> The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The univers

> The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well. The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc. So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.