Turducken, thanks for the tip about the carnivorous nature of your name. I think I had only ever heard of “vegan turducken” and somehow just assumed that that was the only kind. Seriously, though, I appreciate your knowledge of the tax differences between different kinds of university services!

This isn’t conclusive, but here’s a few thoughts about the broader questions of the relation between funding and educational quality:

(1) I don’t think there is any *single* scale of educational quality to go by, since different universities aim at different institutional objectives (if we measure by how much students change from when they walk in the door, a good community college might in a sense be teaching and transforming its students a lot more than Harvard College affects its already super-elite undergrads; or for instance UChicago anthropology is no doubt better at research than undergrad education, etc).

(2) Even when the institutional objectives are identical, I don’t think there is ever a totally direct correlation between financial means and academic life. Crudely speaking, money can’t buy everything — and money also changes its value across contexts. I’d bet that for instance big-shot Sorbonne profs are probably happy to accept much lower salaries than big-shot Harvard profs: there isn’t such a culture of huge salaries in this country. I guess in thinking about how financial resources determine institutional culture, we have to accept that money makes certain things possible, sets limits to the number of faculty and the available space etc, but it only sets very wide ranges of possibility within which a lot of other factors determine what can happen. I’m sure we could find institutions with almost identical budgets and material resources that still produce really different kinds of educational spaces… Anyway, if you have clearer ideas about how money determines or doesn’t determine academic life, I’d love to hear them.

(3) Getting back to the spending-per-student question, yeah, I wasn’t initially trying to use it as a measure of educational quality. I just think it’s a useful if we’re comparing sheer institutional wealth to give per-student figures so that we have some degree of control for different institutional sizes!

I guess my larger point here is that, rather than forming hypotheses about why the Sorbonne isn’t worse than Harvard in direct proportion to the difference in their financial situations, we might do better to think through all the ways that rankings are unreliable and that money isn’t everything, institutionally. What do you think?

“I suspect it would be hard to separate student housing as a service from student housing as basically one component in the broader world of university real estate investment.”

I would disagree with this. Partially due to accounting regulations, these would be budgeted very separately. Student housing is considered an education-related service, as are things like parking, dining, student health centers, etc. Most of these services are run to recover their costs, to break even, but not to provide additional income. Property rental income is unrelated business income (UBIT) and taxed.

Lastly, in a not-so-important point, a turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken, definitely non-vegan. 🙂

Students: 25,835
Faculty: 2,323
Staff: 13,419
(this one is from http://www.dria.uic.edu/quickfacts/default.asp?rptname=profile&year=2007)
# Buildings:
Annual Budget: $4.7 billion
Endowment: $1.46 billion (held by its foundation, not UIC)

So compared to U of C, it has more students but the same size faculty and a marginally larger staff. I am actually surprised to see its budget is that large.

IPEDS allows you to quickly break down the funding sources of American institutions. At UIC, tuition is 15% of revenue, state appropriations are 18%, government contracts and grants are 26%. The other 40% comes from donations/endowment income via the foundation, fees for services, UBIT, etc. At U of C, tuition is 12%, 0% is state appropriations, and government grants and contracts are 14%.

Great to hear from you both and to have your useful comments. Seems to me that there are several different questions here:

1) The role of student services in different universities. Paris8 does actually have limited student housing (mostly for international students, I think) and public space for student activities and the like, and certainly it has fairly well-developed campus cafeterias and coffeeshops, but yes, I agree with you, it certainly isn’t on the university-as-total-institution/shopping mall model of UChicago.

You both raise the question of how these student services relate to the budgetary differences between universities; it turns out that UChicago’s “campus life” budget (which covers athletics, health services, career office, etc) is only about $60 million, which is a lot of money but still only about 2% of the total annual budget. I suspect that student housing, which has its own real estate empire, may be a bigger concern than campus life, but I didn’t find figures and I suspect it would be hard to separate student housing as a service from student housing as basically one component in the broader world of university real estate investment.

The broader question about the different role of the university in student (or faculty) lifeworlds is a really important one, and one that maybe I will eventually have some ethnographic materials to deal with, but not just yet.

2) How do we decide how to do international university comparisons? Here I think much depends on what the aims of our comparison is. One possibility is to compare the closest thing we can find to structurally similar objects, as in Elina’s suggestion of comparison with UIC. (I haven’t actually checked, but I would expect to find that per-student spending is higher at UIC, which certainly has a far larger campus and better buildings and more housing & student services…) If we do this kind of “apples to apples” comparison, we would indeed get a more rigorous sense of what varies as a result of differing university cultures, international variations in governmental funding, etc. The comparison I’m making here is obviously *not* that, though; it’s obviously a comparison between a wealthy private american university and a relatively poor public french university, which means that there are several axes of difference implicit in the comparison. I didn’t really think about this when I wrote the post, but in hindsight, I think my aim here is more just to highlight inequality and financial difference than to do real structural comparison. In response to a possible sense that the comparison is ungrounded, it seems worth emphasizing that my initial stimulus comes from the fact that the uchicago’s vast wealth enables it to reach out across the world as far as Paris and to provide better working conditions there than even many local academics get — so in some sense my comparison in this post is based on an actual institutional conjuncture in the world and not just on my ethnographic caprice!

3) How do university funding structures actually work in France and the US? It seems, actually, looking at the annual report, that the largest single source of operating revenue at UChicago is the university hospitals, which produce 45% of revenue; tuition and fees are only about 11%. I don’t think that this is a typical fiscal structure even for most American private universities, however. I’m not an economist of higher ed so I think I have to postpone giving a more rigorous cross-national comparison (I’ll post one if I can come across one). One thing that does, intuitively, look similar cross-nationally is the fact that salaries compose a pretty large fraction of the overall costs for both P8 and UChicago. But without more detailed budget figures it’s hard to go into detail…

To be quite honest, this wasn’t meant as an incredibly rigorous post to begin with, but I appreciate your both pushing me in that direction!

This doesn’t account for all of the differences, of course. I’m not even sure what percentage of the difference in staff this would account for – it doesn’t explain the difference in faculty or endowment at all. But it may be worth thinking about.