The Government is the Largest Source of University Funding

I went to a large public university.  I recall back then learning that the student tuition paid for around 10-20% of the schools budget.   Today public schools get a higher % of their money from tuition but most of their money is still from other sources primarily from state, local and federal government money.   Private schools get a larger portion of their money from tuition and also have larger gift and endowment funding.   But private schools also do get a significant portion of their money from governments.    How does it all add up?


The Delta Cost Projects Trends in College Spending 1998-2008 report has information on the source of revenue for universities.    In the report, Figure A1 has the revenue per student for each category broken down by each type of institution.     If you add that to the # of students for each type of school in figure 2 of the report, we can find out how much money each type of university gets from the various sources.    The math is simple, e.g. just take the # of students at the type of university then multiply by the average funding per student and you get the total funding for that type of university.   Add up all the funding from all the sources and you can find the % of funding for each source.    Unfortunately the numbers for the # of students in the report are in a graph and not I had to estimate the actual figures based on the graphic.    Because of that all my numbers here are going to have a margin of error of 1-2%.

I'm breaking up funding sources into 5 categories as follows :
Tuition - this is the NET tuition after accounting for student aid.   So this is the total amount of tuition the schools get after things like scholarships or tuition waivers.
State/local government - This is various funding from state and local governments.   It may be outright tax subsidies or grants for specific projects.
Fed government - This is funding from the federal government level
Other - this category includes other sources of money like student housing, athletics, teaching hospitals etc.
Private - this is gift and endowment money.

Note that here we're ONLY looking at money that goes straight to the universities.   So this doesn't cover how student financial aid is handled.    Student aid comes from various sources and pays the tuition and room and board for students.   So for example if the government gives a student loan to a student and the student then uses that money to pay the tuition bill then that money shows up in the tuition category.   A large portion of the tuition segment of funding comes from student aid which has other various sources.

Total funding from the different sources is as follows :

For all universities its a mix of private and public universities.    This is heavily weighted towards  public schools since the large majority (about 80%) of college students go to public schools.    As a whole government funding including the state, local and federal portions provides 44% of university budgets.   Government is the largest single source of funding for universities in the US.


Looking at just public schools we get :

As you'd guess the public universities get even more of their money from government.   For public schools government is the majority source of funding and contributes 55%.  

Private schools look like this :

Private students pay larger tuition bills in general and their tuition money accounts for the largest single source of revenue at private universities at 44%.   However private universities do also get tax dollars in various ways and they get about 13% of their funding in total from government sources.    Private gifts and endowments also play a larger part in private school funding at 20%.

In table format all the numbers from the graphics are :

	Total	Public	Private
tuition	27%	22%	41%
state/loc	25%	34%	1%
fed	19%	21%	12%
other	21%	19%	25%
private	8%	3%	20%

Of course these numbers are nation wide total funding sums.   The figures will vary greatly from state to state and from university to university.  


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Teenage Labor Participation rates Male versus Female

If you're not sick of hearing about the teen labor force participation rate I've got yet more today.   I figured it would be relevant to look at the participation rate for teenagers (age 16-19 years) between males and females.    As a whole teenagers participation rate went up in the 60's and 70's then have been declining since the 80's.   In the entire labor force men have been working less and women have been working more.   The labor participation rate of women went up significantly from the 60's to now.    They went up from under 40% to almost 60%.   Women worked more and more from the 60's to the 90's or so when it flattened off and lately in the past decade its started to drop.  But at the same time the % of men who work has declined gradually for the past 50 years and has dropped from 80%'s to 70%'s.   But the overall labor force was on an upward trend then flattened off and is reflecting the trend for women.    Do teenagers follow that same pattern?

I got the data from the BLS A1 tables again.   I had to do some math to get the numbers for male and female teenagers.    I simply subtracted the over 20 year old numbers from the over 16 year old numbers to get the 16-19 year numbers.

As you can see both male and female teenagers had the general pattern of labor force participation.   Both sexes had increased rates in the 60's and 70's and then have had decreasing rates from the 80's onward.  

In the chart I plotted the green line to show the gap between the sexes.    For most of that time men worked more than women.    However today the women work a little more.   Today the rate is almost the same and differs by less than 1%.  

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Happy Labor Day

(Image from National Archive)

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Electricity Cost of Using a Kindle

I while ago someone on The Simple Dollar made a comment questioning the electricity usage of a Kindle.   At the time I thought to myself that a Kindle couldn't possibly use much electricity.   Small electronics like cell phones and tables and the like really don't use much power and their small batteries require little electricity to charge them.   But I like to have actual facts rather than just simple assumptions.    Therefore I set off to find out how much electricity a Kindle actually uses and how much the electricity it would cost to operate one.

Amazon's Kindle Fire is probably the worst case as far as Kindle models go.   It has color screen and a more powerful processor so it will use more electricity than the other models.   I'm going to just look at the Fire since its the worst case, the other simpler black and white models will be cheaper to operate.

The Kindle Fire has a battery with 16.28 Wh  capacity.   Thats 0.1628 kWh.   The average cost of a single kWh is about 11¢/.   Based on these numbers it would cost 0.17908¢ to charge the battery of a Kindle Fire.

You can charge the battery in a Kindle Fire 5.58 times for a single penny worth of electricity.


Amazon says that the Kindle Fire will last 8 hours of reading on a single charge.   One penny worth of electricity will get you 44.64 hours worth of reading on a Fire.

 An average book is approximately 70,000 words.   An average adult reads about 250 words a minute.

1 penny = 44.64 hours reading = 2678.4 minutes reading = 669,600 words = 9.565 books.

For the cost of 1 penny worth of electricity an average speed reader can read approximately 9 1/2 average size books on a Fire.

The Kindle Fire will also play movies and videos.    The Amazon specs say that the Fire will play 7.5 hours of video on a battery charge.   Nearly as much as the reading time on a single battery charge.

Since a penny of electricity will charge a Fire 5.58 times and a single charge will give you 7.5 hours of video you can get 41.85 hours of video playback on a Fire for 1 penny worth of electricity.

Of course all of these numbers are just averages and your mileage will vary. 

Bottom Line :  A Kindle is very cheap to operate and the electricity bill should be almost negligible.
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