Comments on: “The Federal Leviathan Is Crushing Colleges and Universities” https://www.overlawyered.com/2016/05/federal-leviathan-crushing-colleges-universities/ Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Mon, 16 May 2016 12:19:15 +0000 hourly 1 By: mx https://www.overlawyered.com/2016/05/federal-leviathan-crushing-colleges-universities/comment-page-1/#comment-336311 Mon, 16 May 2016 08:29:57 +0000 http://overlawyered.com/?p=59156#comment-336311 The Vanderbilt figure is extremely misleading, as detailed in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year. The vast majority of those costs are for overhead associated with federally-funded research, overhead costs that are actually paid as part of research grants (meaning that the compliance costs represent both revenue and expenditures to the school) and are certainly not passed on to students. While it may be worthwhile to look at whether overhead on research grants is excessive, that’s very different from arguing that students are paying over $10K/year to comply with regulations.

Nor is there any logical methodology to actually understand compliance costs. Suppose health and safety regulations lead to the conclusion that students and staff working with a particular chemical do so only inside of a fume hood. Should the tens of thousands of dollars for the hood, installation, duct work, etc… be considered a compliance cost? Or should they just be considered the cost of equipment needed to work with a dangerous chemical? If a university chooses to spend millions to build a new lab capable of studying dangerous pathogens, should it call that entire expense a compliance cost since there are inevitably federal regulations that prohibit you from studying Ebola in an English classroom?

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