Dartblog

Only the College could be wasteful enough to spend money on its employees to get them to do what they should do as part of their health insurance. As we wrote several weeks ago, all faculty and staff are being offered a total of $200 each: “$100 for the health assessment and $50 each for biometric health screenings and for meeting at least twice with a health coach.”

Here’s the participation figures of the beginning of February:

● More than 1,100 health assessment completions

● More than 1,500 biometric health screenings

● Of the 655 employees who signed up for health coaching, 221 have had appointments

Melissa Miner, director of Health Promotion and Wellness Programs, reports “”We are thrilled with the success thus far, but we are working to double our numbers by the end of this month.”

Let’s assume that Melissa meets her goals: 2,200 assessments at $100 a pop; 3,000 biometric screenings at $50; and 1,310 employees doing two coaching sessions for $50. What’s that going to cost the College?

A: $435,500, on which the College will pay about 12% payroll tax, for a total of $487,760.

Not chump change. Enough for three or four young professors. Or, here’s another use for the money. Last year the College took in $168,152,000 of tuition and fees, of which 68% came from undergraduates: $114,343,000. The $487,760 that is being showered on the College’s already-overpaid staffers for health screenings is 0.43% of that amount. Had the College not paid out this money, it could have reduced undergrad tuition by $258.86 — bringing tuition from $60,201 down to $59,942.

That was easy, wasn’t it. Do it another few times and the Trustees wouldn’t have had to raise tuition at all. Even a few more, and we’d have the most reasonable tuition in the Ivy League (right now it costs about $6,718 more each year to go to Dartmouth than to Princeton. Which school would you, or your parents, choose?).

Addendum: Now don’t get me wrong here. Health screenings are all well and good, but Dartmouth could easily have made participation in the screenings a condition of enrollment in the College’s health insurance plan, or, what a thought, simply educated staffers about the need to do these screenings. But to drop this kind of dough on incentives, when tuition is the second highest in the Ivy League, well, there is a message about the administration’s priorities in there somewhere.