<p>“where does all the money go? Are utilities prices that high? Or dorm expenses? Or are professors making inordinate amounts of money?”</p>
<p>Professors are paid well, but there is a lot more to it.</p>
<p>In a recent opinion piece by Thomas Sowell he said that when he became an econ professor many decades ago a full workload consisted of teaching 12 semester units, and that now a full workload for most professors is only 6 units. They aren’t spending the time difference playing golf, it is spent on research and writing for scholarly publications. In this way a resource once used mainly for instruction is now being used for instruction and research in roughly equal measure. That is a subsidy in anybody’s book, and it’s a big part of the 50K per year.</p>
<p>Oh, and that’s just one of the big subsidies. The other one, particularly at liberal arts colleges that don’t have a research mission, is an elaborate system of price discrimination wherein needy students receive financial aid at the expense of those who can pay full fare.</p>