Colleges Consider 3-Year Degrees To Save Undergrads Time, Money (Wash. Post)

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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.

The teaching load varies enormously by field and institution. In the sciences, research is not subsidized by the college – quite the contrary. Outside research grants from agencies like NSF actually subsidize the university. Close to 50% of a research grant goes to directly to the university in the form of “overhead.” This is over and above the dollars used to actually fund the research. These funds can go towards faculty salary or anything else the institution needs, including upkeep of buildings, or even the salary of humanities faculty who may not bring in this kind of money. There is a very real economic reason why faculty research is promoted – it is an enormous source of revenue for universities. So an increase in faculty research is certainly not the reason for the increase in college costs. If anything, research dollars should help decrease tuition.</p>