The reason the price of higher education has increased at up to several times the rate of inflation over the years is because of unbridled government spending. Basically anything the government gets its hands into turns to crap. We find professors like Elizabeth Warren, fake “Native American” getting paid huge salaries for doing very little work.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth Warren is becoming more the rule than the exception. One of my uncles spent over a decade hanging around collecting degrees at universities. Now he feels entitled to collect a very large salary because he is so highly educated. But he didn’t spend all that time at college because he wanted to make himself an extremely valuable commodity; he did it because he was a hippie trying to avoid having to make his way into the real world for over a decade. Thanks to the government many people like him who are life long malingerers are currently collecting huge salaries for doing very little.
History tells a lot of this story.
Before 1945, most university operations consisted of professors, some minor support staff, and a chancellor. It’s after the G I Bill came along and massive expansion of college staffs (not really the professors) that this all screwed up the economics or pricing of operation.
If you dig down into normal state-sponsored colleges today, you find that they are primarily run (class-delivery) by very junior professors or professors without tenure.
For most university operations to keep their “Micky Mantle-status” professors on the staff....they have to agree to only limited classes. This generally means that for every ten professors that you ought to have on the staff....in reality, you end up with sixteen to eighteen people doing what ten ought to do.
My general solution for fixing a lot of this...unless some state governor wanted to open a hornets nest and demand changes....is to create two tuition rates. The first for first and second years of college would relate toward trying to keep kids to limit their education to an associates degree (probably what sixty-percent of the kids should be aiming at today). Then the third and fourth classes...I’d double in cost for the students and make it a hefty amount, which you’d have to ask the question....will you ever get the money back via salary. In three or four years...the shift in attendance would start to occur, and we’d downsize the university program to the point where it should be.
huge salaries for doing very little.
Is that not the goal of the younger generation?
Gosh been working since 14 and at 54 no end in sight!