On average, full-time faculty members at the University of New Mexico’s
Gallup campus were being subsidized to the tune of $10,554 apiece.
The word subsidization, in this context, refers to the subsidy from the university and not from government per se. That’s the difference between the cost of the professor minus the revenue he or she brings in from tuition. Here is the full article, with further links. I am not sure how this estimate allocates various fixed costs (does a professor have to "pay for" the lawn care service?), but for the time being does that matter? The important truth is that while universities think in these terms all the time, they are rarely if ever willing to make their implicit estimates public or see how those estimates might be improved.
This sort of reasoning assumes that higher education is a private good that should be financed entirely by students as opposed to in any way a public good. Should we apply this sort of reasoning to elementary and secondary schools as well?
I have yet to ever meet a college administration who knew anything about cost accounting, so I give such numbers very little credibility.
This looks like a useful piece of precisely wrong accounting. The Accountancy Professors will be able to use it as an example of how not to cost.
There may be a way to find out how much the professors within a given department are subsidized by their universities using published information. Look at the required course curriculum for undergraduates and see which and how many out-of-major classes are required by the university for graduation.
If the university’s education program is balanced, then all academic majors will have roughly equal exposure to various disciplines outside their primary fields (for example: a Biology major is required to take an English class and an English major is required to take a Biology class).
But, if the students in one discipline are required to take classes in another, without a reciprocal requirement for the students in the other field to take classes in the first discipline, then the students in the first discipline are being required by the university to subsidize the other discipline. The more one-way the requirements, the more the field is being subsidized. This would be how the university’s administrators communicate the relative values they place upon the various academic majors.
Cost accounting gone wild. I don’t know how they did their calculation, but it looks like they didn’t take into account the nature of a university. Without professors no one would go there. No amount of TAs can make up for that.
CHSW beat me to the punch: the post above doesn’t take into account grants certain professors bring in. I remember reading in The Billion Dollar Molecule (the story of Vertex Pharmaceuticals) that the founder of the company bragged, when he was a chemistry professor, of bringing in enough grant money to pay for the English department.
Maybe somebody could have some fun with a spreadsheet and alternate general-ed requirements.
I wish philosophers would spend more of their time conforming their ideas to the way the world works rather than being engaged in impractical thought exercizes that end up with contrary conclusions and justifying those conclusions.
This is sort of ridiculous. UNM-Gallup pays the professors what the labor market will bear; they hire a sufficient number of professors to teach the number of students they aim to enroll; and politics determines how much of the operating costs are raised from tuition, and how much from general tax revenues. The university doesn’t subsidize its employees, it subsidizes its product.
I have a great idea — fire all the professors, and then the university will start making money. Why are they paying for all these losers? Don’t they know the simplest of all profit maximizing conditions — making the value of the marginal product equal in all internal activities? Jeez, why don’t they get with it?
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