Buying the Best [Hardcover]

Charles T. Clotfelter (Author)

Book Description

Series: National Bureau of Economic Research Monograph | Publication Date: March 18, 1996

Since the early 1980s, the rapidly increasing cost of college, together with what many see as inadequate attention to teaching, has elicited a barrage of protest. "Buying the Best" looks at the realities behind these criticisms - at the economic factors that are in fact driving the institutions that have been described as machines without brakes. In designing his study, Charles Clotfelter examines the escalation in spending in the arts and sciences at four elite institutions: Harvard, Duke, Chicago, and Carleton. He argues that the rise in costs has less to do with increasing faculty salaries or lowered productivity than with a broad-based effort to improve quality, provide new services to students, pay for large investments in new facilities and equipment (including computers), and insure access for low-income students through increasingly expensive financial aid. In Clotfelter's view, spiraling costs arise from the institutions' lofty ambitions and are made possible by steadily intensifying demand for places in the country's elite colleges and universities. Only if this demand slackens will universities be pressured to make cuts or pursue efficiencies. "Buying the Best" is the first study to make use of the internal historical records of specific institutions, as opposed to the frequently unreliable aggregate records made available by the federal government for the use of survey researchers. As such, it has the virtue of allowing Clotfelter to draw much more realistic comparative conclusions than have hitherto been reported. While acknowledging the obvious drawbacks of a small sample, Clotfelter notes that the institutions studied are sig-nificant for the disproportionate influence they, and comparable elite institutions, exercise upon research and upon the training of future leaders. The book contains a foreword by William G. Bowen, President of the Mellon Foundation, and Harold T. Shapiro, President of Princeton University.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Charles Clotfelter, an economist and former vice provost and vice chancellor at Duke University, examines the explanations for the rapid growth in spending in the nation's leading private research universities since 1976-77 . . . "Buying the Best is a thought-provoking and compelling analysis, with implications well beyond its focus on higher education.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; aFirst Edition First Printing edition (March 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691026424
• ISBN-13: 978-0691026428
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,833,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Clotfelter is the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University. His book, "Big-Time Sports in American Universities," was published in May 2011 by Cambridge University Press. He is also the author or coauthor of five previous books on topics including university economics, school desegregation, and state lotteries. At Duke he has served as vice chancellor and vice provost. He likes playing squash and golf, and he enjoys watching college sports.

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but Limited, June 6, 2010

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Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Buying the Best (Hardcover)

This is an interesting but limited book. It is limited in its scope by design, but it is also limited in its conclusions. With over 4,000 institutions of higher education in the U.S., aggregated statistics are relatively meaningless. The various schools are so different in mission, resources and individual economies that generalizations are generally not helpful. Public universities would generally be very happy to see graduation rates of 85-90%, while the top privates would be aghast at such numbers. The rich universities are now struggling budgetarily because their endowments undergird large portions of their operating budgets and their endowments have lost significant value. Meanwhile the publics suffer because of a loss of state support. Some schools invest heavily in financial aid to garner the best students and the best ratings profiles while marginal institutions discount the tuition of marginal students because some tuition from them is better than none.

Hence Charles Clotfelter's idea: look at four top institutions in-depth, look at real budget documents, and then attempt to understand what has driven up costs. The four schools chosen are Harvard, Chicago, Duke and Carleton. Of course, these are not really comparable. Carleton is quite different in kind and in resources. Duke is a latecomer to the top ranks, with major investments just prior to the time of the study. Harvard's resources and every-tub-on-its-own-bottom management model make it largely incomparable with anyone and Chicago is unique in a number of ways--the Rockefeller endowment, the curricular organization, the proportion of graduate to undergraduate students, and so on.

Nevertheless, Clotfelter soldiers on. Of course, once you start digging into budgets you find that different schools put different units in different categories, some have good numbers for certain years but not others, good numbers for certain divisions but not others, and so on. Clotfelter is an economist and that brings with it both advantages and disadvantages. He is at pains, for example, to bring rigor to a subject that is always and everywhere muddled. For example: teaching load. While all departments will have a standard teaching load, the load is field-specific. Natural scientists teach less than humanists, but they `teach' in the labs which they are expected to fund and direct. In every department there will be people who get course relief because of administrative responsibilities or as part of a start-up package in a new appointment or because of the terms of the chair which they hold or because of a grant that they have received, etc. Clotfelter struggles manfully to reduce this apparent chaos to order and succeeds. Unfortunately, the conclusions are largely what we all already knew: teaching loads at top schools have been reduced over the last several decades in response to a greater emphasis on research and, thus, in response to market. The same in true of graduate student stipends, e.g. Everyone is in competition for the best students and faculty and that means that everyone responds, to the degree that they are able, to the market that is set by other institutions.

Unfortunately, the book's conclusions are not terribly startling. Costs went up for well-known reasons. Need-blind admissions (a great desideratum among the AAU privates and COFHE schools) is expensive. Whenever you wish to do anything that costs money, tuition will go up significantly because you have to increase the financial aid budget along with the operating budget. Costs went up because of the communications/IT revolution. Computers do not save money. They may increase productivity, but they don't save money. Faculty salaries lagged in the 70's and caught up (but didn't leap forward dramatically) in the 80's. The `arms race' for top faculty, however, did heat up then and fueled the situation. Clotfelter gives comparatively little attention to the pressures exerted by USNews ratings and the National Academy ratings of graduate programs. Despite their protestations to the contrary, these are taken seriously by colleges and universities and the ratings mechanisms have an impact on budgeting and behavior.

With massive federal loans and need-blind admissions (but with varying financial aid packages) the number of applications increased. In simple terms, this represented at least a psychological rise in demand. If a college sees ten applicants or more for every seat in its freshman class it may be less reticent about raising tuition, particularly if recent hikes did not reduce that applicant pool. Some universities, it is argued, raised their tuition to make it appear that they were in a higher, qualitative pool. The top schools also move in packs (Clotfelter's term). While no one has claimed that they fix prices, they certainly speak to one another through their associations (COFHE, for example, the innocuously titled `consortium on financing higher ed').

There are other factors which contributed to the rise in prices: reduction in some areas of federal support, increases in federal regulations, the general rise in professional salaries (doctors, lawyers, etc.) at this time.

The most interesting elements of the book are in the statistical details. Harvard's large class sizes, for example, may be counterintuitive to those not cognizant of the sectioning system. I continue to be interested in the dramatic rise in student services and the impact of that phenomenon on the budget. There is a great deal of statistical food for thought here, no great revelations or epiphanies, but some interesting numbers and a very lucid exposition.