University budgets: where's the money going?

Many of us have been wondering why higher education has become so expensive, even though faculty duties have changed little and compensation has remained flat or worse when adjusted for inflation. Here is some hard data:

Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.

During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.

There has been a dramatic shift from full-time to part-time hires among the instructors, however, which is noted later in the article.

The data, based on United States Department of Education filings from more than 2,782 colleges, come from 1987 to 2007, before the current recession prompted many colleges to freeze their hiring.

The line between "managers" and "support staff" may not be the most conceptually useful distinction here; a lot of the "support" positions would clearly fall into the administrative bloat category:

The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements college face.

From the NY Times. Big question for me is if there might be room for a counter-trend of back-to-basics in higher education. What if one were to found (or re-found) a college without all the 2009 bells and whistles, turning back the clock thirty years or so in terms of both administrative structure and tuition rates?

US soldiers in Nazi slave camp

A photo from 1945, recently given to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

The photograph is a jarring image that shows Nazi Party members, shovels in hand, digging up graves of American soldiers held as slaves by Nazi Germany during World War II.

While the men dig up the site, U.S. soldiers investigating war crimes stand over them. Two crosses with helmets placed atop them -- the sign of a fallen soldier -- are visible. Two Germans are knee deep in mud. Another, with a handlebar mustache, has the look of a defeated man. The bodies of 22 American soldiers were found in at least seven graves, according to the photographer.

On the back of the photo is written, "Nazi Party members digging up American bodies at Berga."

Two of the Berga commanders were tried and sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted in 1948 and were released in the 1950s. A third the Soviets got; he, of course, was promptly tried and hanged. Full article here.

Firefighting museum burns -- last of Gorham factory buildings

A raging fire of suspicious origin Wednesday afternoon destroyed the old carriage house of the former Gorham silver manufacturing plant off Elmwood Avenue that was being converted into a firefighters’ museum.

The carriage house, the last standing building of the industrial complex that once stretched over a 37-acre area between Mashapaug Pond and Adelaide Avenue in the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood, was being restored by Providence firefighters to turn it into the Providence Fire Museum. . .

The Providence Fire Department Historical Society had planned to fill the museum with memorabilia and fire apparatus going back more than a century including antique trucks that were used in the late 1880s.

From the Providence Journal.