Without Financial Transparency, Colleges Mislabel Research Spending as Instructional

Public colleges spend public money, but college officials are reluctant to make information about their budgets easy to understand. That aversion to transparency makes it easier to pass non-instructional expenses along to students.

Many experts have discussed the problem. But without transparency, it can be hard to show just how much so-called instruction is actually some other activity.

“The accounting habits of research universities obscure the fact that professors are hired to perform research as well as teaching and simply record the totality of their academic year salaries as expenditures for ‘Instruction,’” wrote Charles Schwartz, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California-Berkeley.

In a 2008 report on North Carolina higher education, Andrew Gillen and Richard Vedder explained that many universities “distinguish themselves through their research, not their teaching. Thus, some ‘instructional costs’ likely include research activities, at least those funded by the institution through low teaching loads for faculty.”

But universities don’t reveal which expenditures are for actual instruction and which are for research. As a result, tuition essentially subsidizes the cost of research for professors, but students are unaware.

Faculty expenses “are the major cost driver in higher education,” according to Vance Fried, an economist at Oklahoma State University and the author of a 2011 study from the American Enterprise Institute on making colleges more efficient. Spending on faculty can be divided into instructional, research, or service. Of these, Fried says the instructional portion is the largest. Or, at least it appears to be the largest.

Thanks to an accounting convention that college administrators follow when reporting expenses, colleges lump together instructional and research spending, leaving students with the bill for activities unconnected to their education.

Nor is that bill a minor burden. Fried estimated that “perhaps 40 percent of reported instruction costs at both public and private research universities are really research costs.”

Charles Schwartz argues that it’s worse than Fried estimated. In an analysis of the University of California system, Schwartz found that instructional expenditures are double or triple the actual amount of educating students. He estimated instructional costs are actually $7,560 per student, but the UC system’s budget calculated them as $16,387 per student (with a narrow definition) or $24,200 (with a broad definition). Schwartz wasn’t low-balling the numbers, either: He included academic support, student services, and overhead in his instructional spending estimates.

Some research spending is treated differently, Schwartz noted. Currently, if academic research isn’t funded by an outside grant, it’s classified as “departmental research,” and its expenses counted as instructional. But if a professor receives outside funding, such as a grant from a nonprofit foundation, that research doesn’t count as instructional.

The problem is more pronounced at research-intensive universities. Community colleges (which engage in very little research) and teaching-focused liberal arts colleges have less distortion between research and instructional spending.

By mixing the two expenditures, college officials can argue that educating students is more expensive than it really is, which becomes an excuse to raise tuition.

It’s reasonable, after all, that students pay for their education. But it is not as reasonable that they pay for research. While a strong research record can improve a professor’s prestige in their academic specialty, the research rarely benefits undergraduates.

Students have a right to know how their tuition dollars get spent, and the public has a right to know how and what public money pays for. In an email, Schwartz said that his experience has been that higher ed leaders don’t want to touch the problem and prefer the status quo. They fear that public knowledge of how per-student costs are calculated could threaten public funding for higher ed. Regardless, “we have a moral responsibility to be much more honest about how we spend that money,” he wrote. “We need to be honest.”

“We have a moral responsibility to be much more honest about how we spend that money.”
Changing how colleges report instructional and research spending, however, is not so simple. As Schwartz noted, colleges follow accounting standards endorsed by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). The Department of Education, which publishes financial information for all schools that receive federal funds in a database called IPEDS, follows similar standards. Until NACUBO or the Department of Education direct schools to report instructional spending more accurately, it’s highly unlikely that anything will change.

An alternative approach, called Activity-Based Costing (ABC), could make it more obvious how student tuition revenue gets spent. The ABC method estimates the cost of providing a product or service rather than grouping spending by function or by department. Johnson County Community College in Kansas and the University of California system have promoted the use of ABC, but with the goal of making programs more productive rather than making the budget easier for the public to understand.

Some attention has been focused on universities’ lack of accounting transparency, but not enough. Robert Martin, a retired professor emeritus at Centre College, wrote a Martin Center report in 2009 on the “revenue-to-cost spiral” of higher ed and pointed out that “accounting standards allow administrators considerable latitude in deciding where to apply costs.” Though colleges may be non-profit entities, they still have profit-maximizing incentives like a private business. Martin argued that schools’ “creative use of accounting conventions” can mask where the money actually goes.

In his 2011 report, Vance Fried suggested that the way to lower spending was to separately fund the research and public service missions of universities—or eliminate them entirely. For public colleges with an explicit mission to provide public service and research to the people of the state who fund them, abolishing non-teaching related activities may not be feasible, but Fried’s analysis encourages colleges to be honest and open with students about how their tuition is used.

But until public colleges are more transparent about how they classify costs, researchers can only make educated guesses about why one school spends so much more than another. One thing is fairly clear, though: Research activity makes educating students more expensive.

When a public institution has more eyes watching it, its leaders tend to behave better. If the public gets better information from college officials responsible for providing an education, public trust may improve. But to build the public’s faith in state higher education, state leaders need to be more honest about how tuition and tax dollars get spent.

SOURCE 






In Georgia, Parents Win Battle Over Transgender Bathrooms at School

Jasper, Georgia, isn’t a big town. At last count, it had about 3,800 residents. So it was a big deal when 900 squeezed into the Pickens High School auditorium determined to stop Jasper from becoming the next stop in the march for transgender bathrooms.

For the small community, the time for polite conversation was over.

The residents packed into the special school board meeting were angry. They’d already made accommodations for the two students who identified as another gender, setting up single-person restrooms for anyone who wanted them. The trouble is, these kids weren’t satisfied with that compromise.

In a fiery meeting that pit Superintendent Carlton Wilson against most of the town, moms and dads like Nathan Barfield were furious. Barfield says his two children are being made uncomfortable because a handful of students want access to any bathroom.

“Most people won’t say anything because they fear retaliation,” Barfield fumed. “[But] accommodations have already been made for transgender students. This is nothing but a political stunt to gain attention.”

A raucous applause broke out, punctuated by a series of “Amens!”

“Once you give into this, you’ll open the floodgates,” warned one mom.

In places like the U.K., where this sort of gender free-for-all is commonplace, parents are distraught about the rise in their kids’ anxiety. Some girls are staying home so they don’t have to use the bathrooms with boys. Others are risking bladder infections by not drinking.

Here in the U.S., even liberal parents are calling it a “bathroom crisis.” The Atlantic, not to be confused with a conservative magazine, is the latest to sound the alarm, publishing a long feature from George Packer headlined “When the Culture War Comes for Your Kids.”

Packer tells the story of sending his son to a public school in New York City to expose him to more diversity. There, a single girl in the second grade “had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes.”

Within two years, “almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students,” he writes, adding:

Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.

Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a ‘commonsense solution.’ It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

In Jasper, the parents were fortunate. They won. Wilson saw the outpouring of opposition and reconsidered.

But despite all the Trump administration has done to put these decisions back in communities’ hands, there will always be a small army of activists who try to slip this indoctrination into your district.

When that moment comes, make sure you’re prepared. Read through Family Research Council’s “A Parent’s Guide to the Transgender Movement in Education” and make sure to watch the powerful stories from people at the Values Voter Summit who’ve suffered at the hands of this agenda.

SOURCE 





Queer and conservative students are clashing at a religious Texas university

A group of LGBTQ students at Baylor University in Waco, Texas has begun clashing with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a conservative student organization at the Baptist university.

The LGBTQ students, united under the Greek letters Gamma Alpha Upsilon (GAY), say that YAF has made baseless accusations that GAY is “is violent and [has] intentionally threatened or sabotaged their members/meetings” by tearing down YAF event fliers and disrupting meetings.

GAY asserts that individual members have acted independently in voicing displeasure over YAF’s conservative speakers. One GAY member also tore down some YAF event fliers last year, but yet again, GAY asserts that the student has publicly proclaimed that they acted entirely on their own.

The Dallas Observer says that last April, YAF hosted Matt Walsh, a conservative writer, for a speech entitled “The War on Reality: Why the Left Has Set Out to Redefine Life, Gender and Marriage.” YAF’s posters for the event showed the rainbow Pride flag with a communist-era hammer and sickle on it, an insinuation that the LGBTQ community is a fascist-like group.

Now, YAF has invited Ben Shapiro to speak on campus next month. Shapiro has insisted that “transgender is a mental disease,” attacked the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down laws criminalizing homosexuality and says that “the gay marriage caucus [is] … utilizing the law as a baton to club wrong-thinking religious people into acceptance of homosexuality.”

The university has reportedly arranged a meeting between leaders of GAY, YAF and an “equity officer” who specializes in mediating issues on discrimination, bias and diversity.

Vice President of GAY Anna Conner said:

“We’ve reached out several times [to YAF] asking for information regarding these events (of alleged harassment by GAY against YAF) so that we can help them feel safer and so we can identify whether these attacks care from one of our members.

Unfortunately, all of our requests were ignored and they continue to make these accusations which forced us to ask administration if they could set up a mediated meeting between the officers of the two clubs so we can settle these serious accusations.”

The conservative press has highlighted the fact that GAY is not a group officially recognized by the university, although over 3,000 people have petitioned Baylor to officially recognize the group.

In 2015, Baylor University quietly removed a rule from the student code of conduct banning “homosexual acts” as “a misuse of God’s gift.”

SOURCE