Giving Compass' Take:

• Students and faculty are finding that their universities aren't spending money in a way that they find to be reasonable and responsible. 

• What stakeholders should be involved in deciding how tuition and endowment dollars are spent? Should public universities have minimum requirements for spending on operations? 

• Find out how philanthropy can help college affordability. 

Across the state, at the University of Michigan, lecturers and graduate students negotiating for higher salaries and benefits have been drilling into that institution’s operating budget, finding what they say is a $377 million surplus it’s enjoying from their comparatively low-paid labor.

In Colorado, adjunct instructors at community colleges have used public-records law to dig through data showing vast disparities in pay. They say this research shows that there are almost four times more part-time than full-time faculty members but part-timers collectively get about one-tenth of the money the colleges spend on instruction.

“Students want to know where their money is going. When we break it down for them, they’re shocked,” said Andrea Cardinal, a lecturer who teaches art and design at the University of Michigan, which she also attended. “I was as well.”

A network of student groups affiliated with the Roosevelt Institute, including that chapter at Michigan State, report that 19 public and private universities it studied lost a collective $2.7 billion as of 2016 through a complicated financial instrument called an interest-rate swap.

Higher-education institutions generally have had lackluster results in their investments. Endowment returns were 12.2 percent in the last fiscal year, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute; that’s after falling 1.9 percent in 2016 and badly trailing expectations over the last decade, with the 10-year return averaging 4.6 percent.

Read the full article on holding colleges accountable for their finances by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report