Letter to the Editor: Explain tuition hikes

By Jerry Dickens     3/17/15 7:00pm

Last week’s Thresher (March 11) presented an article of special importance, namely the staggering increase in Rice University’s tuition, evidently 135 percent over the last 15 years. To explain the seemingly inexplicable, Kathy Collins, vice president for finance, gives the primary reason as “educating students, faculty salaries, library resources and other operational expenses.” I think most professors at Rice would be happily amazed by anything close to a salary increase rate of 135 percent over the last 15 years. 

There are, of course, numerous articles on the subject of rapid rise in tuition across universities, including why little of this relates directly to education and why professor salaries have increased at a far more modest rate, one much closer to changes in the cost of living across the United States. To quote the summary of the 2014 report on this topic by the American Association of University of Professors: “Increasingly, institutions of higher education have lost their focus on the academic activities at the core of their mission. Spending on administrative overhead continues to draw funding away from academic programs, and the proliferation of new administrative and support positions has continued unabated in the two decades since ‘administrative bloat’ was brought into the higher education lexicon.”

It would be great if Rice was truly different from most of our peer institutions. This should be easy to find out. I therefore respectfully ask Kathy Collins to either justify or modify her answer. The Rice community, especially students and parents, deserve at least an accurate answer for the skyrocketing tuition. 

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Sincerely,

Jerry Dickens, Professor, Earth Science

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