WHO KNEW?

I do a little armchair speculating and in comes not a breath but a hurricane of fresh air from the real world.  I received this today from a reader of this blog.  It is self-explanatory.  I feel like an MSNBC commentator on the pandemic who just interviewed Dr. Fauci.  I think the revolution is going to take a bit longer than I had hoped.

                                                                       Guest Post

Back in 2015—a few years after Prof. Wolff commented on a chapter of my dissertation thanks to a comment I left on this very blog—I got a job as a program director for a group of credit-bearing programs in the continuing education division of a large public university. (Mine was a smallish unit in a very large continuing education division.) My role was to plan and staff around 200 open-enrollment courses per year, taught by ~120 adjunct instructors, across the humanities and social sciences. My unit had around 4,000 enrollments per year. The divison's mandate is to be self-supporting: it receives no state funding for any of its offerings (and reimburses the main university for any expenses used, e.g. classroom space).

I'm going to keep names out of this post so that google results don't come back to haunt me in some way down the line, but all the numbers below are actual numbers, from a 2017 planning spreadsheet.

I went from the armchair to monitoring enrollments, managing budgets, and making really, really painful decisions to cancel courses due to low enrollment. I left after 3 years, and while I'm happy to have learned a lot from the experience, I'm also happy not to have to cancel people's classes (and income) for low enrollment any more.

We were not the leanest possible higher ed organization that could exist in the actual world, but we were pretty darn lean. Keeping that in mind, you might find it interesting to hear some of the actual numbers that went into making what we called "go/no-go" decisions at the individual section level.

Consider one individual course. Make it a social science course where we can expect better enrollments, which gives us a little more breathing room to pay the instructor more (which we'll have to, if we want to get an economist to expend their valuable labor teaching a continuing ed course).

Predict total enrollment of 15 students. Tuition (in 2017) was $698 for the course. (We really did try to keep our fees low and accessible.) You'll gross $10,740 in tuition.

Let's pay the instructor, say, $3528 for the course. That's on the low end of market value for a quarter-length course, but we'll probably be able to staff the course.

There's your direct expense. Now comes the overhead:

* You'll need to allocate $1,960 for departmental staffing overhead. This pays for the salaries and fringe benefits for myself (the program director) and 1.5 department administrators (one full time, one splitting half their time between this and another program). Those administrators onboard instructors into the payroll system and the online learning management system; answer student inquiries about our courses and do advising on, e.g., where our courses are accepted for transfer credit (which is the reason many students take our courses); and complete many other clerical tasks (which are unevenly distributed among courses and instructors: some instructors are very, shall we say, high maintenance, while others are basically totally independent). That also includes a fraction of the salary for a 'business services' finance person who has a much larger portfolio and processes financial transactions—an accountant, basically (moneybags the continuing education nonprofit administrator must be so lucky!). THE KICKER with these costs: all these people are on payroll regardless, so if enrollments start to decline (as they did when I was there: the decline in humanities enrollments hit us like it did everyone else) and you offer fewer courses, the expense allocated to each individual course goes up rather quickly.

* $3,692 for an "Administrative and Institutional" allocation: this pays for the general institution-wide expenses: electricity, lights, furniture, repainting once in a while, etc. Also the dean's office, HR, the registrar, a student record database system (which is not cheap!) to make sure you can get students accurate transcripts, and many other things. For a time when I was there, the institution was also trying to sock away enough money to pay for our office building to be retrofitted to be seismically sound. Also, in general, as a nonprofit you want to have around 6–12 months of expenses in reserves so that a downturn won't force you to close overnight. All that saving-for-a-rainy-day-and-maybe-not-to-die-in-an-earthquake funding comes out of this bucket.

* A marketing assessment of $1466: this can seem fairly high but is absolutely essential if you're doing course-by-course open enrollment as we did. I don't care how wonderful your course is, if you don't market it, too few people will enroll and you'll have to cancel. This covers creating a course catalog and an institutional website as well as some course-by-course marketing through e-mails, social media ads, etc.

* A classroom assessment of $1,047, which, at the time, weirdly, was socialized across all courses—online or in person. The idea was to remove incentives for program directors to choose online or in-person modalities based on cost, so that we'd be more responsive to what students actually want.

* An ITAV assessment of $209: this pays for that IT guy. Actually, a really good IT department that went above and beyond to support our mission.

* An assessment by the Office of the President (yes, for the whole system) of $127. Sheesh.

Overall, you have $3528 in instructor expenses and $8036 in overhead. That's a little top-heavy because our enrollments were dropping, which meant fewer courses running, which meant the staff costs (the first item in my list) were higher per course. The "Administrative and Institutional" costs were also a little high when I was there; when I heard people talking about the absolute leanest we had ever been, they would cite a number about 20% lower.

Anyway: with 15 students, and all costs allocated, this course "loses" $824. To show that the course is self-supporting, you'd need 2 more students to enroll. I'd probably run the course with 15 students anyway, since a lot of those costs would stay around even if we cancel the course; but to have a healthy unit, it would be good to have higher average enrollments (or, sigh, cut staffing costs).

Now, a caveat: with a large number of part-time adjunct instructors, we needed slightly more staff positions to handle academic planning (me) and making sure that all the clerical items get done (the other staff) than you'd find in a regular university context. I was the only one you could call overpaid; the other admin staff worked their butts off to keep things running.

I'm not trying to defend this way of thinking about higher education. Still, I found it eye-opening to be in a context where I was expected to systematically think about all of our costs, which people had attempted to distribute in a somewhat-reasonable way to specific courses.

WOW, 1,000 words? I guess I had some things to get off my chest…