The dozen higher-education leaders summoned to the White House in December to talk about college affordability included 10 prominent college presidents and the head of one of the nation’s most visible education foundations.
And the 12th person, the person seated right across from the president to open and frame the discussion? A self-made number cruncher named Jane Wellman, whose outspoken devotion to the power of data has helped raise some uncomfortable questions about the way states and colleges spend their higher-education dollars.
That Roosevelt Room meeting helped shape some of the college-cost-control proposals Mr. Obama announced last month. It also provided a notable reminder of the national influence Ms. Wellman and her Delta Cost Project now wield.
With sophisticated analyses and an often-sardonic delivery, Ms. Wellman has been a pull-no-punches critic of fiscal policies that starve the institutions educating the biggest proportion of students—"public universities are getting screwed, and the community colleges in particular are getting screwed,” she says.
She is just as dismissive of the “trophy-building exercises” of public and private institutions that elevate their research profiles by hiring professors who never teach or that dole out merit aid to enhance their admissions pedigrees. And don’t even get her started on the climbing-wall craze or colleges whose swimming pools “have those fake rivers for people to raft on.”
But most of all, through the Delta Project and other consulting work, she’s been an advocate for using financial information and other data to highlight spending patterns and bring into greater relief the true costs of academic and administrative decisions. In higher education, she says, policy makers and administrators too often present “an analytically correct road to complete ground fog.”
Her antidote, created in 2006, was the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, an independent, grant-backed organization that produces the annual “Trends in College Spending” and other reports. Over the past several years, the Delta Project’s reports have highlighted the spending shift from instruction to administration, the rising cost of employee benefits, and how community colleges have been disproportionately hurt by public disinvestment.
Notably, the reports are formatted to reflect the diversity of institutions—the comparisons are organized by sector, so community colleges aren’t compared with research universities—and to reflect several categories of spending, not simply revenues and expenses. Ms. Wellman says that’s deliberate. Too many of the generalizations about higher-education costs are “based on one part of the elephant,” she says. “I wanted to neutralize that.”
She has also been eager to bust open some of the rationalizations that college leaders trot out, such as that higher education’s rising costs are justified because of uniquely high personnel expenditures. “Everybody spends 80 percent on payroll, unless you’re a lumber mill,” she says.
That mix of bluntness and evidence is what’s brought the Delta Project, and her, credibility and fans.
“It’s the only place in higher ed that’s really laser-focused on the question ‘How much do you get for how much you put in?’” says Travis Reindl, program director for the education division of the National Governors Association. “She has made the cost issue more approachable than anybody else I can think of, especially for people who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.”
A Background in Policy
But after five years, Ms. Wellman and the Delta Project are undergoing a transition. Under an arrangement Ms. Wellman masterminded, the organization last month merged its database of financial information into the National Center for Education Statistics and moved the policy-analysis side of its work to the American Institutes for Research, where it will continue to produce reports as the Delta Cost Project AIR.
Ms. Wellman, 62, will remain an adviser to the project, but will also devote more time to her role as executive director of the National Association of System Heads, a group for presidents and chancellors of public university and community-college systems. She says the new role will give her a different kind of platform to articulate “the moral imperative” of financing the institutions attended by a majority of students—including those who are the neediest.
It’s a natural step for her, says Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system: “Jane has a vision, and I think it’s because of the work she’s created in the Delta Project.”
Ms. Wellman’s interest in higher education began largely by accident. She dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s to get a job and establish residency as an in-state student. As she tells it, she “ended up typing for David Breneman,” who was then finishing his dissertation before going on to become a nationally known scholar on the economics of higher education. The subject matter “resonated with my political interest,” says Ms. Wellman.
She stayed at Berkeley for a master’s in higher education and then began working as policy analyst, first for the University of California system and later as staff director for the Ways and Means Committee in the California State Assembly. (The man who would become her husband was working there, too, for a committee on prisons.) She was frustrated by a lot of what she saw, both in Sacramento and when she moved to Washington, in the early 1990s, and worked for two and a half years as a lobbyist for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Her higher-education colleagues would say things like “Complexity is our friend” when preparing to talk budgets to legislators—and to bury them with numbers.
By the mid-2000s, after about a decade of consulting for the Cal State system and working on government and association commissions on college costs—and seeing all of them “go to naught"—she decided it was time “to create the data set and the methodology that I knew was possible” to bring more clarity to the issues of spending.
“We were hugely helped by the recession,” she says. “At any other time, I would have gotten much more pushback from the institutions.”
Data for Everybody
Richard Staisloff, a consultant on college finance who teaches with Ms. Wellman at an executive doctoral program in education at the University of Pennsylvania, says her contribution comes in “myth busting.” Often, he says, she makes it clear that where students are is not where money is being spent. “It’s hard to run from the data,” says Mr. Staisloff.
Mr. Reindl remembers getting together for coffee with Ms. Wellman here in Washington and listening as “she sketched out on a Starbucks napkin” her plans for the Delta Project (she chose the name since it’s the mathematical symbol for “change”). Those ideas have taken root, he says. When people like Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri and a Democrat, talk about state spending and degrees per dollar spent, “that’s really out of Delta, and that’s a governor talking,” he says. “She has made it not only OK to talk about outcomes and resources in the same sentence, she’s made it necessary.”
At least one critic of rising college costs, however, questions whether she’s too much of an “establishment figure” to be an effective reformer. Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University (and a blogger for The Chronicle), says her data are good, but “Jane doesn’t tell us what to do about it.” He says he wishes she’d do more to tie her information to data on what students are learning. “Where does Academically Adrift fit into the picture?” he asks.
But Andrew P. Kelly, a research fellow at the free-market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, says it’s her neutrality that makes Ms. Wellman valuable. “I use her data all the time,” he says, adding that he especially appreciates the measures that she calculates, like cost per degree and the share of expenses going to instruction. “This is certainly edgier than a simple definition of revenues and expenses,” he says. “Jane’s not just a policy wonk. She also has created a resource for the rest of us to use.”
Ms. Wellman calls herself “an insider” in higher education who is nevertheless “always sort of on the edge,” and she says her work draws criticism from both the left and the right. And while she believes her work has elevated debates about college affordability, she sometimes worries herself about the political tone of many cost-cutting discussions. “A lot of the cost stuff is anti-institutional and anti-faculty,” and need not be, she says.
Over the past five years, she guesses she’s talked with lawmakers and higher-education leaders in more than 40 states. And while she admits she’s not sure how much of her work is truly changing policy, she is satisfied that she has accomplished her goal.
“My hope was to contribute some substantive language around this,” she says, creating a college-cost vocabulary for people who are not immersed in the intricacies of education-spending spreadsheets.
“It is geeky,” Ms. Wellman says of the data she has championed so successfully. “I try to make it accessible.”