How UNC Spends Its Money: A Lot More Than Instruction

When it comes to reform, sunshine is the best disinfectant. In the coming months, the Pope Center will be exploring finances of the UNC system in order to better understand whether the system is properly acting as a fiduciary of taxpayer money.

Start with university expenditures. Expenditures illustrate universities’ priorities, making them a good gauge of the campuses’ fidelity to the wishes of taxpayers.

Although the federal government collects data from universities each year, finding those data and organizing them in a meaningful way is tricky. Data are available on the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Web site of the Department of Education, but without careful research and considerable patience, the information isn’t very meaningful. It took some effort to compile the table, which will tell you how much the universities in the UNC system spend on instruction, research, and other categories.

Universities classify most of their operating costs as “educational and general expenditures,” which include all money spent directly on instruction plus additional costs related to student education. On average, educational and general expenditures represent 72 percent of all expenditures at public universities. (These core expenses generally exclude auxiliary enterprises, independent operations, and hospitals.)

Unfortunately, schools have a lot of leeway in reporting data. For example, a department can decide whether its professors’ public service and research activities are budgeted separately — or simply included in faculty salaries. According to economists Andrew Gillen and Rich Vedder, “some ‘instructional costs’ likely include research activities, at least those funded by the institution through low teaching loads for faculty.”

Despite these problems, we can make some observations.

• Costs per student vary widely. They range from $19,983 in total at Appalachian State University to more than $60,000 at UNC Chapel Hill. Even within expenditure categories, there is remarkable variety. For example, Elizabeth City State University spends far more on Student Services (which include expenditures for admissions and registrar activities) than any other school in the system. In many cases, it’s unclear why expenses vary so much.

• At most UNC schools, more is spent on research, public service, and institutional support than on instruction directly. For example, at North Carolina State University, non-instructional expenditures are nearly double instructional expenditures. UNC School of the Arts, however, spends no money on research at all and instruction is very expensive. (Total general and educational expenditures per student at UNCSA exceed the total at N.C. State.)

• Institution type matters. For the most part, per student expenditures are highest at universities that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifies as “Research Universities” — like UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State. Both instruction and support services are more expensive on a per student basis at such schools (UNCSA is a high-cost outlier). Some of those expenses can be explained by the presence of medical, law, and graduate schools, which require laboratory space, intensive instruction, and specialized equipment. But why are expenditures per student nearly $23,000 more at UNC-Chapel Hill than at N. C. State? Both are research universities with “very high” research activity.

How much of these expenditures are paid for by students through tuition? That varies widely but is relatively low in all cases. At UNC-Chapel Hill, tuition covers only 8 percent of the total. At Appalachian State, the figure is 27 percent.

Jenna Ashley Robinson is campus outreach coordinator for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (popecenter.org).