Cost & Quality
On this page:
• The Cost of Higher Education
• The Quality of Higher Education
The Cost of Higher Education
Should we focus on tuition?
Rising tuition fuels the discussion about college affordability as frustrated students and parents pay increasingly higher tuition bills at Texas’ public colleges and universities.
Are state appropriations the problem?
Despite claims that declining state appropriations are the problem, actual state appropriations have increased each year.
But why have higher education costs increased?
According to data published by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, the number of non-instructional staff to instructional staff has grown 35%.
How do alternatives compare?
Importantly, although the rapid increases in cost per student and tuition appear across public institutions of higher education across the state—and even across the country—these trends are not present everywhere.
Quality of Higher Education
As costs rise, are students getting a better education?
Considering the core function of colleges and universities should be providing an education to its students, we have to wonder: who is actually teaching the students?
Of course this begs the question, what are the tenured faculty doing if they are not in the classroom?
The National Center for Education Statistics reports that as recently as 1998, 36% of full-time university faculty taught fewer than four hours per week, but by 2003 that number was almost half.
