TESU experiences an Operating Loss every year.

[TrailRunr]

Much of academia needs need consultants to help clean house, both at management and at the lower levels.

[Yanji]

I'll admit that I'm too lazy to read through the whole financial statement, but my guess is that they are not losing money on test-out students. They don't use up as many resources as students taking a lot of classes. They're not going to prevent these losses by increasing fees on test-out students who make up a minority of their student population.

Yeah, students who take a lot of tests are a tiny minority of TESC students, most of which I assume are in-state non-traditional students and military students.

This is basically how public funding of education works. This is not some annual bailout given to TESC because it is in financial peril. If things were that bad, it would be given notice from the regional accreditor. State funding isn't operating revenue because it is not earned through regular school operations. Alumni and corporate donations are also an important revenue stream for most schools, but they're not operating revenues either. I did a bit of research and compiled some stats about a few other public institutions in NJ to illustrate this fact.

Thomas Edison State College - FY2013
Operating Revenues - 67,903,347
Operating Loss - (17,271,704) (25.4% of operating revenues)
State Appropriations - 19,595,980 (equal to 28.9% of operating revenues)

Rowan University - FY2013
Operating Revenues - 190,558,000
Operating Loss - (76,280,000) (40.0% of operating revenues)
State Appropriations - 95,697,000 (equal to 50.2% of operating revenues)

The College of New Jersey - FY2013
Operating Revenues - 153,173,000
Operating Loss - (30,672,000) (20.0% of operating revenues)
State Appropriations - 53,311,000 (equal to 34.8% of operating revenues)

William Paterson University - FY2013
Operating Revenues - 114,762,000
Operating Loss - (50,492,000) (44.0% of operating revenues)
State Appropriations - 60,367,000 (equal to 52.6% of operating revenues)

TESC receives less state funding relative to its size compared to other public institutions in NJ. Rowan is a research university, so it may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, but TCNJ and WPU are smaller teaching schools. TESC obviously has lower costs because of the way they deliver most programs, but it also saves NJ taxpayer money.

[Prloko]

Thanks for the supporting info. The main point I was trying to get at is that tuition does not pay for all the expenses at a public institution (even many private institutions). There are some anecdotal examples in this forum, but I think my main inspiration for starting this thread was because of a conversation that happened in a CC class I took many, many, years ago.

Basically, one student tried to brag (why she thought this was brag material is beyond me) that she wasn't using grants and aid like most of the students in class, but that she paid her own way in full. The teacher, a Sociologist asked her "Do you really think the $1,200 you paid for tuition covers the cost of this school?"

He went on to bring up many examples similar to this thread. I had already known this, but it was a bit surprising that there were people who thought that they weren't being subsidized in some form. Now I'm not making any claims on how the school spends it and whether they are wise or not, just speaking to the point of people's ignorance.

[sanantone]

I'm sure they are expensive to run for the same reason most universities are expensive. Lots of professors with a 9 hour per week course load working half the year earning $100,000 per annum. Offices full of administration staff administering each other. An academic sense of entitlement that tells them they are important people that shouldn't be expected to scrimp. I'm sure I missed a lot.

This is far from the truth. TESU has a lot of part-time mentors rather than full-time faculty. They're basically adjuncts. If you tried to live solely off an adjunct salary at one school, you would qualify for public assistance.

Even in tenure-track positions at traditional universities, most professors don't make anywhere near $100,000. Those salaries are only regularly seen in certain fields, such as law, computer science, and engineering. Only a couple of my professors in my PhD program earn 6 figures because one was the founder of a popular theory and the other writes the most popular ethics textbook in CJ. It took them decades to command those salaries. They're in their 60s and 70s.

[dfrecore]

I'm sure they are expensive to run for the same reason most universities are expensive. Lots of professors with a 9 hour per week course load working half the year earning $100,000 per annum. Offices full of administration staff administering each other. An academic sense of entitlement that tells them they are important people that shouldn't be expected to scrimp. I'm sure I missed a lot.

They had something in the paper a few years ago about UC Davis - the number of employees at the campus was MUCH larger than the number of students there. Many were making a LOT of money (unionized workforce), and I'm not talking about professors - administrative personnel, janitors, food service workers, etc. Although I am sure that it takes many people to make a large university run, I'm pretty sure that there is plenty of waste, overpaid people, etc. Let's not even talk about the College President who is earning half a million dollars, and her living expenses are paid for (she gets to live in a mansion near campus, and hosting all of the VIP's gets all of her meals paid for, as well as "staff" to help her in her mansion - because mansions don't run themselves you know). It's all ridiculous.