The Ugly Secret Why Tuition Costs a Fortune

by J.P. Zmirak

In times of economic slowdown, prices usually fall. Is your home worth as much as it was two years ago? As much as the mortgage you have on it? (For your sake, I hope so.) In major cities rents are falling, and shoppers are skipping organic groceries in favor of mongo-sized discount produce from Price Club. There’s just one sector of the economy that’s bizarrely insulated from reality: Academia.

Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College just hit $53,166 per year. That’s like buying a C-Class Mercedes every year ... except you never get the car. Other colleges are comparable, with even state school tuition rising to levels some parents find impossible. Why hasn’t reality had its revenge?

There are good reasons why we try to preserve college life from the logic of the market. There’s no clear bottom-line benefit to teaching Shakespeare plays, but we still want professors doing it. Universities in the West were invented by monks in the Middle Ages, and at their best they still serve as a cloistered refuge from the grim necessities of life – offering students not just a degree that’s valued in the marketplace, but a chance to broaden their interests and deepen their souls, to gain a solid grounding in the fundamentals that made our civilization, and explore all life’s possibilities before settling down to a life of working to earn their bread.

Yeah, that’s the theory. But what if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers – who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?

That is exactly what happened in academia over the past 30 years, according to Emory University professor Mark Bauerlain, who explores the open, ugly secret that most professors are paid based not on the quality (or even quantity) of their teaching, but rather on the volume of scholarly articles and books they can produce.

Bauerlain’s American Enterprise Institute paper, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own,” reveals the following: Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.

At the same time, the degree of interaction between teachers and students has declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial course work, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”

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September 2, 2009

Dr. Zmirak is editor-in-chief of Choosing the Right College and Collegeguide.org. He is author of Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist. He writes frequently on economics, politics, popular culture and theology.

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