In reviewing Higher Education?, Mark Bauerlein shares some statistics:
Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent” — that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
Elite colleges justify the light teaching loads of their professors — Yale requires only three courses a year, with a semester off every third year — by claiming that the members of their faculty spend their time producing important research. A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this “research” is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild’s need to credentialize its members. In any case, time spent for research is time taken away from students. The remoteness of professors may help explain why about 30% of enrolling students drop out of college only a few months after arriving.
I was following along, nodding in agreement, until that last bit. No, I don’t think the typical college drop-out is disappointed by the lack of professorial attention.
It’s amazing that professors have wrangled larger and larger paychecks out of a system the spawns far more Ph.D.s than could ever work in academia.