> STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students
Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.
This works fine for research universities, but in teaching universities (couldn't find the statistics, but there are a lot of them out there) someone has to subsidize the new STEM programs until the alumni start giving grants. In my experience, a lot more STEM alumni give large donations than humanities and social sciences. But that does mean a bigger initial outlay by someone.
It is largely anecdotal based on some inquiries made at my school. Different schools will vary- is it a research school? What types of STEM degrees are offered? Etc. Others likely have more concrete insight than I do.
One conversation that stuck was the me:
Back when I was in school, one of my mandarin teachers wanted to offer a "business mandarin" course outside of the general language program geared towards business students who might need basic fluency in a corporate setting. The school denied him because there wasn't a budget for it, which struck me as asinine at the time as it wasn't like there would be students who weren't paying tuition for the course anyway. The school had rooms available, and students have to buy all the materials the class would need anyway.
Would offering that course have spread the same n students across m + 1 courses? (Hence an increase in instructional costs, but no increase in tuition revenue.)
STEM professors have to be paid a lot more than liberal arts professors (due to competition for STEM talent). Equipment for teaching isn’t covered under research grants, but might come from overhead on those grants, but more likely from donations (from big corps), grants, or tuition.
STEM professors bring in billions of dollars in research grants, of which the university takes over 50% for "administration". If you aren't aware labs have to pay a big cut of any grant income they get to the school. It used to be that in exchange the school would maintain buildings, fund build outs of equipment, etc. but nowadays it's wasted on DEIABCDXYZ vice chancellors of provosts.
The national center for labor statistics says labor costs are about 30% of the spend [0]. STEM programs also include Liberal Arts courses, so only a fraction of the 30% goes to STEM professors pockets. AFAIK, STEM professors justify their value by generating money for the university via patents and grants.
While there are a massive number of private liberal arts schools, there are relatively few private STEM schools. Most STEM degrees come from public university that are significantly cheaper than private universities.
(1) Many grants have a mentorship / training / giving-back component. This is one of the merit-based criteria NSF reviews on.
(2) Research grants have overhead which feeds back into general budgets. At elite schools, this is about 2/3 of the money. A typical split might be 1/3 to the department, 1/3 to the school, and 1/3 to the project. It's kind of a financial scam. Nominally, these cover buildings and admin time. Practically, these feed into general budgets which do include labs and teaching. Corruptly, a lot of the money gets funnelled in creative ways to improve professor's lives through fancy faculty clubs, get-aways, and in some cases, creative (but legal) embezzlement with money ending in people's pockets.
Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.