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Over at The New Republic’s blog The Stash, a post from Zubin Jelvah on whether going to an elite school is worth it, cost-wise, includes a striking graph that I have decided to steal (click for full-sized version).
It’s slightly hard to decipher at first, but the key feature here is the rapid rate at which top-tier schools are distancing themselves from everyone else when it comes to the amount they can spend on their students. There is a very precipitous drop that occurs not too far down the ladder.
So, not unexpectedly, the very top-tier schools, which cater to a higher percentage of extremely privileged students than other schools, can lavish those students with all sorts of benefits that are lacking at the schools attended by mere mortals (that is, members of the lower and middle classes).
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Dave Munger on October 29, 2009 5:45 PM:
It's really hard to tell from that graph what's going on. It would be much easier to interpret if it was on a logarithmic scale. It looks to me like the proportion of resources going to the elite schools is about the same. But again, it's hard to tell because the lines are so squished together on the left side of the graph. About all you can say is that all schools are spending a lot more educating students now than they were in the 1960s.
David Achtenberg on October 30, 2009 11:48 AM:
Of course, the biggest component of what is usually called "student oriented" spending is faculty salaries. Much of what the graph shows is that highly selective institutions pay their faculty more and have more faculty per student. Both of those facts may improve student learning since it is reasonable to think that higher paid faculty may be better teachers and that a lower student-faculty ratios will improve learning. However, this may be less likely if faculty salaries are (as some believe) far more closely correlated to research productivity than to teaching quality and if the increased size of the faculty doesn't lead to more faculty teaching hours (because highly paid faculty spend less time on teaching and class preparation).
This doesn't mean that the highly selective schools are not doing more for students; it just suggests that the numbers are less significant than they might seem. It is not really clear that "all schools are spending a lot more educating students now than they were in the 1960s."
Emily on May 15, 2011 12:48 AM:
I think that the statistics brought up someway show that schools have become less selective and that students at recognized schools get a "good deal." But I have to take it on faith because it's... unreadable. The chart renders school resources founded on how selective they were in 1962. But for our days?