What all is tuition paying for anyway? It's not paying for the professors, since they have to fund themselves with grants. It's not paying for research overhead, because that also get claimed from grants. It's not paying for extracurriculars, since those get funded by donations, student contributions, and revenue. It's not paying for new facilities, since those all get named after donors.
It certainly doesn't seem to be paying a lot for post docs, grad students, (who are either contributing their own tuition or getting it contributed by someone else anyway), adjuncts, or other non-professor faculty, since they famously make starvation wages.
I'm being a bit facetious, since tuition has "transparent" line items stating how much goes to what, but university revenue streams are a bit baffling. Mountains of money go in, and mountains of money go out, but the two seem to have a very indirect relationship at times.
And I know, the common answer is that it goes to some nebulous "administration", but the executive administrative staff, while reasonably well compensated, make a pretty small portion of the overall budget, and the rest of the admin seems like it could be more reasonably be split into the actual services and departments they're administering, which, again, seem adequately funded between grants, donors, and tuition. So I'm not clear what all this ambiguous "administration" that's not executive staff and not tied directly to, say, health insurance (which gets paid for as part of tuition) or research (grants). What are they administering??
It certainly doesn't seem to be paying a lot for post docs, grad students, (who are either contributing their own tuition or getting it contributed by someone else anyway), adjuncts, or other non-professor faculty, since they famously make starvation wages.
I'm being a bit facetious, since tuition has "transparent" line items stating how much goes to what, but university revenue streams are a bit baffling. Mountains of money go in, and mountains of money go out, but the two seem to have a very indirect relationship at times.
And I know, the common answer is that it goes to some nebulous "administration", but the executive administrative staff, while reasonably well compensated, make a pretty small portion of the overall budget, and the rest of the admin seems like it could be more reasonably be split into the actual services and departments they're administering, which, again, seem adequately funded between grants, donors, and tuition. So I'm not clear what all this ambiguous "administration" that's not executive staff and not tied directly to, say, health insurance (which gets paid for as part of tuition) or research (grants). What are they administering??