The author is a fraud. How the Times let him write without making it plain that he is a (failed) entrepreneur in an online education scheme, I don't know. Firs

The author is a fraud. How the Times let him write without making it plain that he is a (failed) entrepreneur in an online education scheme, I don't know. First, writers who go on about the how high tuition, but don't investigate how much people actually pay can never be trusted. The only figures to contemplate are average and median tuition actually payed. The stated tuitions are simply the maximum; it is true that Trustees have spiked the maximum in the last 20 yrs, figuring, why not make Saudi princes pay as much as possible. This is not inflation, but a policy change that affects a vanishing minority of students. Any writer who doesn't make this plain is either stupid or dishonest, and my advice is, stop reading as soon as he or she pulls this stunt. (I realized how much fraud there is in journalism on these themes, when I looked into in-state tuition at my old school, College Park, and was startled to see it is the same, after indexing for inflation, as it was in the late 70's. Admittedly Maryland is a fairly well-heeled state, most state schools have been savaged by legislatures in the last 23 years.) Presumably the Times pays him because they like what he says; clearly there is no fact checker. In one of his earlier [diatribes](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/19/what-if-college-tenure-dies/why-tenure-is-unsustainable-and-indefensible http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/7/19/what-if-colle...) the claim was let pass that the average 'full professor' makes $12,198,578 / 30 = $406,619.26 per annum. He also suggests that it is typical to spend 5 years as an associate professor, then 30 as a full professor. The data on a large state university are before me: these are the numbers for the humanities faculty: 62 full profs at average $99,431 --nice work if you can get it. 69 assoc profs at avg $64,722 51 asst profs at avg $53,687 His claim about full professors would suggest that there should be something like six full professors for every associate prof; in fact, there is less than one. (That the number of untenured assistant professors approaches the same figure though this status lasts only ~7 years; this suggests well over half of them will soon be in real estate at age circa 40 -- shows how savage and efficient a market Universities constitute....) For all I know, the Universities should all be drowned at sea, but we'll never know if we are given out and out liars like Prof. Taylor to read.