Nobody's Business

I would not have guessed that a book “following the money” in the university would have the odd title, Like Nobody’s Business. The author is Andrew Comrie, who has served as a professor and administrator at multiple institutions of different flavors. Comrie previously thought of having the book’s title be Seeing the Elephant, but I think the final choice was more apt, after reading his book. The subtitle? “An Insider’s Guide to how U.S. University Finances Really Work”

 

Very importantly at the outset, Comrie clearly states: “Budgets don’t make decisions. People do.” Keep that in mind whenever anything related to budgets and finances come up in any context.

 

The book covers a wide range of topics: budget sizes and models, revenue sources, expenditures, and dives into the major “parts” of the university: human resources, academic affairs, student affairs, research, facilities, athletics, public service, and fundraising. While Comrie discusses and cites work done by others, he has also pulled together data from IPEDS covering 1174 institutions and divvies them up into four main categories based on Carnegie classifications: R1, R2, R3-M3, baccalaureate. Each of these is also divided into public and private institutions (primarily because the revenue streams have differences).

 

As someone who spent some time in college administration (but thankfully not during Covid!) I’m accustomed to the lingo and terminology. Having seen the inner workings, I’m also not surprised at the broad conclusions. However, since my professional career has been at liberal arts colleges focusing on undergraduates, I have less experience with what goes on at research institutions, so I found it enlightening to see what is similar and what is different. I also enjoy Comrie’s fact-of-the-matter style of writing that’s very accessible to the academic who may not have much administrative experience. He’s careful with details, but doesn’t bog you down. I found his discussion insightful, and he does a nice job moving from data to take-away messages.

 

Comrie asks and answers the common questions: Do out-of-state students subsidize in-state students at public institutions? Why do higher education costs rise so much? What are the amounts and trends in student loans? What are the types of support staff and their salaries? Is administrative bloat a myth? What is RCM or activity-based budgeting? Do the humanities cross-subsidize STEM fields? How do we account for faculty time and workload distribution? Why do students drop out and what proportion is retained? Why do universities lose money on research? Does the university have a rainy-day fund? Why isn’t parking free? Does athletics (success) benefit the university’s bottom line? How do university endowments work? Do university rankings have a financial impact?

 

If you read higher education news regularly, you’ve likely heard answers to these questions. But if you would like nuanced answers backed up by data, I highly recommend Comrie’s analysis. I didn’t know as much about university athletics, deferred maintenance, and some of the nitty-gritty details of endowments, so I learned a number of new things. But I also learned that many of the “answers” to these questions require a qualified “but”. And there are good reasons – some of them because of complexity, some of them because the university is a strange beast, and some of them remain murky because the university benefits (to some extent) in being opaque.

 

This last point – the university’s opaqueness – coupled with its garbage can model, are both a strength and a weakness of the messy university systems that exists in the U.S., as detailed by David Labaree. While Comrie’s data helps categorize institutions into bins for broader trends, each college or university has its own idiosyncratic local situation and history. Sometimes the university does seem like it’s nobody’s business. Organized anarchy, Labaree would call it. Sometimes when you poke your nose into it, you wish you didn’t know how the sausage was made. As Cypher says to Neo in The Matrix: “Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”