Right before last year's Commencement, the Class of 1963 had its 50-year reunion. Alongside all the free wine and ice cream were several long tables that the endowment management office had set up, and they were pushing hard to get folks to donate.
Maybe I will come back to Tufts for my 50-year reunion in 2064 and maybe I won't, but I will be astonished if I end up donating anything.
Last year, Tufts charged $55,212 for tuition, fees, a single and a 160-meal plan. I cut that down by 20 percent by working two jobs during the year, but if anyone has a way for an Arts and Sciences student to do any better than that, I'd love to hear it. Junior year was the lowest amount that my family has ever paid for me, but even despite that, I'm not sure it was all worth it for the 35 weeks that I was on campus.
It isn't that I have disliked the seven semesters I have spent on campus; quite the opposite. But Tufts makes it pretty challenging to for me rationalize coming here without having received a significant tuition discount. Even accepting the fact that Tufts will give you a better education, additional opportunities for networking and research access and name recognition for employment or graduate school applications, it's hard to imagine that it all is (really can't be) worth six figures more than the local state university. Tufts students have been pretty fantastic overall, but the same is just as true for the people I know at UMass Amherst.
If Tufts spent all its money wisely, I might feel a little bit better about my decision. But that isn't remotely close to being true. Incoming freshmen last year were given free 1GB flash drives, and I must have found every last one left in rooms at the end of the year. The Office for Campus Life ordered 2,500 T-shirts last Spring Fling and distributed them on the day of the event, when everyone who wanted a shirt that day already had one. Just last week, Public Relations decided it would be really important to spend money to rent a helicopter so we could update a two-year old aerial view of campus.
The above are a small portion of the university's operating budget, but it is emblematic of a much bigger problem: much of the money the administration spends is not for a clear purpose. We pay our faculty handsomely (in the 75th percentile of all universities) which is certainly in line with our ultimate goal of being a top-tier research and teaching university. However, can the same be said of the university administration? Each position is equivalent to one to four full tuition scholarships. Hiring another programming coordinator is implicitly a decision to not have an additional dozen internship grants or a decision to make an additional student take on crushing student loans.
There are 420 "non-faculty professional" or "executive administration" full time employees (which exclude clerical and technical positions) at the Schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering, or in other words, more staff and administrators than tenure-track professors. Not all of these positions are unimportant. But there are some that are quite clearly more valuable to the university than others. Most of us came to Tufts because it promised us an excellent education and plentiful opportunity, and certainly many positions contribute to that vision. But there is a point, long since passed, where the additional position simply does not contribute in any meaningful way to that vision. There needs to be a serious re-evaluation by President Monaco and Provost Harris about which positions are truly essential to the functioning of this university.
Bhushan Deshpande is a senior majoring in quantitative economics. He can be reached at Bhushan.Deshpande@tufts.edu.
