Professor Campos takes a long hard look at the economics of higher education. You can read the whole thing if you're interested. In a pistachio shell, tuition has risen enormously in the past 40 years, as have total revenues and spending, but the money isn't going to instruction. As a matter of fact, more and more teaching is done by low-paid and job insecure adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty. The money is going to more and more highly paid administrators, fancy buildings, athletic programs, and such fol-de-rol. And by the way it is not the case that public subsidies for higher education have declined. They have in fact increased, but again, the money isn't going to instruction, it also is being hoovered up by administrators and buildings.
And by the way students aren't getting more economic payoff from the ever higher tuition.* It is true that the gap in earnings between people with and without degrees has increased, but that's because people without degrees are earning less, not because people with degrees are earning a whole lot more. Campos analyzes the forces driving this trend, pretty compellingly, but he doesn't propose a solution.
It's particularly interesting that the comments on the post quickly veer into health care. There are different dynamics, but people are experiencing a more and more expensive system, with increasing public subsidies, and they aren't feeling better cared for. It is true that health care administrators, like university administrators, are more and more highly paid, while physicians -- particularly in primary care -- are working harder and making less money. Like universities spending more on student centers and dining halls, health care systems are buying fancier buildings and hospitals are spending more on, well, hospitality - better food, better amenities for visitors - to attract more of the higher paying patients. There are other drivers of increasing health care costs. I don't want to make too much of the parallels. But I do think it's interesting that people are experiencing these dynamics similarly.
*To be fair, higher tuition isn't coming entirely out of the pockets of students. Federal tuition subsidies have increased, and a lot of people get financial aid and don't actually pay the sticker price. But the money is still flowing in.
2 comments:
This dynamic is illustrated very well in the book entitled “Parkinson’s Law,” by C Northcote Parkinson. As institutions age and get larger, their meaning and effectiveness are often reduced in inverse proportion to their size.
Graeber addressed this also, estemado Cervantes. You should grant his last book a few minutes of your time.
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