The private return to postsecondary investment varies widely by field, but the resources required by different fields are not well known. This paper establishes five new facts about college costs using novel department-level data. First, costs vary widely across field, ranging from electrical engineering (109 percent higher costs than English) to…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are facing challenges to their continued existence on several fronts. One is fiscally, as federal funding for education has been cut and the responsibility for paying for higher education has been levied on students and parents. Another challenge is the amount of endowment dollars available to…

The way that funding allocations are made to colleges and departments at Appalachian State University (ASU) (North Carolina) was examined. Funding patterns related to full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollment and faculty allocation units (FAU) were addressed. An account is provided on attempts to gather information on how funds are distributed to…

An analysis of academic activities of college faculty at the eight campuses of Chile's Universidad Tecnica del Estado was conducted. Activities were grouped into seven categories: direct teaching, indirect teaching, research, community services, faculty development, academic administration, and other activities. Following the narrative…

Two allocation methods for studying costs per student credit hour at Montana State University are compared. Both a long method and a short method, using the same source of data, were proposed prior to the study. The long method required much more effort, in that it considers every individual faculty member's salary and, for each faculty member,…

This report is the result of an intensive analysis of five departments of geography in differing types of institutions: 1) Dartmouth College, an undergraduate liberal arts institution; 2) Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a former teachers college; 3) San Fernando Valley State College, a large, rapidly growing institution with a large intake of…

A procedure for reallocating faculty positions is described that uses credit hour guidelines that are quantitatively established using instructional method as the unit of analysis (rather than academic unit). Formally recognized guidelines for varying instructional methodologies are also applied to actual instructional experiences of academic…

This study uses iterative solution techniques to determine empirically optimal standards for student to faculty ratios by discipline and student level for a group of 11 public, research universities, all of whom were members of the Association of American Universities. One set of benchmark standards was based on four-variable solutions within…

Cost behavior analysis, a costing process that can assist managers in estimating how certain institutional costs change in response to volume, policy, and environmental factors, is described. The five steps of this approach are examined, and the application of cost behavior analysis at four college-level settings is documented. The institutions…