Given budget cuts at my school, I proctor my own final exams. Those 3 precious hours ticked away slowly. As I sat and watched my 116 students think about my strange Becker Style environmental economics questions, I asked myself why I was sitting there and whether my campus makes money from my teaching. Here is my algebra;
In-state tuition is $13,000 and 80% of our students are in state while Out of State tuition is $36,000 and 20% are in this category. Average tuition collected = .8*13 + .2*36 = 17.6. Each student takes 9 classes a year so UCLA is collecting $1,955 per student per course
This year I will teach 116 + 65 + 13 +17 undergraduates = 211 so the revenue I am generating is
211*1955 = $413,000 . I also give numerous guest teaching lectures because my kind colleagues always ask me to do so (they tend not to reciprocate!).
On top of this I will co-teach a MBA course this Winter that will attract 40 students each of whom is likely to be paying $5,000 per course --- so that's another $100,000 revenue going to the business school.
Believe it or not, I am not paid $513,000 per year. This example suggests that UCLA could certainly generate some "profit" with larger classes taught by good teachers. While I lecture in large classes, I view myself to be a "serious" researcher and rankings such as REPEC's Ranking of economists over the last ten years agrees.
This will require a serious investment in the Ph.D. graduate programs. I worry that our graduate students are drowning in paper grading and this is displacing time they could be spent thinking and doing research.