Tuition fees and the time to graduation: evidence from a natural experiment - "We used the recent introduction of general tuition fees at public universities in several of the German federal states as a natural experiment to identify whether tuition fees reduce the time to graduation and the extent to which they do so. We employed a difference-in-differences approach with the states that introduced fees as the treatment group and the states that remained fee-free as the control group. Our results indicate that the introduction of tuition fees led to a significant decrease in the time to graduation."
Moral hazard in action!
Easy-Come-Easy-Go: Moral Hazard in the Context of Return to Education - "This study explores the relationship between financial support and post-graduation incomes using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation that is designed to measure the economic situation of individuals. Results suggest that students are less likely to engage in moral hazardous behavior to the degree to which they are older and to the degree to which they receive costlier financial assistance."
Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition - "We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality-maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle environment. We measure how much changes in underlying costs, reforms to the Federal Student Loan Program (FSLP), and changes in the college earnings premium have caused tuition to increase. All these changes combined generate a 106% rise in net tuition between 1987 and 2010, which more than accounts for the 78% increase seen in the data. Changes in the FSLP alone generate a 102% tuition increase, and changes in the college premium generate a 24% increase. Our findings cast doubt on Baumol’s cost disease as a driver of higher tuition."
Moral hazard on colleges' side
WILLIAMS: Colleges dupe parents and taxpayers with 'diversity' staff - "Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students, employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries in the six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college... Unless the cycle of promoting and nursing imaginary grievances is ended, diversity bureaucracies will take over our colleges and universities, supplanting altogether the goal of higher education.“Diversity” is the highest goal of students and professors who openly detest those with whom they disagree. These people support the very antithesis of higher education with their withering attacks on free speech.Both in and out of academia, the content of a man’s character is no longer as important as the colour of his skin, his sex, his sexual preferences or his political loyalties. That’s a vision that spells tragedy for our nation."
Colleges Hire an Increasing Number of Diversity Officers - The Atlantic - "One of the most famous essays on bureaucracy ever written was built upon a deceptively simple observation. Between 1914 and 1928, the number of ships in the British Navy declined by 67 percent. The ranks of officers and men shrank by 31 percent. But the number of Admiralty officials administering the shrunken force rose by 78 percent. Nor did the growth stop! Between 1935 and 1954, the number of Admiralty officials outright quadrupled—even as the Royal Navy itself was rapidly drawing down from World War II. The essayist—C. Northcote Parkinson—speculated that the naval administration would continue to grow even if there were no sailors at all.Here was the origin of Parkinson’s famous laws of bureaucracy, including “work expands to fill the time available” and “officials make work for each other.”... Over the past 18 months, the Times reports, 90 American colleges and universities have hired “chief diversity officers.” These administrators were hired in response to the wave of racial incidents that convulsed campuses like the University of Missouri over the past year. They are bulking up an already thriving industry. In March 2016, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its 10th annual conference in San Francisco. Attendance set a new record: 370. The association publishes a journal. It bestows awards of excellence.As diversity officers proliferate, entire learned specialties plunge into hiring depressions. In the most recent academic years, job postings for historians declined by 8 percent, the third decline in a row. Cumulatively, new hirings of historians have dropped 45 percent since 2011-2012... Surely all these chief diversity officers are accomplishing something?Yet the closest studies of disadvantaged-student performance discover that what such students need most is more intensive teaching and mentoring... The students at risk are not all or even mostly “diverse,” as diversity is conventionally understood in the United States in 2016. If J.D. Vance’s marvelous Hillbilly Elegy pounds any one idea into the heads of America’s university presidents, that idea should be it.But maybe the university presidents already know it. “Diversity” is an easier problem to manage than “disadvantage.” The pages of the diversity officers’ journal reveal much more fascination with increasing demand for their own employment—via compulsory programs in “cultural competence” for example—than in the hard work of mentoring and tutoring. As the New York Times’ reporting confirms, the freshman orientation sessions run in the name of diversity have a lot more to say about the offense of addressing fellow students as “you guys” than about the challenge of teaching students from poor backgrounds how to make informed choices about financial aid. The priority—in the Times’ marvelously deadpan headline—is to “cautiously train freshmen against subtle insults.”... our universities. We’ve been thinking of them as institutions for teaching and learning—and wondering why we seem to be spending so much without achieving more. But if you think of them as institutions generating a perpetual cycle of employment in specialties for which there would otherwise be no demand at all? Why in that case, they are succeeding brilliantly."
Campus Diversity Bureaucracies: Cultivating the imaginary grievances of an ever-growing number of “oppressed” groups, a costly administrative infrastructure threatens the goals of higher education. - "By the time a homeowner discovers a termite infestation, chances are that the destructive pests have already caused serious structural damage. So it is with “campus diversity officers,” a category of academic bureaucrat that didn’t even exist until fairly recently. Within a short period, diversity apparatchiks have taken root on most college campuses, and in many cases expanded into sprawling bureaucracies with multimillion-dollar budgets. Diversity departments have become a common campus amenity, like gourmet dorm food, climbing walls, and lazy rivers. Unlike lavish recreational facilities for students, which turn college campuses into an expensive Club U, administrative bureaucracies breed inertia. With size and resources come power, and, in keeping with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, a continual quest for aggrandizement. It’s no wonder, then, that campus diversity officers have already formed a rent-seeking trade association, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), complete with annual conferences, self-serving “standards for professional practice,” a political agenda, and—since this is academia, after all—a pseudo-scholarly publication, the quarterly Journal of Diversity in Higher Education (priced at $681 per year for institutions). A typical article is entitled “The Influence of Campus Climate and Urbanization on Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum Faculty Intent to Leave.”... “Diversity and inclusion” is the latest obsession in higher education, and elite schools compete with one another to see who can field the largest and best-paid team of diversity bureaucrats (diversocrats). It’s an article of faith that “diversity,” originally a euphemism for affirmative action, somehow enhances the educational environment, but data supporting the mismatch theory—which holds that affirmative action hurts minority students by placing them in academic programs for which they are unqualified—refute this claim. Nevertheless, diversity officers have become ubiquitous... The sheer size of the diversity landscape is staggering. The University of Michigan’s diversity bureaucracy employs nearly 100 full-time employees, one earning more than $300,000 per year, at an annual cost of more than $11 million. More than a quarter of UM’s diversocrats make more than $100,000 a year, far more than the average salary of assistant professors with doctorates... UC Berkeley has 175 diversity bureaucrats, and nationwide, the trend is toward increased spending... “Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.” Over the same period, tuition has soared. Ohio State’s Richard Vedder estimates that more than 900,000 nonteaching administrators—most of them unnecessary—bloat university payrolls... What do all these diversity administrators do? By one account, “Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women, launch campaigns to promote dialogue, and write strategic plans on increasing equity and inclusion on campus.” NADOHE Standard Six helpfully supplies examples of other “delivery methods” for diversocrats: “presentations, workshops, seminars, focus group sessions, difficult dialogues, restorative justice, town hall meetings, conferences, institutes, and community outreach.”Campus diversity officers also advocate progressive causes, which coincidentally justify an enlargement of their bureaucratic empire... When laws or regulations impose new compliance requirements (sometimes at the urging of the diversity bureaucrats themselves), administrative ranks and budgets swell. When, as a result of political changes, compliance measures are no longer required, the bureaucrats stubbornly resist revoking them on the grounds that “best practices” or imagined “educational benefits” justify maintaining the status quo. Despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal of Obama’s administrative edict under Title IX requiring one-sided proceedings to investigate and adjudicate campus sexual assault claims, many colleges and universities are retaining these kangaroo court procedures and their accompanying regulatory infrastructure. Diversity bureaucrats exist to service the grievances of an evolving—and potentially unlimited—number of supposedly oppressed groups recognized by postmodern identity politics. Thus, by promoting “social justice” and encouraging “marginalized” students to embrace victimhood, diversocrats ensure their own job security. The mission of campus diversity officers is self-perpetuating. Affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic preferences in admissions) leads to grievance studies. Increased recognition of LGBT rights requires ever-greater accommodation by the rest of the student body. Protecting “vulnerable” groups from “hate speech” and “microaggressions” requires speech codes and bias-response teams (staffed by diversocrats). Complaints must be investigated and adjudicated (by diversocrats). Fighting “toxic masculinity” and combating an imaginary epidemic of campus sexual assault necessitate consent protocols, training, and hearing procedures—more work for an always-growing diversocrat cadre. Each newly recognized problem leads to a call for more programs and staffing. Unless the cycle of promoting and nursing imaginary grievances is ended, diversity bureaucracies will take over our colleges and universities, supplanting altogether the goal of higher education."
NHS 'wasting' money by employing equality and diversity staff at a cost of nearly £7 million - "The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has taken aim at the NHS by claiming it wasted over £46 million last year on 1,129 unnecessary jobs in areas such as public relations, diversity, the EU and ‘green’ staff. The money spent on these positions, the TPA claim, could have paid for 1,662 full time nurses.The figures have been exposed by Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to every NHS organisation in the UK."
MoD is slammed for employing more diversity officers than the Royal Navy has warships - "veterans minister Johnny Mercer told parliament that there were 44 civil servants in the ministry and its executive agencies who had 'diversity' and 'equality' in their job title. In comparison, the Royal Navy possesses only thirteen frigates, six destroyers, two aircraft carriers and eleven submarines, a total of 32... Despite its abundance of equality officers, the ministry is looking to recruit a diversity and inclusion director on a £110,000 annual salary.The sum is more than what is earned by an army colonel, who commands a battalion of 800 soldiers. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, has criticised the emphasis on inclusion in the armed forces.He told the Sunday Express: 'There are always bad apples, and racist incidents can never be tolerated, but in my experience the British Army is less racist than society at large.'The soldiers I commanded saw each other as comrades upon whom their lives often depended. And that applies to the Royal Navy and RAF too.'The British Army is about ... depending on the person next to you; it's about service before self. There's no room for identity politics within that.' The MOD has a target of increasing the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic personnel from 8 per cent to 10 per cent."
When you don't need to fight a war...