


Detective work
Why has the APS meeting registration fee risen so much, and so incessantly? I was curious to see if data I could dig up would shed any light on this, specifically on whether any of the following are plausible:- APS is increasingly making a profit off of the March Meeting, using it to fund other activities.
- The cost of running a meeting — renting a convention center, etc. — have been increasing a lot in recent years.
- Greater attendance leads to to greater cost per person.
Data
In addition to the meeting registration costs, I wanted the total revenue and cost associated with each meeting, and the attendance. The Annual Reports of the APS, list total meeting-related revenue and expense. This includes meetings other than the March Meeting, such as the April Meeting — yes, there’s some creative nomenclature at work here — but since the March Meeting is much larger than all the others it seems reasonable to use the total meeting values. (The March Meeting has about 10,000 attendees; the April Meeting about 1500.) March Meeting attendance was difficult to determine. The number of attendees was given in each of the 2012-2018 Annual Reports, but the earlier ones simply stated “over 7,000 attendees,” or other such lower-bounds. The number of people at the APS March Meeting has grown from about 7000 in 2008 to 11000 in 2018:



Resolutions to the Paradox
We therefore have a puzzle:- The registration fee for APS March Meeting attendees has risen considerably in recent years;
- The per capita cost of running the meeting has remained roughly constant;
- The profit APS Makes on the meeting is small and roughly constant.
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- My data or my approximations are flawed. My meeting expenses are summed over all APS meetings, and perhaps the March Meeting is not as dominant as I think. My attendance figures are rough and don’t distinguish between full and partial meeting fees. And so on. I’ve made several simplifications that could be far off from the reality of APS Meeting finances.
- I’m using only the Early Registration Fees to track the cost of the meeting — perhaps it used to be the case that lots of people registered late, essentially subsidizing those who register early. The number of disorganized procrastinators has been declining.
- Similarly, perhaps the fraction of student attendees has risen sharply. It’s clear from the overall expense that students are subsidized; this subsidy must come mostly from non-student attendees.
- An increasing fraction of the cost of running the APS March Meeting comes from attendee registration fees, rather than, for example, commercial exhibitors (vendors).
- I’ve missed something major in my assessment, or my understanding of how the APS and March Meeting work.