<p>But Yale is not a typical school with a typical compensation structure. You can’t use it to extrapolate to higher education as a whole.</p>
<p>The cost of benefits has soared for every employee in every industry. Service industries that need to hire lots of people to provide the service (academe, health care) have seen huge cost increases because their employees are expensive–but every employee is now expensive. </p>
<p>A lecturer (non tenure-track) making 50K in salary can easily cost the university 80K in benefits. Faculty family plan medical insurance alone can be 20K a year (of which the employee covers only a fraction in payroll deductions). </p>
<p>All of the full-time non-academic staff who run the student center, the psych services, the transcript office, the health center, etc. get the same employee-subsidized insurance as the professors. </p>
<p>Employee-intensive industries are very, very costly.</p>
<p>The bulk of the people in the university making upwards of 100K are administrators. They are the costliest employees. Not faculty.</p>
<p>Don’t worry, there are still many professors who believe their students are incurious ill-trained dolts, even at top-ranked places, so the contempt runs both ways.</p>
<p>No, but Yale and other high-end privates do in some sense, drive the industry. It’s like that one car in the slow lane that is always testing the speed limit; you can choose to stay back, but more likely than not every car in the lane is going to try to keep up. I also think the privates are particularly vulnerable to “brain drain” by other industries because they are the ones who, by and large, are producing the most Ph.Ds; if they can’t interest their own students in the profession, who can?</p>
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<p>I’m not trying to scapegoat colleges and universities. Someone up thread (it could have been you) suggested that it wasn’t salaries that were driving up college costs. I’m at a loss how you can hold both statements to be true?</p>
<p>I think that’s probably true, but not because their universities have scrimped on salaries. I said, the goal was to raise the professoriate to at least the level of a beginner’s salary at an i-bank and, I think that goal has been achieved, at least in terms of <em>base</em> salaries – at elite universities.</p>
<h1>184 I make a distinction between salary and total compensation (cost of employment to the employer), of which salary is only a part. I don’t think professors’ salaries relative to those of other professionals have greatly risen over the last 30 years to bring them into some kind of parity, which I thought was your argument. Also, only about a quarter of all college professors are tenured or tenure track. The vast bulk of college faculty are now short-term contract and/or part time.</h1>
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<p>Not in any universe I know! Anyway, isn’t “base” salary deceiving because bankers get annual bonuses as a matter of expectation? No i-banker realistically expects to make only base. Furthermore, banking does not require the long training and the credentials that a professor needs to acquire for entry into the field. Professors are still a lot poorer than bankers!</p>
<p>Star tenured faculty in certain disciplines at Ivy League institutions may indeed make a very nice salary, but they are such a small number that they are completely unrepresentative of the profession as a whole. There are not enough of them to be driving up college costs at all levels, nationwide.</p>
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<p>No, they don’t. They have huge endowments and they underprice their product (in market terms) because they have a commitment to socioeconomic diversity. The vast majority of colleges and universities aren’t in their fiscal position and can’t mimic their pay structure.</p>
<p>If you look at the annual salary review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, you will see that very, very few professors can expect to break six figures as an average.</p>
<p>And keep in mind that many classroom hours in higher education are not taught by tenured or tenure-track professors at all, but by adjuncts, TAs, and short-term instructors who are making very little. There is a huge academic labor glut that drives down pay.</p>
<p>SUNY tution is affordable to most everyone. The Stafford loans will cover it if the parents absolutely refuse to fill out the financial aid forms or refuse to pay and the family makes too much for any other aid. Those who are low income have PELL and TAP. I think the system was structured to be similar to the California one for their higher education.</p>
<p>Where the south has a major advantage is in their living expenses for college, I have noticed. However, for NY, colleges such as SUNY BUffalo do offer low rent to students if they go off campus after freshman year, and finding such digs is not difficult. By cutting room and board charges by living off campus, it makes living away from home possible for kids whose families cannot come up with the COA amounts. So it is with my one son who is at an OOS public. His room and board charges are up there but there is plentiful student housing and grocery store options near the school and that is what most of the upper classmen end up doing–moving off campus.</p>
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There is a huge academic labor glut that drives down pay.
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<p>Of course, there’s a glut. There’s a glut in part because many bright, otherwise rational 21 year-olds are sold on the idea that they may be among the lucky few to land a job at Yale.</p>
<p>Re ratio in K-12. Our class sizes in high school are usually 35 students.
At the local flagship U, entry level lectures may have hundreds of students.</p>
<p>Then she didn’t apply to the right places. There are tons of schools where a URM with a 4.0+ GPA would qualify for major scholarship aid, especially if the ACT/SAT scores were also very high.</p>
<p>2 tenured profs in my neighborhood work very long hours during the academic year and make decent salaries. They make a BOATLOAD of money consulting/speaking in the summers, though. Thousands per day fees plus first class travel. Both families very financially secure and the spouses travel all over the world for fun!</p>
<p>Adjunct professor pal of mine makes surprisingly little. She has a masters and plenty of real world experience. She is a dynamic speaker, but cannot support her family on her salary.</p>
<p>She would have gotten full tuition or major scholarship at several excellent schools outside California. There are threads on these boards explaining those opportunities.</p>
<p>Precisely. In this, they are no different from the thousands of kids who dream of a pro sports career, with approximately the same chance of success. If Yale profs are “the lucky few,” they cannot be a factor in the widespread escalation of college costs everywhere at every type of institution. My overall point: don’t blame faculty compensation for the explosion in college costs.</p>
<p>Student:teacher ratio is simply the total number of students divided by the total number of teachers. </p>
<p>Average or typical class size is a different metric. The two are of course related, but they are not the same. </p>
<p>Average class size is often nearly double the student:teacher ratio, because class hours per teacher may be less than class hours per student, because some classes use multiple teachers, because some people classified as teachers very rarely actually teach, etc.</p>
<p>BW - when they give the Student:Teacher ratio, do they count the adjuncts? In general schools want to pretend there are no adjuncts (unless it’s to their benefit).</p>
