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Faculty Salaries Push College Costs Higher By John O. Edwards
These are very fat days indeed for America's college professors, who are living high on the hog. While middle-class parents struggle to pay Junior's way through college, college professors have seen their salaries leap well beyond the rate of inflation -- an average increase in 2006-07 of 3.8 percent, outdistancing inflation's 2.5 percent jump. All this, while the cost of a college education soared by an average of 6 percent in 2006, according to the College Board, straining the load on parents' bank accounts and often leaving new graduates with a massive college loan debt to repay. "On average, 75 percent of the costs to run a college are related to personnel expenses, including benefits," states a position paper for the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. "Faculty salaries are especially expensive, particularly in high-demand subject matter areas like business and engineering." David Horowitz, author of "The Professors" and publisher of FrontPage Magazine, a leading critic of higher education, tells NewsMax, "What is driving the cost of higher education is the higher cost of salaries -- combined with government guarantees of student loans.
Story Continues Below "The professor caste is the most privileged caste in America today. Once they have tenure, they have lifetime jobs with four months paid vacation every year and sabbaticals. In return, they may teach only six or seven hours a week, or two classes a semester. They can be completely incompetent, but you can't fire them. Salaries can be 80 percent of the cost of running an institution … If they had to teach 12 hours instead of six, it would dramatically reduce the tuition charges, because you would need half as many people." Education writer Naomi Rockler-Gladen says, "Being a professor pays much better than it used to, and professors in the sciences get paid pretty well." "Pretty" well? At Rockefeller University, the top-paying university in the United States, full professors pull down an average salary of $186,400. Harvard pays an average of $177,400; Stanford $164,300; Princeton $163,700; the University of Chicago $162,500; and Yale $157,600. But even in academia, there are haves and have-nots. If you earned your doctorate in medieval Lithuanian poetry, you're not likely to retire young. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) annual survey found that professors in the areas of business administration and management are paid the most, followed by professors of communications, computer and information sciences, economics, education, and engineering. Only then do professors of fine arts get to line up at the trough. Strikingly, the AAUP also found that in the hallowed halls of academia, where feminism and "equal pay for equal work" are virtually worshipped, female professors still make less than male professors. The AAUP noted that on average, male professors in four-year institutions annually earn $10,000 more than female professors. AAUP's John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy, worries that professors atop the salary food chain might be "more concerned about their own careers than the profession." The scramble for a college education, resulting in a higher-paying career, is driving students into colleges and universities in greater numbers than ever before. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates there were 17.3 million students enrolled in degree-granting institutions in 2005, but expects that number to leap to 18.8 million by 2010 and nearly 19.5 million by 2014. Colleges, therefore, are scrambling to hire more, and better, professors. This creates a supply-and-demand situation that strongly favors the professors, who have their hands out for the biggest salaries. "Celebrity culture has invaded the campuses," Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, tells NewsMax. "Professors become ‘stars' by publishing popular books or appearing in the media. The pursuit of these stars became the way for universities to boost their rankings. This created a money chase after celebrities. "It has become a prestige economy, which causes salaries to increase astronomically. Some of these celebrity professors have played the markets unconscionably." Arthur Kraft, dean of the business school at Chapman University, says that high salaries in business disciplines result from competition between academia and the business world for hiring top-flight business instructors. He tells Inside Higher Education that new accounting and finance professors demand, and receive, 20 percent to 25 percent more than professors in economics or human resources. But professors aren't the only culprits in the academic goodie grab. A music professor at a private four-year college, who asked not to be named says, "The biggest sponges are the administrators -- the people deans answer to. They make tons of money." In fact, some college administrators pull down $1 million salaries, with a recent College and University Professional Association for Human Resources survey of presidents of four-year public and private colleges discovering that many of them enjoy pay and compensation packages of at least $500,000. Audrey Williams June writes in Chronicle of Higher Education, "The median salary of college administrators increased by 4 percent in the 2006-07 academic year." The previous year, the jump was 3.5 percent. June notes that it was a "pace that exceeded the rate of inflation for the 10th consecutive year." "Both faculty and administrative salaries are problems," Bauerlein says. "There are few labor groups in human history who complain more about working conditions and salaries than professors. But in truth, if professors had to work somewhere else, they would appreciate their situations a lot more than they do." Colleges are battling back -- in a way -- by hiring more adjunct and part-time instructors, turning over more classroom instruction to graduate students and, generally, shifting work to people who do not rate the high salaries of tenured instructors. "When you go from tenured to adjunct or part-time instructors, it is a giant leap downward in salary and compensation," Bauerlein says. "Many of them don't have medical or retention benefits and are paid by the course. They have no professional stature or long-term security." Oddly, this may be a better educational deal for students. "The top-level people often spend a lot of their energy avoiding contact with students," Bauerlein says. "They have a research agenda, a conference paper to deliver, or a book they've been working on for five years. They are often distracted and lazy, whereas adjunct people throw themselves into teaching and bring more commitment to students." However, the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have expressed concern about the gap between tenured and part-time and adjunct professor compensation. The AFT is planning a push to require 75 percent of university classes to be taught by full-time professors, and bringing adjunct and part-time professor pay and benefits to "parity" with full-time professors. Among 160,000 professionals in higher education represented by the AFT, about 60,000 are adjunct or part-time instructors -- and the numbers are growing. If the AFT initiative succeeds, even in part, the result is bound to be a further increase in the cost of college salaries -- and a concurrent increase in the cost of higher education. "The real thing driving the high cost of education is government guarantees of student loans," Horowitz tells NewsMax. "The universities have no limit on cost. They can raise their prices and run up their costs at will, because they government has put a floor under it all. It's a bigger scandal than Enron!" Recent scandals in the student loan industry may well be the first crack in a tottering system, which may cause legislators to take a closer look at the unholy alliance between professor salaries and the high cost of college education. As the cost of a degree outpaces inflation and even the ability of government grants to help low-income students finance college, more students have turned to private loans and built up huge post-college debts. The average now is $22,000, according to the College Board. Further, June writes, $1 million salaries being paid to college administrators means that legislators are likely to start "seeking the logic behind high pay for leaders of nonprofit organizations."
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved. Editor's note:
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