Informative read about Auburn from the Wall Street Journal $$$

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I did not realize that Jay Gogue is currently interim chancellor at one New Mexico State University

AUBURN, Ala.—In recent decades, Auburn University added hundreds of millions of dollars in spending to its budget. The additional money didn’t go to the English department, nor to the sociology department. Some science departments only got a trickle more.

Instead, much of the money went toward administrative salaries, buildings and, no surprise, sports.

Auburn piled millions more each year into paying down the debt it borrowed for campus upgrades, including an $84 million basketball arena. It hired hundreds of administrators and professional staff. Spending on the president’s office and other administrative departments often increased far faster than that on many academic subjects.

To help pay for its transformation, the school has raised tuition and fees again and again. By one measure, students’ costs have grown faster than at almost any other major public U.S. university. Auburn’s net price, the average amount in-state freshmen pay after grants and scholarships—covering tuition, fees, room, board and other costs—topped $25,000 annually in 2021-22, according to Education Department data. That’s a 60% increase from 15 years prior, adjusted to today’s dollars.

Nationally, schools don’t consistently disclose the details of how they spend their money, making it nearly impossible to compare how they divide up dollars. To determine how one school’s priorities evolved, The Wall Street Journal chose Auburn as a case study, examining hundreds of pages of budget documents. The data help answer a question facing families across the nation: With college prices sharply higher than they were a generation ago, where does all the money go?

The Journal tallied how Auburn’s spending changed across roughly 125 of the largest budget categories between fiscal 2002 and 2016, adjusting all the numbers for inflation to today’s dollars. Comparisons after 2016 weren’t possible because of accounting changes and because Auburn stopped publishing granular spending figures.

An Auburn spokeswoman declined to answer more than two dozen questions about changes to its budget and didn’t respond to a Journal reporter who visited the campus. In a written statement, she said the Journal had a “predetermined agenda.” She cited the demand for Auburn’s education as well as the university’s accolades from publications that produce college rankings and its success with student retention as evidence of the school’s achievements.

“Financial decisions made by the Auburn University administration prioritize strategic investments that will enrich our students’ academic pursuits, personal development and post-graduation career success,” wrote Jennifer Wood Adams, the university’s executive director of public affairs.

Jay Gogue, who served as Auburn president from 2007 to 2017 and 2019 to 2022, said improvements are expensive and the limited revenue streams a university can tap into for more money include increasing tuition.

“It costs money to deliver quality education,” said Gogue, now an interim president at New Mexico State University. “You’ve got to have the facilities, you’ve got to have the faculty. It takes a lot of things.”

Auburn senior Nylah Bluiett said she is using merit scholarships and federal loans to help pay for school and living expenses, including about $950 monthly for off-campus housing and utilities.

She said she will owe about $25,000 in loans after graduating. As president of the campus Black Student Union, the Alabama native said she has heard concerns from students about costs to attend Auburn and has relayed them to campus administration, but it hasn’t helped.

“The tuition has kept increasing,” said Bluiett, a 21-year-old majoring in apparel design. “As much as I love Auburn, it has become more of an elitist university.”
Building boom

Opened 164 years ago, Auburn was once geared toward the state’s working class, as was typical of public institutions funded by the sale of donated federal lands, called land-grant universities.

More recently, the school, nestled in the hills of east-central Alabama, had loftier ambitions. In 1997, its board set forth a mission statement: Auburn would become one of the nation’s pre-eminent land-grant universities in the 21st century. The school set out to erect state-of-the-art facilities, bring in top professors, develop research programs and add resources to support students. It now has nearly 27,000 undergraduates.

All that added to the school’s bottom line.

Auburn’s budget in 2016 totaled $1.2 billion in today’s dollars, a jump of 82% from 2002. Though enrollment grew during that time, it did so at a slower pace, rising by about 20% during the same period.

Steven Leath, former Auburn University president from 2017 to 2019, said competing to be the best university comes at a cost.

“In a lot of places, it’s an arms race—for new scientific equipment, for new athletic facilities, for upscale, inviting dorms,” said Leath, who worked in leadership positions at several colleges, including as president of Iowa State University. “It never seems to end.”

“I definitely feel blessed to go here, but I do wish it was more affordable,” said Anwah, a sophomore who has used a mix of scholarships, grants and an estimated $14,000 in loans so far to attend Auburn. She said she lost some scholarship money after some of her grades dropped and made up for it using loans and by getting a part-time job as a medical assistant.

The school spokeswoman said published tuition rates have roughly kept pace with inflation in the past decade, and that the school has increased scholarships in recent years.

But published in-state tuition and fees, about $12,500 this school year, have more than doubled since 2002, adjusted for inflation.

Auburn’s net price—$25,271 in 2021-22—was down 7% from two years prior accounting for inflation, the latest available data show. That’s still nearly $10,000 higher than in the late 2000s.

Growing head count

One of the biggest reasons colleges like Auburn are spending more than they used to: They’ve hired a lot more people.

In 2016, Auburn allocated $574 million for salaries, wages, and benefits—roughly half its total budget. That’s about 1.6 times what it spent in 2002.

“Auburn invests in our students by investing in our faculty and staff,” Auburn’s spokeswoman said in the statement. “Universities compete with other employers to attract and retain top faculty and staff. That competition requires that our people are paid salaries that are competitive with industry salaries.”

The school has also increased spending on faculty research, she added.

Some of that money has gone to hiring and retaining professors in popular fields. For example, the personnel budget for Auburn’s mechanical engineering program, one of the school’s most sought degrees, grew by nearly half to $5.9 million.

But Auburn has disproportionately hired administrators and staff. Between 2002 and 2016, Auburn added nearly 600 full-time employees, numbers published by the college show. The number of faculty grew by 10% while the number of administrators grew by 73%.


Though average salaries for professors climbed in the mid-2000s, over the next decade they roughly kept pace with inflation, Auburn’s figures show.

In Auburn’s academic colleges, spending on the administration—usually the dean of a college and his or her staff—often rose faster than spending on individual academic departments.


Gogue earned $846,000 in salary, bonus and benefits in calendar 2016, the last full year of his first term as president, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks pay for public college presidents.

He earned more money in other years. In 2017, for example, his total compensation topped $2.1 million because he received a payout of deferred compensation that had been previously set aside. Gogue said he doesn’t remember details from his compensation at Auburn.

Auburn’s Board of Trustees declined to comment for this article and referred questions to the university spokeswoman.

Tiger Pride

Nationally, Auburn is known for its widely followed Tigers football program. The team most recently won a national championship in 2010, though its 6-6 record this year is middling. Football games are played at Jordan-Hare Stadium, an imposing structure mid-campus with a road stamped with orange paw prints leading to it. Not far away is a lavish $92 million football performance center that formally opened this year, mostly financed by bonds to be paid with athletic department funds, according to board documents.

Though many colleges, including Auburn, have raked in revenue from college sports, that money usually goes back into athletics—for more coaches, more training facilities and more equipment, rather than for more professors.

Auburn reported $110 million in total athletics spending on its 2016 budget documents, an increase of 140% from 2002.

College athletics programs, in theory, aim to support themselves on the revenue they directly earn, rather than from tuition and state appropriations, though it doesn’t often work out that way.

Auburn’s spokeswoman said that athletics is “self-sustaining” from ticket sales, donor gifts and media rights. But budget documents show the school reported taking about $6 million from student fees in 2016 for athletics, in today’s dollars.

That amount roughly quadrupled from 2005, according to data from NCAA reports collected by the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database. Auburn’s 2002 budget doesn’t show whether the athletics department received any student fee money that year.

In more recent years, the athletics department has also received millions of dollars in university subsidies, according to the NCAA reports.

The spokeswoman declined to comment about the money that went to the athletics department from the university.



Between 2002 and 2016, Auburn’s spending on every major sport in the Journal’s analysis, including basketball, baseball, swimming and gymnastics, increased by more than 50%, budget documents show.

They were all dwarfed by the total spent on football. The school spent about $30 million on its football program in 2016, more than double what it did previously.

“You don’t get much push back at all on expenditures in athletics there,” said Gogue, the former president.

Write to Andrea Fuller at andrea.fuller@wsj.com, Tawnell D. Hobbs at tawnell.hobbs@wsj.com, Stephanie Stamm at stephanie.stamm@wsj.com and Andrew Mollica at andrew.mollica@wsj.com

Methodology

The Journal collected Auburn’s annual published budgets from fiscal 2002 through 2016, which contain hundreds of spending codes. The Journal focused on categories for which spending topped $1 million in 2016, in current dollars. The analysis focused largely on the “base budget” and excludes other categories of spending, such as restricted money tied to endowment distributions of specific grants, as those weren’t comparable over time.

Education Department data on college cost after scholarships were first available for 2006-07. The Journal examined colleges, ranked by net price, among four-year public universities with at least 1,000 undergraduates, excluding satellite campuses. Only select schools are displayed.

Budget figures displayed prior to those for fiscal 2024 were adjusted to 2023 dollars.

Sources: Auburn University budget (budget data); U.S. Education Department (net price data); Auburn University board documents and website and bond information (building map); Auburn University Office of Institutional Research (faculty and staff counts).

nvmd


It is pretty shocking that Auburn is the 4th most expensive public school by some metrics. It doesnt really fit the bill we portray as being very conservative- ag and tech school of some sorts.


I believe no matter what the kids should go get basics at juco and then transfer to a 4 year university though. It costs a lot less and likely the grades are easier to achieve while at juco if the kid is just wanting to breeze through them as fast as possible.

Thanks for sharing Lanier.

Reading this and pairing it with the recent over-commercialization of downtown has put a sour taste in my mouth for Auburn unfortunately.

Eye opening to say the least.

Bloated administration. Auburn is a prime example of this. I graduated from Auburn and love Auburn, but unless you are getting an Engineering degree, I don’t think the Auburn education is worth what it costs right now.
And the same could be said for a lot of other schools.

I am going to bookmark this thread for clerical purposes.

Seems as though we are always told someone other than families are paying for our lavishness.