4 ms·

Three Reasons for Those Hefty College Tuition Bills

2 points by Futurebot 11y ago

Jun8 11y ago
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. [1]http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2012/131432 http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2... [2]http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html [3]http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-in-faculty-salaries-over-time.html http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-in-f...
a3n 11y ago
The reason tuition increases is that we have tuition. If public institutions were tuition free, this wouldn't be an issue. And yes, we have the money; we already spend the equivalent of total tuition on other things. We just haven't decided to spend the money on tuition, instead of on some of those other things. We have the choice.

4 ms·

Three Reasons for Those Hefty College Tuition Bills

2 points by Futurebot 11y ago

Jun8 11y ago
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. [1]http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2012/131432 http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2... [2]http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html [3]http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-in-faculty-salaries-over-time.html http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-in-f...
a3n 11y ago
The reason tuition increases is that we have tuition. If public institutions were tuition free, this wouldn't be an issue. And yes, we have the money; we already spend the equivalent of total tuition on other things. We just haven't decided to spend the money on tuition, instead of on some of those other things. We have the choice.