BY JOSEPH G. RAMSEY
Welcome back to school, faculty—and grad student teachers, too!
Wondering how much your teaching labor is subsidizing the rest of your university (in other words: your basic rate of exploitation)?
Try this fun back-to-school activity!
Locate your school’s per course student tuition rate. (At my public university, in-state tuition per 3 credit course is presently $1835—much lower than many.)[1]
Multiply this number by the total number of students in a particular class. (In my case, that number is twenty-five. This class is hardly a large one. So that’s $1835 X 25 = $45, 875.)
Then take the total you are paid per course and divide it by the number you arrived at above, the total-tuition-per-course.[2]
Here you have the percentage of student tuition that is going to the actual person teaching the class: YOU! (In my example it comes out to somewhat under 20 percent. For my adjunct colleague teaching at a prestigious private university, it came out to…2 percent!)[3]
To then find the percentage of your labor value being used to support the rest of the institution (including necessary staff support and overhead) then simply subtract this percentage from 100 percent.
And there you have it: the percentage of your labor value that’s being siphoned off to other institutional needs or interests, some of which may be valid and necessary, and others, not.
Have you been able to calculate your rate of institutional subsidy (i.e., your rate of exploitation?)
What did you find?
Share your answers in the chat thread below! 🙂
And have a great semester!
P.S. Please keep this answer in mind next time a system administrator suggests that you are not working hard enough, or when you are tempted to beat up on yourself (or others) for falling behind on grading, class prep, research or household bills and… student loan payments.
**Bonus: Once you’ve done the math for your various classes, or for your semester as a whole, you can then take on the next interesting set of (qualitative) questions, such as:
- Where the hell does the rest of the money go?
Or:
- Does keeping the lights and heat on and the grounds clean and the students on track in terms of advising, registration, health support, etc. really require 80% (or 98%!) of the monies being paid by students?
Or:
- Why does Admin insist on cancelling “under-enrolled” courses that are still generating surpluses over instructor costs?
Or:
- Why the hell are you being told that there’s “no money available” when you propose a new idea for student or community enrichment?
Or:
- Imagine you received a whopping 50% of the tuition being paid for your course(s): What would you do with that money?
***Double Bonus: For extra points, try walking through this institutional math lesson with your students in class. They are sure to enjoy it! 🙂
[1] It’s double that for out-of-state students. More for international. Be sure to factor in any extra fourth credit hours! At institutions where students pay per semester, simply divide the semester tuition by the average student course load.
[2] If you have a graduate assistant in your course, you’ll need to factor them in, too! Also note that, for those who receive university benefits, the value of these benefits will also need to be included in your salary total. For most adjuncts though, the math is easy, since you don’t get benefits, period.
[3] Note that this does not factor in public state revenues, or outside grant funding.
Thank you, thank you, for this perfect post! The bouncy tone is just right for the dire truth.
Hey, Joe,
This is terrific. And fun.
Years ago, when I taught a high school summer course in algebra, the deal was 70% of the tuition went to me and 30% to the school. Back then tuition was only $250 for a course but with 10 kids enrolled I still made $1750 which was an appreciable percentage of my regular salary. Summer school was seen as a way to help faculty, especially young faculty, survive over the unpaid summer months. This percentage going to faculty was then cut to 50% and finally, faculty members were offered a fixed stipend per course which was great if you had 1 or 2 students but quite small if you had 10 or 15. And in math there was always 10 or 15. Times change
This stuff can get tricky. At my last college, some course sections had a mixture of students who paid wildly different tuition rates. Regular in-state students paid the usual rate, but out-of-state students (mostly International) paid 3 or 4 times that amount, dual-enrolled (high school) students paid an amount negotiated on a per-school-district basis, and seniors (55+, I think) paid only a nominal fee. Furthermore, FERPA rules prohibited the disclosure of this information to the faculty, so it would be difficult to do the calculations (although we could usually infer which ones were high school students or International students). In the end, some courses — especially those that were often loaded with International students — were cash cows. Other courses, such as science labs, were money pits.
As much as I like the spirit of this exercise, I worry about calculating profit ratios on a per-section, per-course, or even per-program basis. We all know that some courses (and programs) are more profitable than others. And some flat out lose money. But do we really want administrators to start thinking in terms of profit ratios for individual courses and programs? Probably not, because then they might push to eliminate important courses or programs that lose money. We want them thinking in terms of fulfilling the mission of the institution, right?. And part of that is accepting the notion that some courses make money, some lose money. Should an instructor teaching a lecture hall student with 200 students be paid $400,000 because each student paid $2,000 to take the course? No. Should a senior faculty member teaching an upper-level seminar with 8 students be paid peanuts because of the low number of students in the course section? No.
So, my question is… If an institutional researcher compiled and published accurate totals of students enrolled, tuition paid, and instructor salary paid for each section, course, and program, school, and college across a university, would that be a good thing? Do we really want everyone to know the profit ratios for courses and programs? I am almost always in favor of transparency, but I am not sure about this one.
Also: have the university’s CFO present to both Senate (with representatives from the dept. of Accounting present) and GSO explaining what it costs to have you teach the course and students take it. I’ve got a 3-credit seminar with 5 students in it, each paying $3900 for the course, so it’s generating $19,500. I am making just under $10K to teach it. So even a small course like this pays for itself and more — oder nicht?