Page 299 - Crisis in Higher Education

Reshaping Faculty’s Role • 269

disciplinary core courses, which in turn generate larger surpluses
than major and minor courses. The subsidization of higher level
undergraduate courses may be justified by considering that students
who graduate eventually take all three types of courses. Even though
dropouts never receive this advantage, they could have. This sub-
sidy provides community and technical colleges an opportunity to
attract students because they have low tuition for general education
and disciplinary core courses, which can transfer to universities.
What cannot be shown as clearly but can be inferred from the data
is that undergraduate programs provide meaningful subsidies for
graduate programs. Should they?

12.4 RECONCILING UNDERGRADUATE
AND GRADUATE STUDIES
Masters and PhD courses usually enroll fewer students than undergraduate
courses, typically half as many or less. Even though graduate programs
15
tend to have higher tuition and fees than undergraduate programs, the
additional revenue usually does not cover the higher costs. For example,
in-state tuition at UCLA was $11,220 in 2016–2017, while the tuition and
fees for in-state graduate programs was $16,325. 16,17 Comparable numbers
at the University of Iowa were $8,974 and $10,579, respectively. Graduate
tuition often varies by program, and the amount used for Iowa is from
engineering. 18,19

1. Higher faculty costs: In graduate programs, instructional costs are
much higher because most faculty members who teach are tenured.
Professional faculty members often teach in graduate programs that
train engineers, businesspersons, and other professionals, and they
are usually paid much more than instructional faculty who rarely
teach graduate courses. Graduate programs rely heavily on research
so they must fund these efforts by tenured faculty. This is part of
the 40% reduction used to calculate faculty cost for teaching under-
graduate courses.
2. Small classes: Master’s courses tend to have enrollments in the
teens or lower, and PhD courses are even smaller, usually in single
digits. So in addition to higher faculty costs, average revenue for
15