The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) announced that it has launched HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, an innovative gateway into a vast trove of data on college spending across the country.
HowCollegesSpendMoney.com provides unprecedented ease of access to financial information and spending trends from 1,500 public and private colleges and universities. Visitors can select specific colleges and instantly access eight years of their administrative and instructional spending patterns; compare them with other institutions in their peer groups; research student tuition, retention, and graduation rates; generate reports, and much more.
“The dream of a college education has become a financial nightmare for millions of students and families beset with the runaway costs of tuition and fees,” says Michael Poliakoff, ACTA’s president. “With student loan debt burgeoning past $1.5 trillion and student borrowers graduating with more than $37,000 in debt, institutions simply must get control of their explosive costs if we are to safeguard the value of higher education for the nation.”
“HowCollegesSpendMoney.com is designed to equip college trustees and leaders to be more effective stewards of their institutions,” Poliakoff adds. “For the first time, they can easily arm themselves with critical data to make informed decisions about college spending in the best interests of their students—and the public.”
“Those of us who serve on governing boards urgently need solid data, better analytics, and more transparency to face down the rising costs of college,” adds Heidi Ganahl, Regent at the University of Colorado. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure. ACTA’s new resource will be a major tool to help us tackle administrative expense bloat on our college campuses.”
