Report Highlights Gap in Student Spending by Public and Private Colleges

　　The Delta Project, an independent research organization focused on college affordability, released a report last month that charts trends in university spending from 1999 to 2009.

　　The report, which was noted this week in a Web posting by Michael Kirst ofStanford University, emphasizes that the institutions of higher education that enroll the most students tend to spend the least on their students’ schooling. The report cites community colleges as evidence of that point:

　　In 2009, community colleges educated over 6.5 million students — the single biggest sector nationwide, serving over a third of all students – yet spent about $10,000 per student annually, an amount less than any other type of college or university.

　　Private research institutions, while typically charging higher tuition rates than other types of colleges, spend, far and away, the most money on their students’ education, the report concludes.

　　In its report, the Delta Project stresses that the disparity between what a private college and a public community college spend on their students has increased significantly in recent years: “Over the past decade, higher education in the United States has grown increasingly stratified,” the report’s authors write.

　　Meanwhile, as readers of The Choice are well aware, tuition at all types of institutions has increased in recent years. The Delta Project reports that the rates of tuition increase over the last decade have far outpaced the rates of inflation, per capita personal income and most major commodities.

　　Public colleges in particular have raised their tuition sharply since the early 2000s, the report notes, due to “sharp declines in state appropriations following the 2001 recession and the failure of appropriations to return to prerecession levels.”

　　But the percentage increase – as opposed to the raw dollar increase – in public college tuition can be deceiving:

　　While tuitions in the public sector rose at a higher percentage rate than those in the private sector, the actual dollar increases for public colleges and universities were much lower. For example, the sticker price for public research universities rose 56 percent between 1999 and 2009, amounting to an average increase of $2,486. During the same time period, tuition at private research universities “only” rose 32 percent, but this equaled an average increase of $7,380. A similar pattern holds for public and private master’s institutions.

　　The greatest expense for any college, the report notes, is employee compensation, which accounts for 60 percent to 70 percent of all higher education spending.

　　In response to the scale of that expense, all types of colleges have boosted their use of part-time faculty or graduate assistant instructors over the last decade.

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