Rising Collge Tuition

Related to this post, we read this article about rising college tuition and what you can do about it.  Note the part about “amenities.”  Providing such fluff is not only an incentive to draw students in, it is also a justification for the rapidly proliferating administrative parasites.  After all, why does a college or university require 10,000 deans (slight exaggeration) and more “student affairs” personnel than there are grains of sand on a beach (another very slight exaggeration)?  To provide those “amenities” and “enrich the student experience.”  It’s not only the “student experience” that is getting “enriched,” that’s for sure.  And the article touches upon another issue: education inflation; today, a college degree is required for jobs that in the past required only a high school diploma.  Eventually, one will need a PhD, MD, or JD for even the most mundane entry-level job, and then even that won’t be enough.

The cornerstone article may be useful to you, so take a look.

Why Not Adjunct Administrators?

At left, is that an academic administrator? 

By http://phil.cdc.gov/PHIL_Images/20031208/87d4bff74e41427cb278526bd9cbe76a/5260_lores.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=776561

Following up on this and also on this, I ask: why not have adjunct administrators?  Well, other people have already written about this.  See this summary:

Rather than fill universities with adjunct instructors, why not replace them with adjunct administrators?

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

Worse of all, administrators isolate themselves from students behind security doors but meddle more and more in faculty and student lives.

Indeed.  A problem is that hiring and “cost-cutting” decisions are made by administrators themselves. Guess whose positions they have an incentive to protect?

Rent-seeking behavior, anyone?

The same principles apply as to why we have outsourcing and H-1B job replacement for workers, but not for management (or lawyers, economists, politicians, mass media, etc.). Economically, it's always easier for administration (of all types) to focus on the mote in the worker's eye than the beam in their own.

Dismantling academia, part II: the parasites

This post is a sequel of my research on how the U.S. academia is being demolished.

As we have already established, according to major school administrators around the country (including the former president of Stanford University), the major reason for the high college tuition is the overblown salaries of the faculty.

The solution? Remove faculty from the equation – or at least keep them at the bare minimum. Instead of full time faculty with benefits, the higher education institutions should employ adjunct faculty and teaching assistants without benefits.

Whereas these declarations have been made public only recently, the process of switching to adjuncts has been undergoing for decades. The adjunct faculty are now the majority of the higher education instructors in the U.S.

More than 50% of all faculty appointments are part-time.  According the Association of American Association of University Professors: 
 
“This includes positions that may be classified by the institution as adjuncts, part-time lecturers, or graduate assistantships.

Many faculty in so-called “part-time” positions actually teach the equivalent of a full-time course load.

Over one-fifth of part-time appointments are held by graduate student employees, whose chances of obtaining tenure-track positions in the future are increasingly uncertain.

To support themselves, part-time faculty often commute between institutions and prepare courses on a grueling timetable, making enormous sacrifices to maintain interaction with their students.
 
Since faculty classified as part-time are typically paid by the course, without benefits, many college teachers lack access to health insurance and retirement plans” 
 
According to online records, an adjunct professor is paid $3,500 for an entire course. So, why would anyone take on this type of work that is so exacting, requires so much effort and investment of time? 

I just watched a documentary about poverty in America, and one of the featured guys was explaining that as a head busboy he was making approximately $11,000-12,000/year. This income probably does not include tips distributed among the service staff. So, instead of teaching four huge courses in nine months, why not work as a busboy or barista in Starbucks?

It might be that in some places around the country, adjuncts are paid a bit higher for a full load of teaching. Thus, according to this website, the median pay for adjunct professors is $30,000/year; whereas the average salary for all secondary / higher education lecturers / associate / assistant professors is $65,140. Obviously, our administration can save good amount of money by switching to adjunct teachers.

Are there any consequences?

According to online research, this trend damages student learning (the adjuncts do not even have offices in the colleges), faculty governance, and academic freedom (the protection of tenure is gone, so if you are not tenured, and even worse - you are an adjunct, watch your mouth and keep your opinions to yourself).

Meanwhile, no one has tried to compare the salaries of the adjunct educators to these of the administrators. But here they are, I could not find one administrator position that is paid less than $45,000. Most salaries are six figures. 

Most of the administrator positions in the past were created to help faculty fulfill their functions as educators. Today, faculty serve the administrators.  And the administrators are self-propagating.  By the way, these are the defining characteristics of any parasite, look it up in a biology textbook:

"an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense"