I have seen the cost of a university education explode since I was a student, even adjusting for inflation. As a professor, I can assure you that faculty salaries have not increased proportionally nor are we to blame for the increase in the cost.
Professor salaries, especially at state school, are often compressed. For those of us who have been around a while, the compression can be extreme. For example, a full professor who was hired in the early 1990s might have a salary on par with a brand-new hire. This is one reason why star faculty move around in search of ever larger salaries. Universities also rely heavily on underpaid adjuncts. While the rates vary, an adjunct might make $24,000 over nine months for teaching eight classes. As adjuncts usually receive no benefits, they are cheap labor for higher education. As adjuncts often have advanced degrees, they are perhaps the worst paid of the best educated.
To be fair and balanced there are star faculty who command large salaries and perks. They are celebrities of academics who use their status and connections to slide from one well-paying job to an even better paying job. Such stars sometimes enjoy exemptions from the mundane duties of faculty, such as teaching. As with any profession, stars are relatively rare and are usually not a significant factor in the increased cost of education. As such, blaming the faculty for the higher cost is not, in general, a legitimate complaint.
But complaining about the cost of education is legitimate: costs have increased significantly while there are increasing doubts about the quality and value of education. The rise of AI is also raising significant doubts, although AI is likely to be yet another bubble. However, we should put the cost of education into perspective. Being a professor, I will focus on the educational aspects.
At a state school like my own Florida A&M University, a student will most often take a class from a person with a terminal degree, usually a doctorate. A standard class is three credit hours, which means that a student is supposed to be in class two and a half hours per week. In my college four classes per semester is common and we are required to hold two hours of office hours per class. We also have various research and administrative duties. For example, I am the unit facilitator for Philosophy & Religion and seem to have a lifetime sentence to be the chair of two university committees. Thanks to email, students can contact us around the clock—and most faculty, including myself, respond to emails outside of normal hours and on the weekends. I’m writing this on a Sunday and just completed an email exchange with a student. We also typically do work for the classes, such as grading, preparing lessons and so on throughout the week and during vacations. Even the unpaid three months that 9-month faculty get in the summer.
While the exact hours will vary, a student at a school like FAMU will have access to a professional with an advanced degree for 2.5 hours in the classroom, have access to 8 hours of office hours, and typically have unlimited email access. Most faculty are also willing to engage with students in their off time—for example, I have stopped while grocery shopping to explain a paper to a student who also happened to be in Publix at that time. This is in return for the cost of tuition, only a small fraction of which goes to the professor.
Now, compare this to the cost per hour for other professionals. For example, a psychiatrist might charge between $125-$285 per hour. As another example, a plumber might charge $9-150 an hour. As a third example, a consultant might charge anywhere from $30 to thousands of dollars an hour. As a fourth example, an attorney might charge hundreds of dollars per hour or more.
Imagine what it would cost to have a plumber, medical doctor, or attorney spend 2.5 hours a week with you for 16 weeks (divided by the other people, of course), be available an additional eight hours a week, do work for you outside of those hours, respond personally to your emails and so on. If professors billed like plumbers, lawyers or medical doctors, the cost of school would be insanely high.
It might be replied that plumbers, lawyers and medical doctors perform services that are more valuable than professors. After all, a plumber can fix your pipes, a lawyer could get you a nice settlement and a medical doctor might re-attach your quadriceps tendon. A professor merely teaches and surely that has far less value. The obvious practical reply is that people with college degrees make, on average, more than those without—this would suggest that teaching does provide some value. There is also the fact that plumbers, medical doctors and lawyers need education to do what they do—thus showing that education does provide something of value (although plumbers typically do not go to college to become plumbers).
As such, while education is too expensive, the actual cost of paying professors is ridiculously cheap relative to what other comparable professionals cost. You might suspect that I implying the blame lies elsewhere, and you would be right.
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