Up Closed and Personal
Ninety-five percent of classes at a university have 20 students. What is the likelihood that your child will be in a classroom with 19 other students?
As the demographic apocalypse continues unimpeded, I don’t blame college presidents for hiring marketing folks to try to sell the above stat. The numbers are accurate, but your guess regarding the chance that your student will be in a small class is way off. As we’ll see.
But first let’s be sensitive to the perspective of college officials. A chicken is an egg’s way of making another chicken. A full first-year class of students is a college’s way of avoiding bankruptcy. It’s that simple. Tuition equals salaries. Empty dorm rooms mean there’s not enough money. Several hundred million dollars in the endowment fund might seem like a helpful number. Until all those paychecks need to be written. Cafeteria workers, adjunct faculty, full-time professors, librarians, maintenance workers, employees in the admissions office, development fund personnel, coaches—all need to be paid a living wage. And making interest payments on that no-longer-new student union, basketball arena, or dorm room mortgaged when coffers and classrooms were full is not optional. Tuition remains the biggest income source.
The big dogs have big sticker prices. Sixteen institutions have topped $100K/year, $400,000+ for four years: Duke, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, Barnard, New York University, Washington University in Saint Louis and a few other elites. Not all families pay the asking price; indeed, few do. But what is a “second tier, not second rate” institution to do? These colleges have the same expenses as the “name” colleges, but not the star power. These good places can’t realistically charge comparable numbers. So what do they do? Figuring that “half a loaf is better than none” they discount their tuitions. Significantly.
And the death spiral accelerates. As competition for bodies intensifies, colleges accept students who don’t contribute enough to cover costs. You can’t blame parents for accepting tuition discounts (termed “merit scholarships”). You can’t blame university administrators for taking what they can get. But the list of closures is heartbreaking. The shut downs aren’t just no-name business colleges, abstruse art schools, or obscure-sect religious institutions. I’ll make it personal: Hampshire College in Massachusetts where I placed my best friend’s daughter ten years ago; Birmingham Southern in Alabama where my brilliant dermatologist was undergrad; St. Andrew’s College in North Carolina, the first institution to be completely wheelchair accessible; Mills College in Oakland, CA where ironically the young women wore tee-shirts “better dead than co-ed.” Be careful what you wish for. All out of business.
Which brings us back to the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” in the first paragraph of this essay. Of course college folks would want to sell “95 % of classes have 20 students or fewer.” But if one class has 420 students, then there is a less than 50% chance that your child is in one of the small ones. The “average” class size is 40, not 20. (19 x 20 + 1 x 420 = 800. Eight hundred students divided by 20 classes is 40 students per class.) There are 380 kids (19 × 20) in the small classes, but there are 420 students in the large lecture hall.
Think my example of 420 students in one classroom is hyperbolic? The University of Illinois packs 900 students into an introductory computer science course; the University of Pittsburg has one thousand students in one lecture hall; Cornell University in New York has 1600 students in intro psych.
I guess the good news, such as it is, is that there are tremendous academic bargains for individual families looking for extraordinary educations at discounted prices. The not-so-good news is that we are losing exceptional institutions that shaped the intellectual, social, and moral development of generations of students.
