Welcome to Dartmouth, '17s. You've just joined the institution with the ignominious distinction of being the second most expensive school in the Ivy League. Perhaps even more striking, Dartmouth currently ranks as the seventh most expensive college in the entire United States. Although many of the colleges that are more expensive than Dartmouth have at least some of their high costs associated with being centrally located in large cities, Dartmouth certainly does not share this same situation. Why does Dartmouth cost so much? The answer is a compilation of many things, but put very simply, the largest contributing factor seems to be administrative and various other non-faculty staff.
I have observed that Dartmouth seems to overemploy to an astounding degree. At every corner there are seemingly more idle workers than undergraduates. The circulation and reserve desks in Baker-Berry almost always have two or more employees idly sitting behind them, even during the relaxed summer term when there is hardly a need for one person. At Novack Cafe, three or four employees (often students) are behind the counter, so bored and listless that they sometimes come out and talk to friends or work on their laptops since two employees in non-peak hours can clearly handle the small cafe. The Class of 1953 Commons, with its legions of unionized workers, also seems to have a similar mentality. These observations are just the smallest tip of the iceberg though, epitomizing a larger problem at Dartmouth.
The greater transgression would be in the unending boondoggle displayed by the administrative offices which run throughout the College. Although there are over 1,000 faculty, I find the figure of roughly 3,328 non-faculty employees even more astounding. How has Dartmouth come to have almost one employee for every single undergraduate on campus? In 2012, another 153 employees were added to non-faculty positions, many of them in administrative roles. It is clear that some restructuring is needed based around the types of services students actually use, and it doesn't seem as though that restructuring is headed in the right direction. For a college in which many graduates go on to careers in consulting, it seems natural that maybe Dartmouth could benefit from what those students have to say while still on campus.
Cornell University, hardly a paradigm for administrative efficiency (I should know after having spent my first year of college there), has roughly 8,000 non-academic staff and 14,000 undergraduates. Put differently, Cornell has less than 2.5 times the number of non-academic staff at Dartmouth, despite having almost 3.5 times as many undergraduates. Despite the disparity in costs and employee numbers, certainly the academic support, deans, dining halls, dorms and overall facilities are run just as well at Cornell as at Dartmouth.
According to College financial reports for fiscal year 2011, Dartmouth spends more on "academic support" ($34,061 per full-time student per year) than on actual instruction ($23,750 per student). Given how students' experiences compare with the experience that could be provided with such monetary figures, I am forced to question how well Dartmouth is run on an institutional level.
Maybe Dartmouth should take the advice of Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C. He points to "Purdue University's example of a tuition freeze while cutting costs through eliminating administrative positions and reducing travel costs to conferences." Certainly the cutting of administrative roles could play a large part at Dartmouth.
The Board of Trustees must wake up and realize that the unaffordability of Dartmouth to many middle and upper-middle class families is a reality, and a shameful one at that considering costs could so easily be reduced. The solution should not be focused only on expanded financial aid (although that certainly is an important component), but also on looking at endlessly extraneous operating costs. And if any of them have the cojones to put pressure on the higher-ups in the college administration to trim their own administrative fat rather than passively approving an operating budget of $934 million, the College and the students will both be better off.
