Report: Colleges should cut research, unpopular classes to save money

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Why are college costs rising so dramatically? Not because of football, fancy dorms or gourmet dining halls, says a new report from the American Enterprise Institute. The report says universities should cut costs by targeting research and unnecessary programs while increasing faculty productivity.

It's the latest look at how colleges and universities should reduce their expenses at a time when tuition and fees are on the rise, state funding for public higher education is seriously threatened and the cost of a college degree is increasingly burdensome for the average student.

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The paper from the institute's Future of American Education Project suggests that things like student housing and big-time athletics are a "red herring" and not a major cause of large tuition increases. Instead, the report says, colleges should focus on eliminating waste from their education budgets and focus more on teaching undergraduates.

To figure out where colleges can cut back, the report's author, Vance H. Fried, the Riata Professor of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University and author of "Better/Cheaper College: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Rescuing the Undergraduate Education Industry," created a hypothetical university.

Although it was designed to offer a top-of-the-line, comprehensive undergraduate education, the made-up College of Entrepreneurial Leadership & Society ended up with an annual cost per student of $6,705, less than half that of the average public regional college, which costs $14,073. So, how does CELS save so much cash?

It gets rid of unpopular majors and the accompanying unpopular classes, which never fill up and therefore are expensive to offer. It increases class sizes in most cases while giving students the chance to take at least one "micro-class" of eight students or fewer each semester. It dramatically reduces the number of administrators.

CELS faculty also teach more classes. Fried notes that a common teaching load for a tenure-track faculty member at a research university is six credit hours a semester, with release time for research. Fried argues that research release is a waste of time for teaching-oriented colleges.

In fact, he advocates eliminating funding for research altogether at public regional colleges.

"From society's viewpoint, the costs of university research may be justified because it provides a public good, generating new innovation and knowledge in fields like medicine, engineering, and the hard sciences," Fried writes. "However, these costs do not do much for educating most students."

Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, said Fried's report hit the nail on the head, for the most part.

"I think (he's) quite right that the typical focus on auxiliaries and dorms is a red herring," Wellman said. "Most of the savings (he) imagines come through different use of faculty and faculty productivity – that's the meat of it – and you either agree that's something that can be done without sacrificing quality or not."

But Wellman questioned the idea that even the smaller universities can just scrap research.

"We probably subsidize departmental research more than we should, and we probably have too many research institutions," she said. "But is it possible to eliminate the research function from a teaching institution and do a good job? No, I don't think so. It's part of quality. You don't want faculty who learned it once in grad school and never picked up a paper again."

In California, a number of universities are looking for ways to cut costs. UC Berkeley's Operational Excellence program is trying to reduce expenses, with the help of the consulting firm Bain & Co. In January, the program's executive committee said it would cut $20 million by cutting nearly 150 staff positions and eliminating unnecessary management layers.

Higher Ed | Daily Report