The New York Times Awakens And Tells Us What We Already Know: College Tuition Is Rising To Pay The Administrators
Sure, there are spa-like gyms and other fabulous facilities being built on campus. And there's the way-too-easy money -- the loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars to students studying Tibetan feminism and "gender theory" who have not a dream of paying that money back (unless they accidentally get a job at a hedge fund or live to be 133 and continue working into their 120s).

But also, law Prof Paul F. Campos writes in The New York Times of something professors and others who write about college have been saying for quite some time:

Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 -- a 221 percent increase.

The rapid increase in college enrollment can be defended by intellectually respectable arguments. Even the explosion in administrative personnel is, at least in theory, defensible. On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about "the market" to be intellectually rigorous.

What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts.

There are those who believe the rise of the crazily-compensated administrative staff coincides with the death of free speech on campuses across America. When you're making a small fortune presiding over a campus, well, you can't be having headlines pop up about those unruly students or staffers saying untoward things. (Welcome to so-called "free-speech zones," created by those who don't understand that the First Amendment wasn't written to only be applied within small, set-off enclosures.)