I'm actually in shock about how much negativity there is coming from democrats about

[JHB]

27. Would appreciate your opinion on this article, Prof

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/why-does-college-cost-so-much

Why does college cost so much?
By Paul Campos / On May 30, 2021 / At 8:51 am


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So why has the cost of college gone up so much, during an era when public subsidies for college have increased on a real dollar per student basis, overall per-instructor faculty compensation has declined sharply, and the degree premium has been transformed into essentially a statistical illusion, driven as it is by declining wages among non-graduates, rather than rising wages among those with degrees?

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(1) A huge increase in the amount of money that’s being spent on administration. While over the past 40 years the size of university faculties has increased more slowly than student enrollment, the sheer number of university administrators has increased far faster than the student population. On top of this, while compensation for faculty has stagnated or declined, as salaries for full time faculty have barely kept pace with inflation, and more and more formerly full time positions have been filled by low-paid adjuncts, compensation for upper administration has exploded.

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(2) Closely related to (1), the upper administration of universities has become its own world, increasingly cut off from if not actively hostile to the faculties it is overseeing. As a rough generalization, prior to the 1980s or so, American universities were run by their own faculties: the top administrators were typically drawn from an institution’s faculty, and they would usually rotate back into regular faculty positions after a time.

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(3) All this, of course, means that the people running American universities have to be positively obsessed with increasing revenue, in order to pay for all this resume-enhancing growth. For example, the annual expendable endowment income of my alma mater, the University of Michigan, is now equivalent, in constant inflation-adjusted dollars, to what was the combined total annual expendable endowment income of all the nation’s 1,497 public colleges and universities when I was an undergraduate 40 years ago. (During this time Michigan’s endowment has grown from $115 million to $12.5 billion).

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Perhaps I'm being overly selective in the parts I'm quoting, but administrative bloat, "keeping up with the corporate executives" syndrome, and careerism and counterproductive incentives for administrators is a much bigger part of it than usually gets talked about. It certainly ain't adjunct professors working "gig academic" jobs causing ballooning costs.