IUP's Tuition Increase, Part 2

This post speculates about the possible effects of changes in tuition at IUP. Before reading it, please read Part 1.

You could argue that, were it not for the stealth tuition increase, charging students per credit is a good policy. It is fairer to students who for various reasons, such as needing to work part-time, can only take 12 credits per semester, since they will only be charged for courses they actually take. It also will discourage students from dropping courses. IUP allows students to withdraw from courses without penalty until two-thirds of the way through the semester. Students sometimes sign up for more courses than they expect to complete, knowing they can drop one or two of them if they are having difficulty or just don't like them. This is a poor use of the university's resources. However, assuming there is no refund for courses dropped late in the semester, students and their parents will come to see course withdrawals as a tangible waste of money.

On a less positive note, I can't help but wonder if accustoming students to paying by the credit and eroding the distinction between part- and full-time students isn't also intended to make it easier to shift courses out of the classroom and into what is optimistically called “distance learning.”

According to IUP spokesperson Michelle Fryling, they believe this package of changes will not harm enrollment or retention and could lead to more credit hours being taken. Until pigs master the art of flight, it's hard to see how these claims could possibly be true. In the real world, increasing the cost of an IUP degree by 25% seems almost certain to reduce enrollment.

He's pissed.

In addition, it would seem that charging students by the credit, while simultaneously increasing the cost per credit, will result in students taking fewer, not more, credits per semester. Students will only enroll in the number of courses they can afford. One of the consequences will be that it will take them longer to graduate. For IUP, this means that its four-year graduation rate—an important metric by which universities are compared and evaluated—will decline. For the student, a longer college career means higher room and board costs and lower lifetime earnings.

It is also likely that, when paying by the credit, more students will try to graduate with exactly the required 120 credits and no more. At present, many students finish with more than 120 credits for several reasons. They may change majors. The longer they wait to do this, the more additional credits they have to take. Students also accumulate excess credits if they try to improve their job prospects by taking a double major, or a single major and two minors. Finally, some students take more than 120 credits out of intellectual curiosity, since under the current system, they can take as many as 144 credits in eight semesters at no additional cost for tuition. The new system will make these deviations from the standard path more expensive.

Why are these drastic—and risky—changes being made right now? IUP faces a potential cumulative deficit of $12.2 million by 2015-16, $16.7 million by 2016-17, and $19.7 million by 2017-18. The official line is that enrollment is declining because fewer young people are graduating from western Pennsylvania high schools. This is true, although an “excellent” university might be able to overcome this handicap. However, there are two other problems.

When I came to IUP in 1971, faculty morale was high and there was considerable optimism about the future. We were led to believe that the mission of the state-owned universities was to bring higher education to middle and lower class young people who were usually the first generation in their family to attend college. To this end, the state paid approximately 70% of the cost of a student's education, with most of the remainder being covered by tuition.

In 2014-15, the State System of Higher Education (SSHE) received $412.8 million from the state, which covers only about 25% of its operating budget. Almost all the rest comes from tuition. The change has been gradual, with the exception of an 18% cut in state aid in 2011-12 after Tom Corbett was elected governor. Like the frog in the pan of water whose temperature is gradually increased, many of us failed to notice how these tuition increases were changing student demographics and causing the university to abandon the goal of reducing inequality. Most middle class students who attend IUP now graduate with crushing debt. Pennsylvania ranks 47th among the 50 states in support for higher education. Maybe our state's politicians and their corporate donors have concluded that it's not in their interest that Pennsylvania have an educated population.

The situation is complicated by financial mismanagement at IUP. The university owes $34 million that it borrowed in 2010 to complete the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex, which was built even though insufficient funds had been raised. This is one of several recent projects in which IUP, like some of the other SSHE universities, seemed to place a higher priority on student recreation and entertainment than on education.

Will there be any organized resistance to these changes? The president of the IUP faculty union, Mark Staszkiewicz, is actually a former member of the administration. His comment, “If the state doesn't do something, there's not many options we have,” seems to indicate passive acceptance and little empathy with students. It has also proven frustratingly difficult in the past to overcome student apathy. Of course, the various “discounts” and offers of financial aid are intended to minimize student outrage. 

If both enrollment and the number of credits taken by each student decline, IUP could go into something resembling a death spiral. Program cuts and faculty layoffs could easily follow. Right now, IUP's future does not look particularly bright.   

You may also be interested in reading:

IUP's Tuition Increase, Part 1

Update (2/23/15)

A friend sent me this blog post on the same subject from Kevin Mahoney, a Kutztown University of Pennsylvania faculty member. Dr. Mahoney included the chart below, which I had looked for but couldn't locate, showing both the changes in SSHE's state appropriation and its tuition between 1983 and the present. You'll seldom find a more perfect negative correlation.

Update (4/19/13)

IUP has postponed its decision to charge for tuition by the credit, and the accompanying fee schedule, for one year.

Last week, the Board of Governors of the State System of Higher Education voted, 9-8, to freeze tuition at the 14 state-owned universities next year, provided they receive the $45.3 million (11%) increase in their state appropriation contained in Governor Tom Wolf's 2015 budget. The closeness of the vote reflects the fact that some board members objected to the way in which it seemed to enlist them, along with students and their parents, as supporters of the Governor's budget.

IUP's postponement is a tacit admission that the changes it had planned were a tuition increase, and therefore contrary to the board's new policy. Given the fact that Governor Wolf faces stiff opposition from the Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature, it seems unlikely that he will be able to deliver the full $45.3 million. However, by the time that outcome is known, it will probably be too late for IUP to change its plans again.

IUP's Tuition Increase, Part 1

I retired from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) in 2007 and I no longer live in Indiana. I haven't sought any inside information to help explain the recent changes in tuition at IUP or predict their effects. This is, for the present, an outsider's viewpoint.

IUP is making several changes at once, possibly in the hope of confusing students and the public about their actual effects:

1. The current flat fee of $6820 per year for all full-time students carrying between 12 and 18 semester hours of academic credit is being replaced by a fee of $284 per credit.
2. This amounts to a substantial tuition increase for most full-time students.
3. To ease the pain, IUP is offering tuition “discounts” of 7%, 4% and 1% during the first three years.
4. They also promise to increase financial aid by $2.5 million this Fall.

These changes are described as a “pilot program,” the effects of which will be evaluated after three years. It should also be noted that a second shoe is scheduled to drop this summer, when the State System of Higher Education (SSHE) announces the 2015-16 tuition at the state-owned universities. All the data in this article assume that there are no further increases in tuition, but this is unlikely. 

What is the purpose of these changes? The IUP administration anticipates that these tuition manipulations will bring in an additional $8.2 million next year. According to IUP's queen of doublespeak, Michelle Fryling, they are “part of a three-pronged approach to get to budget stability and to be able to offer the programs with excellence that we need to offer, that our students need and our students deserve.” The other two prongs are limiting campus budgets to the previous year's amount (that is, not adjusting them for inflation), and encouraging programs to increase their enrollments (without increasing their staff). It's not clear how any of these three actions will promote “excellence.”

Newspaper articles contain conflicting reports about the cost to students of the tuition increase. The figures differ depending on the academic year, the student's course load, and even on whether numbers are rounded up, down, or not at all. Let me try to clarify what is happening. A student needs at least 120 credits to graduate. Over four years, that amounts to 15 credits, or five 3-credit courses, per semester. Most students can't take exactly 15 credits each term, because most programs require some four-credit courses such as science labs. However, we can assume that 30 credits per year is the average load. Under the current system, tuition is $6820 per year. When the new system takes full effect in 2018-19, the cost for 30 credits will be $284 times 30, or $8520, an additional $1700 per year, or a 24.9% tuition increase.

Factoring in the “discounts,” the tuition increases should average 16.1% in 2015-16, 20.0% (over the current amount) in 2016-17, and 23.6% in 2017-18. These are the largest tuition hikes since there was a 15.4% increase in 1991. Of course, it's obvious that one purpose of the gradual phase-in of these increases is to discourage current students from protesting. By the time the full increase takes effect in 2018-19, those students will face a fait accompli.

Not all students take 15 credits each semester. The top chart from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shows how many credits per semester students actually take. The most frequent choices are 15 and 16 credits. The bottom chart is based on the 2015-16 tuition, with its 7% “discount.” It underestimates the eventual cost to students in 2018 and beyond. (Even though the Post-Gazette editorialized against the tuition increase, it failed to confront readers with its full effects.) For each number of credits, the chart indicates whether tuition will go up or down and by how much. The break-even point, at which students' costs remain the same as they are now, is 12.5 credits per semester. At that rate, it would take five years to graduate. The more credits students take between 12.5 and 18, the bigger the financial hit they will take.

As noted, IUP also announced an increase in financial aid in the Fall, equal to about 30% of what they hope to gain from the tuition increase. It's not clear whether these increases in aid will be permanent or whether they will be phased out like the “discounts.” There are two types of aid, based on need and performance. The rules for awarding this money are complicated enough that IUP's press release and an Indiana Gazette article based on it devoted more space to the financial aid package than to all the other changes. But the most most a student can hope to obtain in new financial aid is the cost equivalent of two credits. You can look up the details if you're interested, but I suspect that the very complexity of these rules is part of an administration strategy to distract our attention from the far more important—and probably permanent—changes in tuition.

This post is continued in Part 2.

You may also be interested in reading:

IUP's Tuition Increase, Part 2

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

Before continuing, please read Part 1 of this post.

What are the reasons for the rise of the nones? The media often propose some variation of a political backlash model, suggesting that organized religion has alienated young people with its stance on a cluster of issues related to sexuality and the family—divorce, contraception, abortion, gay rights, and the status of women. And in fact, the nones hold more liberal views on all of these issues. For example, 72% of them believe that abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances, while 53% of the population hold that view, and 73% support same-sex marriages, compared to only 48% of the population. However, these attitudes could be a result rather than a cause of their secularism, or they could all be caused by other social conditions.

Cross-cultural research on the sociology of religion has emphasized two predictors of religiosity, poverty and lack of education. The Existential Security Framework proposes that objective measures of security, such as material wealth, good health and a government-provided safety net, encourage secularity. When people lack these forms of security and can't do much about it, they turn to superstition as a way of asking for help.  Comparing countries, there is a strong positive relationship between poverty and religiosity. Non-believers are concentrated in European countries such as Sweden (64%), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). On the other hand, fewer than 1% of people from Sub-Saharan Africa are non-believers. However, the United States is one of the richer countries that bucks this trend. In addition, this model may be better at explaining the worldwide decline in religiosity than changes here in the United States, since real wages in this country have been stagnant for the past 30 years.

If poverty is religion's friend, its worst enemy is probably education, especially insofar as it encourages scientific literacy and critical thinking. Data from Canada indicate that, holding other variables constant, each additional year of schooling results in a 4% increase in the likelihood that a person reports no religious affiliation. Braun attempted to find out which was the best predictor of secularism, education or economic security. He assembled 149 objective measures from some or all of the world's 193 countries. He grouped them into clusters of related measures with the help of factor analysis. He then used multiple regression to determine which measures were most strongly related to survey questions about the importance of God and religion in one's life.

He found that education was the strongest predictor of lack of religiosity, and that economic security had no additional effect when education was held constant. It's important to note that multiple regression is just an advanced form of correlational analysis. These data do not mean education is the cause of secularism, economic security or any of the other variables in the analysis. It merely indicates that education accounts for more of the variability in religiosity than any of the other measures that were available. 

Once again, the United States is an outlier in that we are more religious than our average level of educational attainment would predict, and the positive relationship between years of schooling and non-belief is weaker than in other countries. My own hypothesis, unsupported by data, is that political interference in the public schools prevents American teachers from referring to religion in any but the most favorable terms. Even at the college level, attempts to discuss critical thinking sometimes lead to complaints to administrators from religious students. (It's possible to lecture on critical thinking without mentioning religion, but students usually recognize that critical thinking is pretty much the opposite of religious faith and this invariably comes up in discussions.)

Whatever the reason for the shift, if the nones continue to increase, it is likely to benefit the Democratic Party in national elections. Here are the exit poll data from 2012, broken down by religion.

However, before you members of the Jackass Party break out the champagne, two words of caution:

• The nones make up 20% of the adult population but only 12% of the voters. One of the challenges for Democrats will be to mobilize this group.
• The 2012 presidential race probably overstates the effect of religion on voting, since Barack Obama was one of the candidates. Not only are religious people more likely to be conservative, they are also significantly higher in racial prejudice.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

A couple of years ago, a neighbor and I chatted about the weather while walking our dogs. The topic of climate change came up. He said he agreed with his minister, who had told him that global warming was nonsense. After I began to tick off some of the evidence, he reversed direction and said he welcomed extreme climate change, since it would bring about the “end times.” He and his co-religionists would ascend to heaven, where it is presumably air conditioned. Of course, this is just an anecdote, and it could be misleading, but in this case it's not. I thought about it when I read some recent surveys reporting the rise of the “nones.”

The General Social Survey (GSS) is pretty much the gold standard in American survey research. Not only is the sample representative, but they have a response rate of 70% and 83% of their interviews are conducted in person. The interviews average 90 minutes apiece and respondents are paid $20. Since 1972, the GSS has been asking: “What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?” The percentage answering no religion has gone from 5% in 1972 to 20% in 2012 (the most recent survey). Here's the trend line. 

Since 1990, those preferring no religion have been increasing by .6% per year. These data are consistent with the results of other national surveys.

So the priests are losing ground to the nones. Does this mean the nones are discarding their old habits? Not exactly. Rather than individuals changing their attitudes, we're seeing a demographic transition, as older, more religious people die and are replaced by younger, less religious folks. Here's the 2012 data sliced by age. In the 18-30 age group, also known as the “Millennials,” more people are choosing the secular option than either Protestant or Catholic.

Here the attitudes of these same 18-30-year-olds regarding the existence of “God” are compared to older folks.

What are the reasons for the rise of the nones? Please see Part 2.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

Tom Corbett, Privateer

“I'm all about privatization,” says Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Corbett. In case that wasn't clear, his chief of staff Kevin Harley adds, “The governor is a proponent of bold privatization. That has been his consistent position from day one—and it hasn't changed.”

Yesterday, Gov. Corbett announced his plan to sell or auction off the state liquor store system and expand the number of outlets permitted to sell liquor, wine and beer. He optimistically claims this will raise a one-time windfall of over $1 billion as follows:

• $575 million from the sale of liquor licenses.
• $224 million from auctioning off the 1200 state liquor stores.
• $107 million for new wine and beer licenses.
• $112.5 million for licenses allowing beer distributors to sell liquor.

Apparently, the governor is not confident that this proposal will survive on its own merit, so he has tied it to the more popular cause of education. The $1 billion will be used to fund block grants for school districts, to be targeted to four areas: safety, early education, individualized learning, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs.

Gov. Corbett claims the new system will be “revenue neutral” in the long term, but the numbers don't appear to add up. Currently, since the state owns the liquor stores, they take in revenue from both profits (the difference between wholesale and retail liquor prices) and taxes on liquor sales. If they are going to give up the profits, they are going to have to sell a lot more booze (at higher prices?) to make up for those lost profits with additional tax money. Maybe he is indirectly asking Pennsylvania residents to get drunk more often “for the sake of the children.”

Less than three weeks ago, the governor announced the sale of the Pennsylvania state lottery to Camelot, a British firm that promises to increase gambling revenue, so Pennsylvanians are already being asked to throw more of their money away for the sake of our senior citizens.

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Gov. Corbett also supports expanding our reliance on charter schools, another form of privatization. We should not necessarily assume that all of the $1 billion will go to public schools, since local school districts are required to pay charter school tuition for students in their districts. And what exactly does the governor mean by “individualized instruction?”

Blackmail is usually defined as threatening “to make a gain or cause a loss to another unless a demand is met.” In his first two years in office, the governor has cut back sharply in state funding for public schools. Apparently, to get some of that money back, Pennsylvanians must agree to his liquor privatization plan.

Mike Crossey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the public school teachers' union, commented, “It's nice that the governor has acknowledged that he created a school funding crisis, but our students shouldn't have to count on liquor being available on every corner in order to have properly funded schools.”

Coursera

You should be aware of a valuable resource that you can take advantage of free of charge on the internet. Coursera describes itself as a “social entrepreneurship company,” which makes college courses available online. They are offering 214 courses (so far) in virtually all academic fields, taught by professors at 33 universities.

Right now, I'm in my ninth week of a 12-week course, “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue,” taught by two philosophy professors, Walter Sinott-Armstrong of Duke University and Ram Neta of the University of North Carolina. There are three to nine video lectures each week. Each lecture is followed by an ungraded quiz. There are four graded tests, which determine whether you pass the course and get a certificate. If you flunk a test, you can retake an alternate version. There are discussion forums with other students. The textbook is optional, and I seem to be doing fine without it. Other courses are structured differently. Some require papers. The difficulty level seems to be comparable to a typical undergraduate course. I'm spending about an hour a day on average in this course.

There are several courses about health care policy. I'm planning to take “Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act,” taught by Ezekial Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also looking forward to “Introduction to Sustainability,” with Jonathan Tomkin of the University of Illinois.

Is anyone interested in social psychology? You could take “Social Psychology” with Scott Plous of Wesleyan University, or you could take “A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior,” taught by social psychologist Dan Ariely of Duke. I recommend both instructors. As a jazz fan, I'm intrigued by “Introduction to Improvisation,” by vibraphonist Gary Burton. Unfortunately, I don't play an instrument.

Lurking in the background is the question of how these “entrepreneurs” plan to make money out of this website. According to the New York Times, two possibilities are to charge colleges and universities for allowing their students to take these courses for credit, or to charge students whose universities will accept these courses as transfer credits. Of course, its also possible that they will start to charge their internet consumers directly. In the meantime, this is one of the greatest bargains on the web.