Delta Cost Project Casts Doubt on On-Line Education Strategy

The Delta Project's new report, "Trends in Higher Education Spending, 1998-2008," has data to fuel a dozen major debates about higher education policy. One finding is particularly relevant to the much-discussed proposal to get UC into the on-line education business.

The interest among senior managers in on-line education was wedded in public comments to the belief that UC was weighed down by the costs of academic personnel, which was used to explain the need for pay cuts. On-line ed was thought capable of reducing these.  The Delta report shows that all types of institutions already spent less on instruction in 2008 than they had 10 years before. For public research univresities, this meant a small drop from 62.8% to 61.7% of the total (Figure 9).  Efficiencies are always possible, but instruction isn't the place where costs have grown.

No less interesting is how overly-administrative UC is when compared to its peers.

UCOP's own study showed that three categories of administrative personnel - professional support staff, managers and senior professionals, and senior managers - constitute fully three quarters of UC's payroll. By contrast, the average for public research universities is 37%, adding student services, academic, and institutional support rolled together. Last December,  Ákos Róna-Tas showed that the growth of senior management has greatly outstripped that of ladder rank faculty. Methodologies vary, but the findings do not.

Were UCOP serious about cost savings, it would have spent this year trying to reengineer UC administration.  It's still not to late to start.