College: Are you buying education or recreation?

What are you paying for when you write that tuition check? Is an old-school format the best way to deliver a modern education? Does what you spend today translate to a better career and more satisfactory income?

Is today's college education a good investment?

The Cato Institute's Charles Murray writes that college in its traditional and expensive guise may provide a nice experience, but that it doesn't always supply the best preparation for a lifetime of earning.

Murray writes, "For the student who wants to become a good hotel manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator, farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optometrist, interior designer, or football coach…the two-year community college and online courses offer more flexible options than the four-year college for tailoring academic course work to the real needs of students."

Education versus recreation

Research by government agencies, think tanks and independent analysts supports Murray's assertion. While college budgets have gone up across the board, the proportion of spending on student services has increased at the expense of spending on instruction. "This is the country-clubization of the American university," explains Richard K. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University and an expert on the economics of higher education. "A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities."

If you're going to college for the sole purpose of having a good time and can afford it, this needn't affect you. But if your goal is preparation for a career and your priority is to do it as efficiently as possible, you may prefer schools that devote the majority of their budgets to (gasp!) teaching.

What are you paying for?

The Delta Cost Project breaks down school income and expenditure data, and its data indicate that the portion of revenue devoted to student services (like athletic stadiums and dorms) is on the increase. The portion earmarked for instruction (faculty salaries and benefits, office supplies, etc.), on the other hand, has dropped.

Additional analysis shows that if tuition were tied to spending on education-related expenses, tuition at most public institutions would have dropped between 2002 and 2006, rather than increasing. By and large, those increases, which made college less accessible for the most vulnerable students, were not funneled toward education.

Delta Cost Project director Jane Wellman attributes this partly to state budget problems and declining donations and endowments: "The quickest place to cut costs is in instructional programs. When the primary focus is on balancing the budget from year to year, you grab what you can and spend where you must," she says.

Traditional institutions cannot just drop expenses and become efficient purveyors of relevant education. Most of them are saddled with expenses that can't easily be reduced, like dorms, athletic complexes, impressive classroom buildings, a glut of administrators, the big-league sports programs (which almost all lose money), the prestige-driven researchers, and the acres of landscaped campus that can't be shrugged off like a heavy and outdated mink coat. The non-traditional online college may be the more efficient delivery system for many degree programs.

What about online degree programs?

Online education is right for these times, according to an article on ConsumerAffairs.com. The new breed of colleges doesn't need to build and maintain cushy and entertaining campuses because most of their students spend their out-of-class time at a job or with their families. New-school colleges have been particularly successful at appealing to working adult students in ways old-school colleges haven't. They have accomplished this by "offering courses in the evening and on weekends and pioneering the use of online and distance learning."

David Kird, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, praised work being done by one such national school and noted that it "graduates more African-American engineers than any other institution in the United States."

The business model of online and other non-traditional colleges will probably stick as state budgets come increasingly under fire and taxpayers become more reluctant to pay for programs perceived as self-indulgent and not necessarily productive.

For-profit for the future?

Michael Platt, chairman of Ad Venture Interactive, believes that non-traditional schools work the way they do because they can't afford to offer an inferior (unprofitable) product. He says, "If universities were profit-driven, maybe they would stop misleading students with noted professors who then rarely step into a classroom. If community colleges were profit-driven, maybe they would grow in capacity instead of settling for 1-2 year waiting lists."

It is a fact, he writes, that the numbers don't lie. "Simply look at staff-to-student ratios in the for-profit schools vs. the not-for-profit schools, and you will easily determine which sector is focused more on students and student outcomes." He attributes this to the fact that for-profit career colleges enjoy significantly better placement rates than community colleges and significantly better gainful employment ratios than private university undergraduate degree programs.

What's best for you?

Whether traditional schools or new-style colleges offer the best bang for your buck depends on your goals and the type of education you seek. A person wanting to embark on an extensive study of the liberal arts followed by an ivy-coated teaching career would thrive in a different environment than one who wants to cut to the chase and nail down that management degree ASAP. If the college education trumps the college experience, make a point of investigating the online degree options available to you.

For more information about specific online degrees, check out WorldWideLearn's education guides:

• Guide to College Majors
• Guide to Master's Degrees
• Guide to Doctorates