Where Do All Your Tuition Dollars Go for Online College? Surprising Breakdown

[LevelUP]

Some of you might be wondering where all your dollars go when you pay online tuition.

You may be surprised that often less than $100 of your tuition goes to pay the professor teaching your course!

Purdue Global Budget
https://philonedtech.com/purdue-global-b...last-year/

For example, SNHU pays their professors $2200 for an average class size of 25 students which comes out to $88 per student.
https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/employment...ching-jobs

[rachel83az]

Not surprised!

[Vle045]

This is why tuition at schools like California Coast are way too high. They don’t offer a darn thing other than a syllabus and tests. At least with the bigger schools, they may also offer library services, tutoring, career services, videos, discussion forums, access to software programs, and other additional services.

[ss20ts]

Where on earth are they spending $130 million on marketing? If they're spending that much then enrollment should be skyrocketing.

Paying an instructor $88 per student is a joke. PUG is 10 weeks long per session/term. That's $8.80 a week! That's way less than minimum wage in my state and not much over the federal minimum wage. These people have master's degrees or doctorates. Why would anyone take one of those jobs? I see why schools have so many adjuncts. I also see why many adjuncts just rubber stamp assignments.

[jch]

As of 2008, TESC mentors were paid $172 per student, plus a $17 per student bonus incentive for timely grades.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/pa-commonwea...92692.html
That's a tiny fraction of tuition, so I wonder where the rest of it goes.

[rachel83az]

A single 30-second ad apparently averages about $100k. If you do just one of those a week, that's $5.2M. If you do it a few times a week, on more than one channel, that could be half the budget right there. Especially if they're paying more for premium ad slots.

I know they also advertise a lot on FB & YT. I run across PUG ads every so often when I don't have an adblocker running.

$130M is still a lot, though.

[bjcheung77]

Back in the days of "U of Phoenix" spending, they spent well over 130 million on TV ads alone... If you added other media, it wounded up to about 650 million at the peak of their student base of about half a million students or so... that was amazing back then how much they paid to get noticed!

[ss20ts]

A single 30-second ad apparently averages about $100k. If you do just one of those a week, that's $5.2M. If you do it a few times a week, on more than one channel, that could be half the budget right there. Especially if they're paying more for premium ad slots.

I know they also advertise a lot on FB & YT. I run across PUG ads every so often when I don't have an adblocker running.

$130M is still a lot, though.

Why would any school spend so much money on television advertising today? That's a very dated method of marketing especially when you're looking for students in an online program.

They're not getting enroll numbers that justify $130 million in advertising. I'd be curious how much WGU spends on advertising. Them and SNHU have the highest enrollments of online students. Now if they could just get their graduation numbers up. That's the hard part with adults. We have lives and families.

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Back in the days of "U of Phoenix" spending, they spent well over 130 million on TV ads alone... If you added other media, it wounded up to about 650 million at the peak of their student base of about half a million students or so... that was amazing back then how much they paid to get noticed!

And what does everyone thing of U of P? Not much that's positive.

[studyingfortests]

Why would any school spend so much money on television advertising today? That's a very dated method of marketing especially when you're looking for students in an online program.

I would not be surprised if they are specifically targeting students who are not particularly Internet savvy.  Back in the day, I used to see ads for the seediest trade schools on daytime television, promising ridiculously high wages. And with USC under fire for targeting extremely low income folks for its north-of-100K MSW, it would not surprise me at all to see these programs intentionally going after vulnerable and not-particularly-savvy folks. Television is a great way to find those folks.