Should URI Faculty get a 3 percent raise? Let me tell you a story and you decide.
URI is the big kahuna among the three institutions run by the Board of Governors. It educates about 16,000 students, around 10,000 of whom are from Rhode Island. Researchers there pull in about $80 million each year in research funding, largely from federal sources, like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, but also from corporate sources.
There are some important financial issues going on at URI, and none of them are about raises for faculty. One is that state dollars continue to decline in importance to URI’s budget. Twenty years ago, state general revenue funding of $57 million provided about a quarter of the overall budget of $214 million. Today, we provide $75 million for a budget of $705 million, or just a tiny bit more than 10% [B3-46], making URI essentially a private university with a small public subsidy. State contributions over that time grew at an average rate of 1.3 percent per year while the overall budget grew more than four times as fast.
The Governor is proposing to raise the state’s contribution by a little more than $3 million, which is $2 million more than level funding, so that will hike the percentage of the budget contributed by the state a smidge.
But wait, shouldn’t we be concerned about growth of more than 6 percent a year? Why yes, we should. This is a national problem; universities across the country are seeing this kind of cost inflation. Tuitions are pretty much the only thing around that rivals health care costs in the inflation department.
So what is URI spending its money on? Answer: Not professors. To teach more or less the same number of students, URI has almost a hundred fewer professors than it did in 1994. (I’ve used the 1994 personnel budget in this, because they changed the presentation that year and it matches the 2013 presentation better.) In 1994, the “Education and General” part of the budget had 623 professors of the three ranks (full, assistant, and associate), and in 2013, we expect to have 540. The collection of all full professors have seen their pay climb about 2.8% per year over that time.
Looking at the administration shows a different picture. The top couple dozen administrators—the deans, provosts, and vice presidents—have seen their pay go up an average of 4.5 percent per year. There aren’t more people at the top level of administration, but in 1994, there were 65 people with the title of “Director” of something (or assistant director), and in 2013, there are 89. Individually, their salaries didn’t grow quite as fast as all the deans’ and vice-presidents, but because there are so many more of them, they also saw approximately a 4.5 percent average growth rate.
That kind of growth is high, but doesn’t make it to 6%. How about capital projects? In 1994, URI spent $6.4 million on construction and debt service. This year we’re looking at $68 million, and next year it will come down to $59 million. This is a growth rate of 13 percent a year! If you walk around one of the URI campuses, you’ll see lots of new buildings. But few of them are very crowded.
The other huge growth is in the account that provides student aid to cover rising tuition costs. Tuition this year is expected to go up 9.5% as it has for a number of years in the past. Consequently, the aid bill also rises very fast.
So that’s the story: declining aid from the state, declining numbers of professors, increases in administrator pay and numbers, construction of fancy new buildings, and huge increases in tuition. The construction part makes it seem like investment, but all together, does that really sound like an investment in education to you?
There’s another dimension here. By 1995, URI had already lost a tremendous proportion of its state aid budget. In 1989, state dollars covered 58 percent of the budget, but by 1994 it was down to a quarter. This was a crisis. The University (under its new President Robert Carothers) responded by doing a revenue analysis of all the departments, to see which ones made money, and they abandoned most of the programs that didn’t. They stopped admitting students in 47 degree-granting programs, including 16 in science and engineering. From a financial perspective, this seemed to make sense, though it was virtually unprecedented in American university administration.
From an academic perspective, the benefit was hardly as clear. Consider philosophy. URI still teaches some introductory level philosophy courses, so they still need some faculty. So if you love philosophy enough to pursue a doctorate in it, what URI has to offer you is a career of teaching classes to students who don’t really care about it. This immediately makes URI a second choice for anyone in that field. Maybe you don’t care about philosophy, but there were 46 other programs that got the same treatment. Is that the best way to get good faculty? How about not giving them money?
Now I learn from a 2010 “Research and Economic Development” presentation to the URI Strategic Budget and Planning Council that over the ten years from 1996 to 2006, URI saw its research funding grow by 29 percent. Over that same time, UNH saw its research funding up by 271 percent, UVM’s went up 162 percent, and UConn saw its funding rise 136 percent. (All larger than the national average of 117 percent.) This was immediately following that downsizing. Do you think maybe this could have been related to a shrunken faculty? Downsized programs?
The presentation was clearly meant to show how worried the University should be about this poor showing. After all, after educating students, research is most of the point of an institution like URI. Research brings in grant funding, research builds prestige, and research is where the real economic benefit of universities comes from.
But not to worry. The folks who put together this presentation had a plan, which was, I gather, put into action. Their plan: Create a new Vice President.
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So state contributions, Federal research grants, subsidized Federal Stafford Loans, and Pell Grants have contributed to skyrocketing administration and facility construction costs while legitimate costs like faculty remain fixed. How surprising it is that a nearly unlimited stream of government cash has created a bubble in higher education and the money has not been used responsibly by those receiving it. When have we ever seen this happen before?
I’ll remember this the next time I hear progressives complaining about how little URI gets from the state and how contributions should be increased to fight tuition increases. But let me guess, if we just pass another law saying that X percent has to go to subsidizing tuition, then everything will be okay.
At least fiscal conservatives and progressives can agree on one thing – it’s the students and taxpayers who are getting screwed.
Interesting analysis/point of view. But it won’t lead to any action, any changes.
Thank you Tom for raising questions about relative allocations to the professors who deliver the curriculum, especially in view of student population growth vs. downsizing the full time faculty. I am grateful for both your efforts and your canny assessment.
Because of your efforts I would hate to see you wrongly accused of disregarding the humanities by not actually doing the homework on your argument, I am offering a few gentle corrections about the state of philosophy at URI.
URI does not merely offer “a few introductory” Philosophy courses. We have a full fledged and rigorous major and have done, uninterrupted, for decades. It is true, however, that we offer just a few Religious Studies courses, all at the lower level, and that we have no major in that subject. Is it possible that you confused the two, since Religious Studies courses are by and large offered by philosophy faculty?
URI currently has ten full-time faculty in philosophy and another ten talented part-time faculty of whom we are very appreciative. Five current or previous Philosophy faculty have won Teaching Excellence Awards. Several of us have won national grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy. One of us was a Rhodes Scholar, one was a Marshall Scholar and a Truman Scholar, many went to Ivy league or equivalent graduate programs and more than half of the full time faculty has published a book in the last few years.
The URI Philosophy major appeals to some of the university’s best students. We have one of the very highest rates of summa cum laude graduates in the university with a strong showing of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi initiates relative to each inducted class.
The current administration is very supportive of philosophy, especially as we carry a very high student-faculty ratio in the university’s General Education Program, where we teach thousands of students at all levels – not just introductory – per year.
I believe you might be confusing the elimination of an underfunded and underenrolled masters degree program back in the 1990′s with our undergraduate degree program, which is (like philosophy programs everywhere) small but actually growing. We also maintain a thriving minor program.
Because we offer a strong major, URI places some students as fully funded graduate students in other philosophy programs each year. We also attract and place pre-medical, pre-law and pre-business students, since philosophy majors score #1 on the GRE exam, in the top three of the LSAT exam, very high on the MCAT medical admissions exam and very high on the GMAT business school exam. We are always, hands down, the strongest humanities subject on all of these assessments. Furthermore, many of our graduates go right into the workplace and excel due to the acquisition of superb analytical and writing skills.
It is indeed true that, upon enrolling, almost no students have “any interest” in philosophy. Imagine?!?! Given the brute fact of everyone’s eventual death, one thinks there might be SOME interest in it, but no matter. The fact that we BEGIN with almost no students from any given freshman class, but FINISH with more than fifty majors and at least that many minors by the close of each year, is testimony to the success of our department in cultivating that interest that students lack when they enter. One point of value in such cultivation is to undertake careful research when making important and clear arguments, which i am sure you appreciate.
Thank you for your attention to our situation down here. We appreciate your intentions and invite you to reach out to those of us on the faculty if you require further information about our current situation.
Cheryl Foster, Chair
URI Department of Philosophy
No knock meant to philosophers, philosophy, or the philosophy program. It was the ending of the graduate program to which I was referring, though you’re correct that I was unaware how many majors there are now. Though many professors find their satisfaction in teaching undergraduates, there are those who find a lively graduate program is what they need to satisfy their intellectual needs. It’s those who I don’t think will look for work in Kingston.