A law professor says
“the real reason” college tuition is shooting skyward is that campus
administrator staffing and salaries are more or less going through the roof.
Prof. Paul Campos of
the University of Colorado offered some compelling facts in his New York Times
opinion piece a couple weeks ago.
The U. S. Department
of Education reports that administrative jobs at colleges and universities grew
60 per cent between 1993 and 2009, while tenured faculty positions increased
only about one-tenth as much.
Campos also says “the
recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university
administrators” is indefensible. Indeed, it is. The tired old argument that “we
need to pay high salaries to get high quality candidates” has never been proved,
and is unprovable.
I think Dr. Campos
stumbles when he pooh-poohs arguments that federal and state education funding
have shrunk drastically, forcing community colleges and good old State U. to
grab more revenue from paying students and their parents. Campos says public
funding has not been substantially cut back. However, he seems to be focused on
total dollars allocated, and he seems to ignore the impact of inflation and the
fact that the number of students attending post-secondary institutions has
swelled spectacularly. Per capita (per student) public funding for education
certainly has declined.
I believe much of
the criticism of “high college costs” is impotent. It seems to me that the
focus of critical discussion should be on reducing the actual costs of a
college education for the typical student.
We need to eliminate
some student amenities (like multi-million-dollar fitness facilities) and some
sports (my alma mater, a small liberal arts college, still has a golf team and
an equestrian team) and some liberal arts courses (for example, cut all of them
and award a degree in three years) and all further additions to the tenured
faculty.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved
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