I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure)
As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar equipped fitness rooms, no pretty dorms and everything upscale. No pay increase for staff and I actually went through 3 years with no cost of living increases while the cost for college went up 15%.
Then the idea that Public Education in the US is a failure (Totally false narrative except in the cities and other low income communities). So people believe that private investment and legislation will fix things. This just has people coming in making and taking the money from teachers and the community and taking them else where.
Tuition and fees keep going up, but the quality of education is heavily determined by the quality of professor. We aren't getting the best professors, because somehow despite record profits for universities, their pay doesn't seem to go up. An adjunct professor, which I personally know people who have been adjuncts for 10 years, average $42k. That's so ridiculously low as every university that I know of is having huge buildings erected.
On the supposed professor "overcompensation": I know a couple of well-respected professors' kids who had to turn down their first-choice schools because they couldn't afford to go. So even these supposedly overpaid professors can't afford these outlandish tuitions.
At any rate, professor pay has never been going up at 3-5 times the rate of inflation, and the viability of the career track has been crumbling. Overall teaching pay has been going down relative to inflation, and quite possibly in absolute terms.
I agree with your first sentence, but professors at public universities don't actually make much money compared to other professions with similar education levels. Typical pay is 70-90k.
This reads like a press release written by York University administrators, or pretty much college administrators everywhere. Some facts that offer a useful corrective:
1. Rising college costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last 2 decades [0]
2. Salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]
3. Most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts who get paid a pittance [2]
So...college is massively more expensive than it's ever been, but full-time professor salaries have not risen significantly and there are actually fewer of them overall. So where has the money gone?
In the US, I don't know that there is a complete answer on that, but there are definitely some suspects:
* offsets to deal with slashed state funding (although federal funding has risen significantly in the same time period)
* university endowments
* university administrators [3]
* building sprees and tons of shiny new facilities
Well, the underlying problem is high tuition and high faculty salaries. Faculty used to be like a monastery, where scholars could live a simple life to nerd in their topic of nerdhood.
Now, my alma mater pays high-tooting faculty nearly a megabuck, pays typical faculty $180k, has $200 million building projects, yachts, and what-not. Tuition went up multifold too.
I'm more than happy to pay a bunch of nerds $60k per year to have lifetime jobs to sit around and nerd, but if my taxpayer dollars are paying for that monstrosity, it better darned well deliver economic value too.
The big problem is that the teaching faculty are paid like absolute garbage and have no job security or continuity between semesters. They are widely abused by universities and often are paid at or below wages you'd get working the cash register at Target.
Schools don't need to bring professor salaries down. They just hire cheap adjuncts to teach a lot of classes. That greatly reduces their average cost per credit hour.
Good professors pay for themselves by bringing in grant money.
This seems to be a much better explanation than the article provides, which seems to be along the lines of "the smart people teaching in college must be paid a lot."
The answer to the question posed by the headline is: It isn't. The correct question would be "Why does College cost so much IN THE US?," which implies there's a fundamental difference between the higher education system of the United States vs. that of a large part of the world.
You COULD claim that professors in other countries are being paid ridiculously low wages, but this sounds far fetched. A much more convincing explanation, in my opinion, would involve the difference in the way the economy of higher education works in the US versus other parts of the world.
I think the problem is more complicated than basic supply and demand. There is a lot of demand for college education. Enrollment is higher than it has ever been, and the people profiled in this article have jobs. The problem is that in order to cut cost colleges are hiring more and more adjunct professors as opposed to full-time, tenure track professors. It's not uncommon for these adjunct professors to take on jobs at multiple community colleges in order to make enough. The end result is that they are doing as much or more work than a full time professor but for less pay.
In general I don’t think education is their product. Their product is research and their ability to bring in high grant dollars is the source of their prestigious pay.
The recent explosion is numbers of students attending university requires them to expand the pool of teachers without a corresponding ability to expand their demand for grant winning researchers. Hence the lower average pay.
I would love to hear an expert in the field chime in on this, because I’m as armchair as it gets when discussing this ecosystem. Are there any high paying professors whose primary responsibility is teaching students only?
I can't understand the paradox that as tuition increased, tenured professor jobs became more scarce and other professor jobs lower paying. I guess fancy facilities and less gov't subsidy helps explain.
It's gotten to the point that you might consider the alternative of starting a higher education co-op to hire associate professors and frustrated, underemployed phds while minimizing tuition by meeting in un-fancy locations or online.
College professors and the department are the gatekeepers, they pick the textbooks, they set the curriculum. Administrators might push something, but it is exceptionally rare for anyone outside of a department to dictate exactly what materials and resources they're required to use.
As an aside is your argument:
- Underpay
- Being a college professor is hard
- Administration made me do it
Because that really was the smorgasbord of excuses. I have very little sympathy for #1 (see college tuition increases; unionize if you want a larger piece of the pie), #2 since the whole rest of the world manages without selling out, and #3 is pretty much everyone's job (i.e. standing up to bad administration decisions).
We've had the same lame excuses for the last twenty years while the problems continue to get worse. Until incentives align, or the public correctly holds professors/departments accountable, this will continue and continue to get worse. None of the excuses here change that.
When people complain about the exponential increase in costs of higher education and healthcare the first things that gets cited is the salaries of professors and doctors, yet when I talk to friends in these industries about this they roll their and give a big LOL. Someone must be wrong.
Focusing on professors, one the one hand there are people who argue that salaries have not really increased that much: For example [1] claims that "During [the past decade], the salaries of public-college professors, when adjusted for inflation, rose by less than 1 percent at doctoral and baccalaureate institutions and fell by more than 5 percent at master’s universities." [2] has good data on sociology professors that show that "Over the past 21 years the average sociology faculty salary for all ranks more than doubled in current dollars, increasing by 133 percent by AY 2003/2004." Finally, [3] has some cool plots that you can play with, that show 3x to 4x increase in the time span 1975-2012.
So, professor salaries have increased considerably, as this article also states, but it's not enough to explain the huge increase in tuition.
What is your opinion on the massive college tuition bills people have to pay for them to be able to dish out salaries anywhere near this? Teaching staff scale badly, sure some would be benefiting greatly from this professors expertise, but others would have little contact paying the same hefty tuition to support this kind of salary.
Two biggest drivers are 1) massive declines in public support (for public universities, obviously) and 2) more administrators.
Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad--it's the cost of complying with things like disability laws, Title IX, etc--but they require collecting and reporting significant amounts of data, and that isn't free.
There's other stuff too; some colleges do have the lazy rivers and fancy dorms, many colleges lose money on their football program, etc. But those aren't the fundamental drivers.
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the money is definitely NOT going to faculty salaries. Salaries for full-time faculty have been stagnant for decades even though an increasing percentage of classes are taught by poorly-paid adjuncts.
I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. If you like being on college campus, teaching, and don't care about money - hey, that's fantastic. More power to you. Be an adjunct professor. If you do care about money - think about a different career.
I just don't get why this is a problem. You chose to study mideval literature. Chose to get a PhD in it. Chose to be an adjunct professor. Kept choosing to keep doing it, etc. If it's a bad job, stop doing it.
As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar equipped fitness rooms, no pretty dorms and everything upscale. No pay increase for staff and I actually went through 3 years with no cost of living increases while the cost for college went up 15%.
Then the idea that Public Education in the US is a failure (Totally false narrative except in the cities and other low income communities). So people believe that private investment and legislation will fix things. This just has people coming in making and taking the money from teachers and the community and taking them else where.
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