Learning Ecosystems

In conjunction with its third annual “Trends in College Spending” report, released today, the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability provides a publicly available database that allows journalists, policy makers and anyone curious about higher education an opportunity to decipher where college funding comes from and where it goes.

While the Delta Cost Project has for years provided broad overviews of spending practices at various types of institutions, the new database’s groundbreaking feature is that — fasten your seatbelts — it allows for an analysis of the budget priorities of individual institutions. Jane Wellman, the project’s executive director, hopes that the new data will stimulate conversations about spending priorities and cost containment — or the lack thereof — that generally aren’t happening now at the national, state or institutional level. Such conversations, she adds, are long overdue.

“I think we’ve got a lot of habits to break in higher education,” she says.

While there’s much to pore over in the Delta Project’s new report, it is necessarily limited because the federal data on spending the project draws on are now available only through 2008. Consequently, the recession that is now crippling many colleges and universities is barely captured in the current report — and some of the big spending it meticulously documents happened in what history will likely regard as the heady days of higher ed.

So what can Delta tell us now? Perhaps most importantly, the project can begin to respond in a meaningful way to common arguments that have played out among faculty, students, administrators and state and federal policy makers in the last several years. Here are a few debates we’ve been hearing a lot, and the responses and insights Delta offers: