Having recently embarked on a new five-year DEI plan, UM is paying more than $30 million to 241 DEI staffers this academic year alone, Mark Perry found in a recent analysis for the College Fix.

That represents an astounding expansion of the school’s already-infamous DEI bureaucracy, which had a mere 142 employees last year.

And the price tag accounts for neither the money spent on programming and office expenses nor the hundreds of other employees who use some of their time to assist with DEI initiatives.

These expenditures are a reckless waste of taxpayer money considering the impact of UM’s last five-year plan.

It cost $85 million, and what did it accomplish? 

According to the university’s Black Student Union, “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”

Hispanic and Asian enrollments increased, but black enrollment dropped slightly from 4.3% in 2016 to 3.9% in 2021.

And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021.”

These results are consistent with findings at other institutions.

A Claremont Institute study of Texas A&M University found that despite an annual DEI budget of $11 million, the percentage of students who felt they belonged at the school dropped significantly from 2015 to 2020: Among whites, the number went from 92% to 82%; among Hispanics, from 88% to 76%.

Among blacks, there was an astonishing drop from 82% to 55%.

At the University of California, Berkeley, whose Division of Equity and Inclusion boasts 152 staffers and a $36 million budget, black undergraduate enrollment dropped from 3% in 2010 to 2% in 2021.

The truth is that DEI does not work and frequently makes matters worse.

DEI trainings not only fail to achieve their purposes but often exacerbate grievances and divisions by antagonizing people and teaching them to monitor one another for microaggressions and implicit biases.

DEI often leads to illegal activities, too.

The University of Washington recently revealed, for example, that its psychology department actively discriminated against faculty candidates based on race, elevating a lower-ranked candidate for a position over others because of a desire to hire a black scholar.

In another case, a former assistant director of multicultural student services at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire recently filed a lawsuit alleging that despite exemplary performance reviews, she was harassed and discriminated against simply for being white, until she resigned.

“We don’t want white people in the MSS office,” a student reportedly said during an open house.

Even with the failures and the excesses, Michigan is not the only school ramping up its DEI expenditures.

Another College Fix analysis found that Ohio taxpayers are spending $20.38 million annually on DEI salaries and benefits at UM’s famous rival, Ohio State University, where the number of DEI bureaucrats has grown from 88 in 2018 to 189 in 2023.

Oklahoma’s public universities spent $83.4 million on DEI over the last 10 years.

Florida’s public universities reported spending $34.5 million during the 2022-23 academic year.

The University of Wisconsin was poised to spend $32 million over the next two years.

Why not use all that money to give students a much-needed tuition break?

Or why not fund need-based scholarships for promising students instead of giving cash to bureaucrats who are actively damaging our higher education institutions?

Fortunately, some states are taking action.

Florida and Texas passed laws eliminating DEI bureaucracies, and Wisconsin lawmakers recently curbed DEI in the state university system by compelling the board of regents to agree to DEI staff cuts and a hiring freeze.

Many other state systems have ended the use of DEI statements in hiring, recognizing they are used to screen out heterodox thinkers when studies show ideological diversity is beneficial to the search for knowledge, which is a university’s core purpose.

And that points to the greatest cost of DEI: While the financial waste is appalling, the price of expecting everyone on campus to conform to an ideology that undermines free expression and excludes intellectual diversity, two foundational values of the academy, is one we should be unwilling to pay.

This post appeared on New York Post on January 11, 2024

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Boston University Professor Phillipe Copeland would like to know. When news broke that Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University was laying off half or more of its staff, Professor Copeland called the move an “act of employment violence and trauma” and said the “university needs to explain … how mass layoffs are ‘antiracist.’”

Kendi needs to explain it too — and remember: neutrality is not an option.

Professor Copeland is not the only former colleague turning against Kendi. The outgoing faculty lead of the center’s policy office critiqued the original decision to give him “millions of dollars and so much authority.” The former assistant director of narrative (and, yes, the center also had an associate director of narrative) said she found the center “exploitative and other faculty experienced the same and worse.”

In another comment, Copeland accused others of sitting “at the feet of a ‘Master’ who provides answers in exchange for deference. They mistake celebrity for solutions. This is a ‘Chosen One’ theory of change.”

While these criticisms are partially directed at the university, they also clearly target Kendi and suggest he is what his critics have long said he is: a self-promoter elevated to a role he is unsuited to play.

In conversation with Columbia University linguist John McWhorter last year, Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown University, was blunter in his assessment of Kendi: “I take umbrage at the lionization of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed mother***ers like Ibram X. Kendi, who couldn’t carry my book bag, who hasn’t read … a f***ing thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. … He’s an unserious, superficial, empty-suited lightweight. He’s not our equal, not even close.”

The popularity of this mediocre thinker was always stunning. He has commanded up to $40,000 per speaking engagement and attracted millions of dollars in donations, including a $10 million gift from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. What has happened to all that money?

Those of us who lived through the moral panic that catapulted him (and Robin DiAngelo) to fame in 2020 could be forgiven for enjoying a moment of schadenfreude as his ideological brothers-in-arms turn his own arguments against him. It is an understandable enjoyment after those of us who always opposed racism were nonetheless subjected to all those workshops, trainings, and committee meetings. We watched as our institutions issued diversity statements and inclusive language guides, insisted on curricular changes, and announced new antiracist initiatives, suggesting racism lurked in every corner.

In fairness, Kendi cannot be personally blamed for all of this, even if he took full advantage of his moment. While the complaints about him and the layoffs are personal for his former colleagues, the rest of us should be more concerned with what he represents. His rise and fall are irrevocably tied to a fervor, fueled by the anxieties of a pandemic, that spread through the American academy, attempting to remake it according to the ideas of one or two thinkers — a damnable abdication of responsibility for the intellectual capaciousness and commitment to free and open inquiry aiming toward truth that should characterize academia.

Dare we hope that the decline of Kendi’s center is another sign that we have reached “peak woke” and the tide is turning, as some have suggested?

Texas and Florida are dismantling the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that colonized their universities, and public institutions in Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, and elsewhere have renounced the use of DEI statements in hiring.

Meantime, legislatures in Tennessee, Ohio, and elsewhere have created academic centers devoted to civic education and free expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against race-based college admissions. There is even some evidence that the number of cancellations on American campuses is declining.

These are small flickers of freedom against the backdrop of intolerance and ideology that still dominate our colleges and universities. These institutions are still overpopulated by those who would call themselves liberals or progressives or leftists. They have allowed too much of the ideology Kendi represents to become embedded within them. And looking to the future, survey data suggests that the next generation of college professors is already set in its even more intolerant ways.

But the reduction of Kendi’s center shows that things can change. As he and his former allies descend into infighting, we should slip past them and continue to build on the reforms that have begun.

Kendi famously and perversely claimed, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” The remedy to Kendi’s supposedly antiracist ideology is to ignore this pernicious binary and cultivate institutions dedicated to truth and freedom that are based on merit, fairness, and equality.

This article appeared on Blaze Media on September 21, 2023.

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College is really expensive. And it just keeps getting more expensive.

The average tuition at US private colleges grew by about 4% last year to just under $40,000 per year, according to data collected by US News & World Report. For a public in-state school, that cost was $10,500, that’s an annual increase of 0.8% for in-state students and about 1% for out-of-state.

But at highly rated or selective schools, the price tag increases substantially. Harvard University charges $57,246 in tuition and fees, per year, for undergraduate students. When you add in housing, food, books and other cost of living expenses, Harvard says you should expect to pay about $95,438 each year.

Harvard University stands in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 6, 2023.Brian Snyder/Reuters

It wasn’t always this way. After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 747.8% since 1963, the Education Data Initiative found.

And between 1980 and 2020, the average price of tuition, fees, room and board for an undergraduate degree increased by 169%, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

That far outpaces wage increases.

Over the same 40-year period, earnings for workers ages 22 to 27 only increased by 19%, the report found.

That might explain why Americans’ confidence in higher education has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released this week. The June poll found that just 36% of Americans have confidence in higher education, down more than 20 percentage points from eight years ago.

“While Gallup did not probe for reasons behind the recent drop in confidence, the rising costs of postsecondary education likely play a significant role,” said Megan Brenan, a research consultant at Gallup.

So why is the price of college rising so rapidly?

The high cost of human teachers

It costs a lot to employ professors, said Catharine Hill, an economist with the education nonprofit organization Ithaka S&R and the former president of Vassar College.

“Higher education is primarily produced by skilled workers — faculty and administrators,” she said. “Their price in the economy has gone up.”

Real wages for US skilled workers have outpaced inflation by a couple of percentage points for long periods of time, but other industries have been able to offset those labor costs through productivity advances that reduce their reliance on skilled labor — things like AI and robotics.

But there aren’t many robots teaching college classes. You still need professors with expensive degrees to do that.

“We pretty much produce higher education the way we used to, which is a faculty member in front of a class of anywhere from 20 to 40 students,” said Hill. “That means that there haven’t been efficiency gains to reduce that cost.”

Some universities have been leaning more heavily on contingent, non-tenure track faculty with low pay and no access to employer-ee benefits in an attempt to save money. The higher education system has become increasingly dependent on this temporary labor, according to the National Education Association. Nearly 70% of US faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987.

Competition for the richest families is driving up costs

Income inequality in the United States has grown significantly since the 1970s, and there’s a much wider gap between the rich and the average income earner today than there was back then.

In 2021, the top 10% of Americans held nearly 70% of US wealth, up from about 61% at the end of 1989, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes home 21% of all the income in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

That means a top-ranked university can charge whatever it wants and will still find wealthy families willing and able to pay each year.

“Flagship schools are competing for talented students and families that can pay the sticker price,” said Hill. These families “don’t have any trouble writing that check,” and are willing to spend more in exchange for luxe services and well-maintained campuses. “They want small classes, they want nice dormitories, they want good food,” said Hill.

If a school tried to scale back on spending and cut back on those amenities, she said, “they wouldn’t end up attracting those students.”

Colleges currently spend more on administrative services and luxuries than they ever have in the past, according to a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. That type of spending grew by 29% between 2010 and 2018, compared to a 17% increase in spending on instructional staff.

State subsidies fall

State legislatures are also contributing less in their budgets to public education than they used to.

Between 2020 and 2021, state funding for higher education declined in 37 states by an average of 6%, according to a recent NEA analysis. “This means colleges and universities must rely on students to pay the cost of college — and those students are borrowing to do it,” wrote the NEA in a report.

Many students at the nation’s top universities who qualify are receiving a healthy amount of financial aid and other subsidies, greatly reducing the price they ultimately pay for their degrees. But not everyone benefits from financial aid and other subsidies.

The net price of college

Yes, sticker prices are increasing. But the net price of college — that’s the amount that students and their families are actually shelling out — has been decreasing.

The average student at a private four-year college paid $32,800 for tuition and room and board last year. When adjusted for inflation, the actual price paid for private college has dropped by 11% over the past five years, according to College Board data.

For public colleges, the net price averages out at just over $19,000 and has dropped 13% over the past five years.

What comes next

“These kinds of discussions about whether this ‘college cost disease’ could possibly continue, they existed 50 years ago too, with people saying, ‘oh, it couldn’t possibly go above $30,000. It couldn’t possibly go above $40,000,’” said Hill.

“On some level, if incomes continue to rise the way that they’ve been rising, I think it will go on for a while.”

Before adjusting for inflation, the average student loan debt at graduation has increased 2807% since 1970, according to the EDI. Even after adjusting for inflation, the average debt increased by 317%.

Student debt explosion

Late last month, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, blocking millions of borrowers from receiving up to $20,000 in federal student debt relief, just months before student loan payments are set to restart after a yearslong pause. On Friday, the Biden administration said 804,000 borrowers will have a total of $39 billion worth of debt wiped away in the coming weeks.

There is about $1.6 trillion in outstanding loan debt in the United States.

This appeared on CNN Business on July 16, 2023.

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In a recent open-ended survey of over 150 “college workers,” respondents expressed “frustration at the lack of clear career ladders, bitterness at being passed over for jobs, and bewilderment at seeing those on the outside, often with less education, finding more financial success,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

“At my institution there have been long-timers in leadership positions who have no intention of retiring anytime soon, which means there is no way for any midcareer professionals to move up,” an anonymous respondent said. “It gets worse when we staff up: We are bringing even more people into the organization without giving them anywhere to go.” 

Several respondents suggested problems with hiring, pay, and bureaucracy in university administrations when asked whether they “felt trapped in a dead-end job” by The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

One respondent wrote, “I can’t even spend the money my office was allocated (because I’m a temporary administrator).”

“It’s a [d]umpster fire. And there’s no evidence the administration is going to do anything to fix it,” the respondent continued. 

“Academic department heads and deans are often identified through national searches, while administrative deans/directors and department heads are often pursued with a ‘who can we get for the least money that will do the most work’ mind-set,” another respondent said. 

The suggested tension between faculty and administrative positions reflects a trend in the way that colleges and universities are choosing to budget. 

A 2021 report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) analyzing 1,529 institutions found that spending on administrative positions outpaces instructional spending. 

ACTA is a non-profit “dedicated to promoting academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability at America’s colleges and universities,” according to its website. 

“Non-instructional spending–including student services (29%) and administration (19%)–grew faster than instructional spending (17%),” the report reads. “From 2012 (the earliest year for which comparable staffing data are available) to 2018, colleges and universities prioritized hiring less expensive and often less-credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.”

ACTA reported that when spending increases, tuition increases. 

Increased spending on administrators, an article in The Daily Signal argues, “corrupts the core mission of higher education.”

“Universities are no longer focused on free academic inquiry in pursuit of the truth or the development of capable adults,” Jay Greene, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, wrote. “Instead, they have employed an army of staff who either distract from that mission by providing therapeutic coddling to students or subvert truth-seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy.”

Campus Reform similarly reported on the consequences of hiring practices that favor administrators over instructors. 

Students at The New School, a private university in New York City, demanded tuition refunds after a strike from adjunct faculty, who make up around 87 percent of faculty, according to The Washington Post. 

They also demanded “A” grades for the semester, better cafeteria food, control of the president’s house, and the resignation of the president and other administrators. 

Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano blamed The New School’s administrators for the students’ demands. 

“Demands like this–it simply reflects a growing trend of what we’ve been witnessing where they think if they complain loud enough, the system will capitulate,” Giordano said in an interview with Real America’s Voice. 

Giordano argued that this capitulation gives companies the impression that “students aren’t really being educated.” 

He also referenced another Campus Reform report on New York University (NYU) firing an organic chemistry professor because his class was “too hard.”

Campus Reform shared the response of another NYU professor, who tweeted, “One of many problems with insanely expensive private education is that institutions have an incentive to treat the student as [a] customer and not [as a] student who needs to learn certain things.”

This article originally appeared in Campus Reform on January 10, 2023.

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The future of the economy, the health of our civic institutions, and the integrity of our national workforce depends on the strength of our colleges and universities and their commitment to excellent student outcomes and financial stewardship. Policymakers cannot assume that higher education institutions properly serve taxpayers and students without careful oversight.

IN ranks 44th in the nation for administrator to professor ratios

IN ranks 9th in the nation for speech code policies

IN ranks 6th in the nation for student to faculty ratios

IN ranks 47th in the nation for Pell Grant student graduation rate gap

“Students, families, and taxpayers deserve a public higher education system that prepares graduates for career and citizenship and that stewards state funds appropriately. Lawmakers must ensure that colleges and universities meet these goals,” says Armand Alacbay, ACTA’s vice president of trustee & government affairs. “ACTA’s new tool provides policymakers with the information they need to make sound, data-driven decisions.”

Use our interactive education tool to see if institutions in Indiana are providing taxpayers with a significant return on their investment in higher education. #eduimpactIN.

ACTA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability in higher education. We receive no government funding and are supported through the generosity of individuals and foundations.

This article originally appeared here.

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Acknowledgement that some colleges lack true commitment to free expression, backhanded as it was, came in a report released late in the fall semester by the Academic Leaders Task Force on Campus Free Expression, an initiative of the Bipartisan Policy Center. The report was entitled, “Campus Free Expression: A New Roadmap.” That such a report had to be generated is an admission that free expression principles had drifted away at many colleges and universities. There would be no need for a new roadmap if college leaders knew their current location and found it suitable.

The report is a good faith effort, on one level, to address a difficult topic. It acknowledges the importance of free expression in higher education and notes the need for viewpoint diversity on campus. Clearly, a good deal of discussion and deliberation went into the report.

The report, however, is long on bureaucratese and short on specific fixes.

It doesn’t address how college administrations allowed free expression principles to dissipate over the last 30 years. It fails to identify the campus influences that led the descent of colleges into ideological gulags that lack viewpoint diversity and where certain voices are often stifled.

A key shortcoming is the report’s interest in balancing campus free expression with ongoing initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion. A university can’t claim allegiance to free expression and then say “but…” The report cautiously treads onto the minefield of DEI: “There are no simple answers or strategies addressing the perceived tension that pits academic freedom and freedom of expression against diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

There should be no tension between a free expression commitment and diversity measures. Noted free expression philosopher, Frederick Schauer wrote that free expression is a fundamental principle of human dignity. It doesn’t need to be hedged against other priorities. Schauer notes that free expression actually promotes inclusion by empowering the widest range of voices. Further, Schauer pointed out that the harms of suppressing free speech outweigh the occasional adverse effects of open discussion. But robust campus debate won’t happen in an environment where students and faculty are constantly worried about violating a speech code.

The alarm about campus free speech deterioration has been sounded over the years by organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), as well as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE’s President, Greg Lukianoff, explained the state of affairs in a recent essay, pointing out the number of colleges that impose restrictive speech codes and the alarming increase of colleges punishing professors for engaging in constitutionally protected speech. He writes, “American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal and too conformist.” A report by FIRE last fall indicated that over 80 percent of college students nationwide say they self-censor on their own campuses.

Conformity is bound to happen in environments where everybody is expected to think alike and where those who don’t are chilled from speaking. This is dangerous and antithetical to everything colleges once stood for. As the noted sociopolitical observer Walter Lippmann wrote a century ago, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” It appears that thinking alike is not only the effect of a stifled culture, it is the intent.

ACTA’s President Michael Poliakoff wrote in an email to membership that there is an “alumni revolution” brewing nationally of alums who expect their alma maters to protect free expression. He encouraged alums to mobilize for change at their colleges and to “make gifts contingent on these changes.”

Reestablishing an environment for intellectual liveliness and free expression in higher education will be difficult and, at times, painful. It will take more than reports and policy tweaks, as Princeton Professor of Politics Keith Whittington wrote in the Fordham Law Review, “Ultimately, realizing free speech principles on college campuses is a matter of culture as much as it is a matter of policy.”

Changing culture takes time, but time is now of the essence.

Nearly a generation of college students has graduated into the world not understanding how free expression empowers them and the society at large. A polarized nation reflects that lack of understanding.

This article originally appeared here.

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“University boardrooms are filled with the most knowledgeable civic and community leaders in the country, but even they need support to counteract the problem of skyrocketing tuition,” says ACTA Vice President of Trustee & Government Affairs Armand Alacbay. “HowCollegesSpendMoney.com gives trustees and the public unique insight into how expanded campus budgets adversely affect the bottom line.”

ACTA’s 2021 updates include the newest financial data from FY 2019 and 2020, as well as student services spending per student. Other features on the updated HCSM.com include the ability to search for tuition as a percentage of household medium income, administrative spending per student, instructional spending per student, inflation-adjusted tuition, and four-year graduation rates for students pursuing bachelor’s degrees.

For more information about HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, please visit ACTA’s website, watch this video overview, or take a brief, guided tour of the website.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org
PHONE: (202) 798-5425

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Moderated by Armand Alacbay, ACTA’s VP of Trustee and Government Affairs, the panel included:

• Congressman Tom Davis – Current Partner with Holland &  Knight, former Representative of VA congressional district 11, and former Rector of the George Mason University Board of Visitors.
• Amy Jones, J.D. – The Education and Human Services Policy Director for the House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee.
• James Toscano, D.L.P. – President of Partners for College Affordability and Public Trust.
• David Walsh – Former President and CEO of Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas Inc. and former trustee at the University of Central Florida.

The post Spending for Student Success: Effective Strategies for College Governing Boards to Control Costs Webinar appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

he Biden administration recently announced a $5.8 billion federal student loan cancellation through the Total and Permanent Disability program and extended the halt on student loan payments and fees until early 2022. Despite the Covid-19 relief bills that have landed even more federal money in higher education coffers, colleges and universities are pressing Congress to double the Pell grant.

The notion that student loans function as “good debt” by helping graduates build successful and happy lives is now untenable, with surveys showing that borrowers are forced to postpone marriage, purchasing a house, and retirement. The public is told that lawmakers are to blame for skyrocketing tuition costs, but blaming federal divestment for the rapid rise in tuition costs is a smokescreen: The student debt crisis is the result of more than a decade-long spending spree by colleges and universities that institutions chose.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s (ACTA) recent report, The Cost of Excess: Why Colleges and Universities Must Control Runaway Spending, found that when state legislatures cut funding to higher education during the Great Recession, colleges and universities embarked on a course of increasing tuition and inflating spending instead of cutting costs, to the detriment of students, taxpayers, and families. In a fatal pattern, colleges across the country hiked tuition costs to fund surges in spending.

No wonder student loan debt stands at $1.7 trillion. The cost of a four-year degree at a public institution has risen 178 percent since 1990. U.S. colleges and universities spent a staggering $604 billion in 2017-2018 alone, including “$385 billion at public institutions, $207 billion at private nonprofit institutions, and $12 billion at private for-profit institutions.” Between 2010 and 2018, spending on student services, administration, and instruction grew by 29 percent, 19 percent, and 17 percent, respectively.

These costs are passed directly to students in the form of higher tuition, which they take out loans to cover. At public institutions, a 1 percent increase in instruction, administration, and student services spending categories resulted in a 0.32 percent, 0.13 percent, and 0.10 percent increase in the tuition rate. In other words, “increases in spending on instruction, administration, and student services were statistically correlated with a rise in the following year’s tuition.”

Worse, higher costs correlate minimally with higher graduation rates. A 1 percent increase in instructional or administrative spending was associated with 0.10 percent and 0.05 percent increases in graduation rates. The Cost of Excess illustrates the point: “The average four-year public university charged $9,885 in tuition and had an undergraduate enrollment of 10,201 . . . to graduate an additional 72 students, it would need to spend an additional $10.2 million and charge students an additional $224 in tuition.”

Colleges are failing to direct all this spending to what actually improves academic outcomes. While the number of full-time professors has increased by just 5 percent since 2012, the number of other full-time instructional staff—including instructors, lecturers, and staff with no academic rank—has increased by 20 percent. “This pattern is consistent with the oft-cited phenomenon of the ‘adjunctification’ of higher education, where part-time, often less-credentialed (and often less-experienced) contingent positions replace full-time tenured or tenure-track instructions.” When it comes to administrative staff, ACTA’s research found that from 2012 to 2018, the number of managers increased by 9 percent and business and financial operations staff increased by 25 percent, while office and administrative support staff fell 10 percent. The report explains, “Here we see a complete reversal of the instructional staff trends. Instead of prioritizing less expensive general support staff, who are often the student-facing members of the administrative team, institutions are radically cutting the number of lower-level staffers in favor of hiring more expensive and specialized administrators.”

It is time for colleges to accept their share of responsibility for the student debt crisis by reevaluating misplaced spending priorities. ACTA provides several recommendations to help:

• Governing boards and college administrators must prioritize controlling costs.
• Combine tuition cuts or freezes with cost reductions.
• School boards and state legislatures need to make smart, data-driven decisions rather than rely solely on the information they receive from college administrators.

While lobbyists push for more funding and politicians urge radical student loan cancelation, the findings of the Cost of Excess reveal that ever-increasing Pell Grants, loan forgiveness proposals, and Covid-19 relief will not resolve the student debt crisis because they fail to address the root cause of rapid tuition increases. Lavish college spending, fueled by federal funding that comes with little to no oversight, has resulted in exorbitant tuition prices and an unmanageable debt burden for graduates. By finally reckoning with reality and implementing common-sense solutions, this problem can be fixed. America’s students and taxpayers deserve a high return on investment for the time, money, and energy they devote to earning a college degree.

Zachary Rogers is a program manager for educator outreach at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and a former Constitutional fellow at The American Conservative.

This article originally appeared here.

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