The Washington Post was the latest place to repeat the inanity.
In an otherwise sensible profile about Southern New Hampshire University Online (SNHU), the reporter homed in on the fact that more than 14% of SNHU’s expenditures are spent on advertising.
Cue the predictable quote from The Century Foundation’s Bob Shireman, who said that anything above 10% was “a red flag.”
According to the article, “Federal data also shows that SNHU spends a smaller share of its budget on instruction than most U.S. colleges do.”
There are several problems with this statement. Among them:
- The big question ultimately shouldn’t be one of micromanaging how different schools spend their resources, but instead on the value they provide to students and the outcomes they achieve.
- Traditional colleges spend big percentages of their budget on things that nominally are not advertising, but in fact serve similar purposes.
- Institutions like SNHU put a lot more thought and scientific evidence into the design of their learning experiences than traditional institutions.
First, let’s cut to the chase. How should we evaluate a college?
We shouldn’t actually judge a school’s value to its students based on its inputs: how the college allocates its resources, staffs its school, and the like. How a college chooses to structure its programs and spend its dollars is its job. The evidence of whether it’s working is in student outcomes.
To understand a school’s ultimate outcomes, you also have to look beyond graduation rates and into measures from places like FREOPP Highlights’s college return on investment (ROI) tool, as well as the Carnegie Foundation’s new “Student Access and Earnings Classification,” with an eye toward whether an institution is classified as an “Opportunity College”—meaning a place that offers high access for Pell Grant recipients and students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups and produces strong earnings 8 years post-enrollment. Opportunity Colleges, in other words, are those that have measurable outcomes for positively helping those students who need the most help.
And here, SNHU Online has a mixed track record, particularly compared to some of its peers that serve similar students in similar circumstances. Although SNHU has some programs that produce a strong return on investment, it also has several programs that produce a negative return, particularly when you include the risk of dropping out (as one should when evaluating whether to enroll in a particular program). And while Western Governors University (WGU), for example, is classified as an “Opportunity College”—a distinction that only 478 schools have achieved—SNHU falls into the next tier, with 1,322 other schools, as a high-access, medium-earnings school. Not bad, but not stellar.
Now here’s the interesting thing: according to that same Washington Post article, WGU spends a whopping 18% on advertising. More than SNHU, in other words.
National University, another school referenced in the Post article, is also classified as an “Opportunity College” based on the students it serves and its outcomes, and yet it spends 20% on advertising! Two institutions that spend more on advertising yet get better outcomes for the students who need it the most.
So perhaps looking at the percentage a school spends on advertising and marketing doesn’t yield that much value. Which bleeds into the second point: the claim that traditional, on-campus universities don’t spend much money on advertising.
It’s true that large, traditional, non-profit schools tend to allocate an average of roughly $4 million for marketing in total, according to Simpson Scarborough. That means they are, on average, likely allocating far less than 1% of their operating budget toward marketing, with a fraction of that going to advertising.
But here’s the catch. The University of Alabama, for example, spends around $240 million on athletics each year, roughly 16% of its $1.5 billion operating budget. Athletics doesn’t count as marketing or advertising, but it certainly helps market and advertise the school to prospective students.
As Matt Brown of Extra Points documented, Sacramento State is paying a significant amount of money—$18 million—just to join the MAC athletic conference for a five-year term. Why are they willing to do it? Because, as Matt wrote, the school’s leadership wants to be an FBS school and to “move the institution into a larger, less-commuter-focused campus that can grow enrollment from all over the country, not just greater Sacramento. Playing FBS games on national TV for the school is part of a broader marketing play. It isn’t just about dollars and cents that live purely in the athletic department budget.”
In other words, even though these athletic budgets aren’t classified as marketing or advertising dollars, some percentage of them clearly serve that purpose as a way to recruit students. And it’s not just athletics—see amenities arms races, high school enrichment programs hosted on-campus, and the like. Online-only programs typically don’t have athletics, of course, nor these other items. So even if we did want to judge a school based on its marketing spend, the story is much more complicated than online critics make it out to be.
That bleeds into the third point: that these schools should be spending much more on instruction. The University of Alabama’s financial statements, for example, show that it spends roughly 25% on instruction, which is the basis for arguing that online institutions like SNHU Online spend less.
But here’s the reality—and it’s a deep irony. Instructional expenses refer to faculty salaries. And it turns out that, on average, faculty know very little about the science of learning and good teaching practices. Their expertise tends to be in research. Their PhD degrees focused on the knowledge and research in their domain, with relatively little attention paid to effective instructional practices, pedagogy, the science of learning, learning engineering, learning design, cognitive science, and the like. And faculty members tend to accept relatively little instructional design for their courses.
Teaching is also typically not why these individuals became professors. Indeed, at research institutions—and some teaching-focused colleges—the emphasis is often on research rather than teaching. They often view teaching as a “burden to be endured.”
Contrast that with a place like SNHU Online, which puts far more intentional effort into the design of each course it offers. How is that when the percentage of resources spent suggests otherwise? It’s because institutions like SNHU Online—as well as places like WGU—design courses centrally, with a mix of content experts and instructional designers trained in learning design. They give careful thought to what the goals of each course really are, what constitutes mastery, and what is the best way to present the learning opportunities and instruction. The faculty also focus exclusively on teaching and aren’t distracted by research—a worthy endeavor, but somewhat separate from instruction. Institutions like SNHU Online that are focused exclusively on teaching and learning arguably are way better at doing it, even if the percentage of spending looks smaller according to a federal database.
The ultimate arbiter should be in student outcomes: the value students receive. We need to move away from the business of judging how schools attempt to accomplish their mission to whether they, in fact, accomplish it. That’s something worth reporting.
