I have never seen any conflict between research and quality education. There is conflict between research and giving faculty more students to teach; but assigning higher course-loads or more students per section is *not* aiding quality education. I’ve taught at an Ivy League (Brown, 2 years), at top-tier state schools (Oregon State, 6 years; University of Missouri, 1 year), at a low-tier state (Coastal Carolina College–now University–1 year) and at a mid-ranked private school (Saint Louis University, going on 20 years); so i think i have a pretty wide perspective on things. Quality education flows from the commitment of the administration as communicated to the faculty. Generally, it’s faculty-driven, to the extent the faculty can get commitment from the administration.

All faculty, generally without exception, want to improve the quality of education, and that manifestly includes the top researchers, the vast middling group of researchers, and those without much of a research agenda.

You should never say, “They are maximizing something, but I just don’t know what.” You are way too smart not to recognize the epistemological implications of that statement.

I think that good universities may be satisficing on two dimension: (1) a vague sense of social justice held by some admissions officers; and (2) keeping their faculty happy. When I was on the faculty senate at Cornell, we had perennial discussions about the fact that raising tuition brought in almost no extra money because of the financial aid policy. So do not even begin to think of tuition as the price of going to college for the typical kid in the Ivy League.

For example, Brown’s endowment gives its administrators the luxury of producing a substandard education. The real question is why mediocre universities don’t compete on the quality dimension by offering serious undergraduate educations. The answer is probably that professional incentives mitigate against excellent teaching at the expense of a mediocre research. Also, an excellent education is not based upon a democratic vision of society, since not all students stand to benefit from it.

This leaves the question about why there are not more good technical trade schools. My guess is that the future belongs to high schools that train plumbers well.

Eric

” The reason that initially selective colleges are much more
selective today is that, in the past, students’ choices were very sensitive to the
distance of a college from their home, but today, students, especially high-aptitude
students, are far more sensitive to a college’s resources and student body.”

That is to say, while there’s lots of data about schools, there’s no data I can see about whether highly qualified students are more apt to go farther from home than they used to. Indeed, my experience is that this is not wholly true: Back in 1969, at my high school (an extremely high-performance one, with 90% of graduates going on to college and 50% being NQMST-qualified), it was routine for the better students (say, the top quarter, constituting a hefty fraction of the best students in the St. Louis region) to seek to attend nationally ranked schools all over the nation. There was some pressure not to go too far away (for instance, I applied to two midwest schools and one east coast, rather than one midwest and one on either coast, on that account); but applying to local schools was seen as the lazy way out, not what most of us “elites” were interested in doing.

Even way back then, there was a lot of compensation available (including substantial amounts from the national government) to make up for the extra expense in going away from home; in fact, I think there was more of it then, and that the 1970s showed a decrease in the amount of aid students typically received. A proper study of the effects on student college decisions would include careful review of monetary aid available from all sources.

All schools have their mission. It may be making money; it may educating the top (or the middle or the bottom) third of the state’s high school graduates; it may be making students “men and women for others” (the Jesuit mission at my school, Saint Louis University). It is crucial to observe these strong differences in mission among schools, as they greatly influence the sources of support for the school, the students they attract, and the policies the schools follow.

Steve, I have to say that I cannot agree with the comment about non-top schools becoming less selective. I don’t have anything more than anecdotal evidence, so I may be out of my reckoning; but the anecdotes include a fairish number of schools (including my own) that are decidedly middle-tier but are experiencing an increase in academic standards for incoming classes. My suspicion is that there is a complex dynamic among levels of schools, with significant numbers of students shifting down from, say, the second dectile (i.e., students who never had a shot at the top 10% but could have got in the second 10%) down to lower-tuition schools in the fourth or fifth dectile, schools that are still respectable enough to attract these students–and which thereby *become* better schools, as better students encourage more rigorous teaching in the classroom, and graduating students then report greater satisfaction with the school.

There’s a lot of dynamics going on here. I’ve seen very strong increase in the size and quality of SLU’s student body and in SLU’s quality of education (and in its grant-getting ability) in the two decades I’ve been here, and at the same time I’ve been reading about the increased fortunes at some of Missouri’s second-tier system of state schools. I also think that I’m likely to see only the positive news, so there’s probably a lot of backsliding at other places that I’ve just not heard about. It also has to be noted that there is not a fixed pool of candidates for entering schools: We have strong increases in attracting foreign undergraduates, and the percentage of people (and not only recent high school graduates) deciding to attend 4-year schools, and to finish 4-year programs, has been increasing. Simple models are going to be strongly out of whack.

In fact, at the highest levels of decision making, it is au courant for administrators to declaim that money is the least important issue under discussion, that the only real consideration is the effect on the “mission”. At the wealthiest institutions, that is, actually, the case.

Pricing, then, is affected by numerous factors. For top private institutions, which really could charge almost anything they wanted, constraints are more a matter of public perception than anything else. If Harvard were to hit $200K, it is likely that there would be almost as much public outcry as Goldman Sachs bankers taking home $17B this year.

For top public institutions, this is an even stronger incentive to maintain reasonable annual tuition increases. Although they typically receive just a small percentage of their funding from the state, the state often is often quite influential in pricing setting discussions.

Also, below, say, the top 5 most popular schools, there is a modest price elasticity. It can be shown that when one institution’s price rises substantially above it’s peers, relative application activity slows. The market is competitive at some (high) level.

Pricing is not really an issue to consider when attempting to attract the best students. The best students get a free ride, no matter what their background. The less talented pay the price.

Finally, when you talk about optimization, the most important asset of any university is its reputation. _That_ is what is being optimized. And that is what enables the Harvards to charge whatever they will.

First of all, was my experience one that is normal for colleges? It was definitely common to Rochester students, but things such as meal plans and housing issues certainly have been complaints at other schools. Could it be that academics and research are such a focus that quality of life for the undergraduates isn’t really a concern?

Professor Landsburg:
Do you know what Rochester pays to subsidize our education? The total of fees, room and board, and tuition was about $50K when I left, but the average student must have paid significantly less than that. Even if the average only paid half, another $80K on top of that would come to over $100,000 per year per student. Could it really have cost anywhere near that for what I got?

Here is what really confuses me though:
The University of Rochester got my money while I went there. Even if they don’t subsidize their students at all and actually make some off of us, that was peanuts compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the average graduate will have at his discretion over the rest of his life. Why not spend a bit more on competent management, on raising our quality of life, on whatever it takes to have us leaving happy and grateful, rather than bitter?

Maybe I’m overestimating the dependency on alumni contributions. Maybe a few years out, people forget the problems they had and only remember the good. I know, however, that the school got its last cent from me just before my senior year began when I paid my last bill and it would not have taken much money on their part to have kept me a happy potential donor.