Of Serfs and Lords by Richard Kelsey

Author:Richard Kelsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475837919
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-07-31T12:36:04+00:00

73Chapter 9

Revenue Predators

Have Colleges Become Revenue Predators?

If so, who is the prey?

Greed is good—so famously said the character Gordon Gekko in the classic 1980s movie Wall Street. Putting aside the philosophical debate on “greed” and what it is, in higher education we must examine colleges and their race for revenues. As we talked about in chapter 6, colleges are in an amenities war. They are doing whatever they can to attract students. Competition is good. Making schools compete for you is good. However, do we want schools competing for us based on creature comforts or on academic excellence?

In modern America, schools are no longer merely competing for outstanding students, they are angling to attract revenue. Why are they doing this now when tuitions are so high? Schools are chasing students because students are the vehicle for easy money. They are hunting unsuspecting students because that cheap federal money given as subsidized loans spends well, as does the money of upper-middle-class families with substandard students looking for any college degree. The difference between trying to attract great students and hunting revenue is quite stark.

A great university attracts students based on its academic reputation. Schools at the top of the academic food chain have no problem attracting high-quality students and ample applications from other applicants who are either completely or nearly qualified prospects for that institution. Even without their endowments, Duke, UVA, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard, among others, are never going out of business. The competition for students among those institutions is a competition for the best and brightest, for the most part. It is not a hunt for customers and revenue.

Isn’t that what colleges should be doing? Shouldn’t colleges be investing in quality education and building a first-class reputation, either locally, 74regionally, or nationally? If not-for-profit colleges and universities were really “not-for-profit,” wouldn’t the sole factor in investment and recruitment be strong academics and programs designed to raise academic standards and reputation? Make no mistake; it’s fine for a university to invest in infrastructure and amenities as part of a strategy to improve its appeal and to attract quality students to its campus—if attracting them is for the purpose of landing great students, rather than merely getting revenue any way it can, just so that it can pay its faculty and administrators.

In many universities, and indeed in some colleges and departments within universities, the fight to attract students is all about what we in administration call FTE. An FTE is a “full-time equivalent” revenue source. A university that spends its time counting FTE instead of thinking about applicants as students is usually a revenue predator. A student is a human being seeking knowledge, an education, and a degree with the imprimatur of the institution he or she attends.

Before choosing a college, you should want to know if you are a valued, high-quality student, or merely revenue to feed the beast. The best way to evaluate whether an institution is a revenue predator is to look at its academic quality ratings, its size, its endowment, and the number of ancillary, nondegree programs it is pushing.

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