If we had the data readily available, we would look at a variety of quantitative information about an organization to help us understand what the organization actually does, how the organization allocates its resources, and what performance indicators the organization uses to measure how it is doing. Further, if we have historical data of this sort we can then look at how the variables have changed over time and use that to investigate changes in organization behavior.
Alas for private corporations, much of their information is tightly held and we won't be able to look at it. But for the U of I, there is much institutional data that is released publicly, and it behooves us to take a look to see what we can garner from it. And the Daily Illini maintains a faculty and staff salary database that can be useful for this purpose. Further, 23 years ago I was able to get some institutional data that is not generally released, because I was doing a study under a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and the university wanted to encourage Sloan (perhaps with a renewal grant) so they supported that work. We'll take a look at a bit of both.
The first Excel Workbook gives some of the publicly available data. There are three spreadsheets, each with different sorts of information. The first is about students in class, which the university measures in instructional units (IUs). An IU is a credit hour. So our course, being 3 credit hours, means each of you enrolled in the course generates 3 IUs and then the total number of IUs for the course are the number of students enrolled times 3. Instructors are divided into three categories - Tenure Track (and Visitors), Grad Assistants (TAs), and Specialized Faculty (these are instructors not on the tenure track whose full-time job is teaching).
In the ideal we'd have some additional data, that we don't have here. The first is dollars spent per IU. In our class, this is pretty simply to calculate, since I'm paid just to teach the class. If we had 50 students, which makes 150 IUs, and if I were paid $15,000 to teach the class, which I'm not but I'm using the figure to make the calculation easier, then the expenditure on instruction per IU would be $100. When I was a full time faculty member, it was pretty standard to allocate faculty time as 40% teaching, 50% research, and 10% service. Plus, at that time there was a 4-course teaching load. Thus you could allocate 10% of my salary then to teaching the class and compute expenditure on instruction per IU that way. As you can see, those numbers would depend on faculty salary, teaching load, and fraction of overall obligation that is teaching. It would be good to know how expenditure on instruction per IU varies with - 100-level courses, 200-level courses, etc., how it varies with the department that offers the instruction, and how it varies from courses that satisfy general education requirements to those that are for the major. I can provide some anecdotal information on this, but it would be good to see the numbers. I've never seen such information presented.
It would also be good to have some metric of quality of output, but that is much harder. Does it matter for students learning who does the teaching? We'll discuss this some in class. But not with any hard data.
The second spreadsheet is on Economics faculty salaries - only Assistant Professors and Specialized Faculty. The salary numbers coupled with the teaching loads of Assistant Professors, which I will provide in class, offer up an explanation for why there are Specialized Faculty now (there weren't when I started by in 1980). I've also included my salary from when I started as a benchmark to see what's been going on since then.
The third spreadsheet gives a historical look at Tuition and Fees plus other expenses. I will ask students in the class, focusing on those from Illinois, what their next best alternative was if they didn't attend the U of I. While this wouldn't be a perfect answer for that, it would be good to see Northwestern tuition and fees and Illinois State tuition and fees over the same time interval. That would help in understanding what happened historically. Do note that tuition at the U of I is a political animal, set by the Board of Trustees with advice from the University President.
The next workbook is old data from spring 1996. You can't find this information publicly available, but it is interest. Take a look at Table 2, which shows the size distribution of undergraduate classes by enrollments. (Credit hours may not be uniform across these courses. If credit hours were uniform, then enrollments and IUs would be isomorphic.) . The distribution is highly skewed, half the enrollments in classes with at least 160 students, and a quarter of the students in classes with at least 500 students, while there are many much smaller classes. Further, the large classes tend to be introductory courses, while the smaller classes then to be advanced courses.
In class we will discuss some of the implications of this and how the situation has changed over time. We will also contrast this with some other information.
Geographic Distribution of U.S. Students in Econ 490 fall 2017
Data about family income at the U of I (from the NY Times)
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