Word: tuition
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...single most coveted stream of money at Penn is tuition because unlike federal grants, it is entirely "fungible"--it can be spent anywhere within the university on anything. It gets mixed with other fungible streams, like investment income, to the point where trying to follow the tuition trail becomes about as easy as tracking a particular cup of water through a faucet. It is almost impossible to say exactly what tuition pays for and what it doesn't, other than to say that it constitutes the major portion of the university's general fund and that anything paid for from...
Like any other university its size, Penn is a dauntingly complex entity. It had more than $1 billion in revenue last year, even without including income from its vast hospital complex. Its two biggest sources of revenue were research grants--$300 million, mostly from the Federal Government--and tuition and fees, which totaled $320.1 million after payouts for financial aid. In turn, Penn educates 18,000 full-time students (9,571 of them undergraduates) and supports about 15,821 employees plus a temporary work force...
...very different from those it discloses in its annual reports to the university community. Its latest federal tax return shows Penn finishing fiscal 1995, which ended last June 30, with an apparent surplus of revenue over expenses totaling $182.8 million, which is more than its undergraduates paid in tuition. But its annual report for the same period, compiled under a different set of accounting rules, shows a surplus of $63.4 million--which then, through the miracle of university accounting, disappears to yield a kind of deficit...
Despite the new accounting rules, tuition will remain the packhorse of academic finance. Parents may think their checks to Penn pay for a specific basket of services, such as the few hours a professor actually spends in class. In fact, tuition money flies rather far afield. Much of it supports legions of administrators, secretaries, groundkeepers, maintenance crews and campus cops--security being an especially crucial and large expense at Penn, which is located on the tough west bank of the Schuylkill River...
Families of Penn applicants who make that kind of money won't get financial aid, but Penn generously reimburses its faculty members for their children's college tuition. This benefit alone cost Penn $11 million in fiscal 1994, according to its HHS application--equivalent to 617 tuitions at that year's rates. A General Accounting Office audit found that four major universities--M.I.T., Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Chicago--together spent $53 million on tuition reimbursement from 1991 through 1993 and charged one-third of it, quite legally, to federal grants. The audit found, further, that 21% of the employees...