And when you look at that, it’s basically US$125,000 a year per student to run those kinds of places. More on the east coast and less in the middle.
What's the interesting lack of shift to you? I was a little surprised to see a pretty simple demographic point, which is that we've had a stable number of 17 year-olds (or, more accurately, stable age cohorts of young people) for a very long time. Then more of them go to college, with net new entrants leaning towards business and health professions. Areas, incidentally, where it's relatively hard/expensive for colleges to get good faculty.
I’m new to your Substack and catching up on prior post. I love the data driven approach. Have you ever seen analysis on what it really costs a high quality university to deliver an education?
John - re: what it costs to run an elite college, much more on this later, but you can just Google the name of any US college and “IPEDS Data Feedback Report” and you’ll have a reasonable X-Ray of some key school statistics.
In terms of the answer, it’s quite difficult, although maybe not impossible, to figure out what a research university spends for undergraduate education on a per student basis. The data feedback report will show you numbers for that. But there’s so much fixed cost that I have doubts about accuracy.
It’s a lot easier to look at Williams or Amherst or Carleton or Grinnell, because the only thing they do is undergraduate education. And when you look at that, it’s basically US$125,000 a year per student to run those kinds of places. More on the east coast and less in the middle.
interesting shift bug also interesting lack of shift 🤔
What's the interesting lack of shift to you? I was a little surprised to see a pretty simple demographic point, which is that we've had a stable number of 17 year-olds (or, more accurately, stable age cohorts of young people) for a very long time. Then more of them go to college, with net new entrants leaning towards business and health professions. Areas, incidentally, where it's relatively hard/expensive for colleges to get good faculty.
yeah, I'm with you, maybe I didn't come off as intended, my apologies, thought it was interesting that:
"the number of college degrees more than doubled, but the number of college-aged Americans was pretty level"