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Originally posted by: Angeline
"From a department chair today: For all those out in the world who think USM Liberal Arts is some kind of dead weight, the Dean's Office has done an interesting analysis to counter this notion.  They calculated all the expenses of the college except overhead (salaries, fringes, operating budgets):  $16 million.  The revenue generated by the college, exclusive of grants or the state allocation that goes to the college, in other words, revenue from tuition alone:  $20 million.  It appears that, using this very conservative economic model, Arts and Letters is quite the profit center.  This info has been conveyed to the VPs and the President."

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don't forget that this university is squirrelly with tuition values. It counts everyone as full tuition and then waives significant amounts for state mandated scholarships (X thousand for every student), also within the College budget there is no accounting for physical plant, ITECH, Accounting, Admissions, etc which actually consume about 40% of all costs on campus. To be "profitable" on tuition, that means not only covering cost of instruction but also institutional costs, CoAL would have to bring in $30 million + in tuition.

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Originally posted by: Angeline
"Folks, I think the point of all this is that CoAL compares very favorably - more favorably? - to the other colleges when it comes to generating the money the university runs on.  How many other colleges have as many majors at so low a cost?  And, no I am not trying to start a college vs. college war, just highlighting that all the recent CoAL-bashing in the Hattiesburg community is misplaced for financial as well as countless other reasons. Angeline"

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Let's also not forget this is the Dean;s attempt to fight statistics with statistics -- if the administration can use its own statistics, then so can we . . . i'M fine if the administration wants to spend its time splitting hairs -- it only draws attention to its own abuse of statistical data

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Originally posted by: Robert Campbell
"State university accounting is remarkably crude.  The kind of accounting for overhead mentioned by "where are the beans" is scarcely ever done. The point is that CoAL is a cash cow for the rest of USM; it is cross-subsidizing other academic operations.  That's what you'd expect, because overall CoAL teaches a lot of student credit hours at a low average cost per SCH. It would be interesting to see which other Colleges at USM bring in tuition revenue in excess of the direct costs of running them. Robert Campbell PS. I was making this same point back on the Fire Shelby board.   Low cost high enrollment programs cross-subsidize high cost low enrollment programs; it's a fact of academic life."

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Yes, Robert.  These same points can be seen in the thread "Real Issues" about 3/4 of the way down page one of the FireShelby board.  It containes many links to articles showing the cost benefits of Liberal Arts, as well as the Arts, IIRC.