The Homa Files

Parent’s lament: “It’s like driving a new Corvette to the campus every September, leaving the keys and taking the bus home.”

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Excerpted from: RCP, Why Corvettes Cost Less Than College, September 21, 2010

American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers.

American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times.

American universities now rake in $40 billion a year more than they did 30 years ago. And most of that money isn’t going for academics.

• For starters, the money is going to more numerous and more pampered sports teams. Duke University in Durham, N.C., spends over $20,000 a year per varsity golf player. And these squads rarely pay for themselves. There are 629 college football teams, and only 14 make money.
• The number of administrators per student at colleges has about doubled over 30 years, according to Hacker and Dreifus. Their titles point to such questionable duties as “director for learning communities” and “assistant dean of students for substance education.”
• Full-time faculty members are being paid more for teaching less. Some elite colleges now offer sabbaticals every third year instead of the traditional seventh. Harvard has 48 history professors, and 20 of them are somewhere else this year.
• Compensation for college presidents, meanwhile, has soared to corporate CEO levels. Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., pays its president $1.2 million a year!
• Universities are also competing to make their on-campus experiences more like a resort than a bookish monastery. Some dorms feature granite counters, kitchens and walk-in closets. Fancy health clubs have replaced musty gyms.

What else are students getting in return for their enormous college bills?

They do receive an education, though the quality doesn’t seem to justify the rising costs.

Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

The market will eventually recognize the out-of-whack economics of today’s “place-based colleges” and intervene. Some day soon, Web alternatives will be a force to be reckoned with.

Full article:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/09/21/why_corvettes_cost_less_than_college_107241.html

This entry was posted on October 7, 2010 at 6:28 am and is filed under Education - Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.