Because faculty salaries come from a separate slush fund.
Big Education is a primary source of Democrat campaign funding.
Univ of California employees were #1 backer of Obama in 2008.
#2 was Goldman Sachs.
I taught at a Big Ten university and a large part of its budget was set by the State, so there is a lot of truth to that argument. However, most articles written about the cost of education make no distinction between in-state and out-of-state tuition rates, with most using the more expensive tuition figures. My Ph.D. is in economics even though I ended up teaching in the computer science department (long story). The point is that I don’t think I ever approached 50% parity in terms of salary with a non-teaching job. Still, that was my choice and I did it because I truly enjoyed teaching. That said, there are other majors where the faculty were well over 100% parity because they were teaching in a field where there literally is no alternative to teaching.
I 40 years of teaching, I have never seen the AAUP come in and do anything about salaries. Their big issue is tenure and faculty rights. To me, tenure is the culprit as to what’s wrong with higher education today, and that extends to the NEA and high school (and lower) education. Fighting the AAUP on salaries is the wrong windmill...get rid of tenure and I think most problems fade away.
“Still, according to an annual report about myths of professor pay from the American Association of University Professors, faculty salaries are not the primary cause of higher student costs — cuts to state support and declining university endowments are to blame.
But Jenna Robinson, president of the right-leaning Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, said ‘the biggest part of the cost problem has been the absolute explosion of non-instructional employees at universities.’”
Someone needs an editor. Jenna Robinson here is agreeing with the point made in the first paragraph. It’s one that I agree with as well. We have administrators for every conceivable thing at our university, deans and deanlets of diversity and the environment and a president who makes upwards of a million dollars for doing a job that I am sure any member of his huge and also overcompensated staff could so equally as well.
Well, if the American Association of University Professors says University Professors are not overpaid and that their increases in pay are not responsible for rising tuition costs then it MUST be true...
In other words, when the state was handing out money, the Universities used it to inflate salaries. Now that the states are cutting back on their largesse, the universities can no longer sustain he inflated salaries.
"the biggest part of the cost problem has been the absolute explosion of non-instructional employees at universities.”
In other words, the state used the universities to create phoney baloney jobs to hide unemployment numbers, and now they cannot sustain those jobs any longer.
-PJ
You get what you pay for. I too have been affiliated with higher education for many years. I work at a public institution and the state funds about 20% of our budget with the rest coming from tuition and research bucks. The STEM fields are full of pretty clever scientists and engineers. The ranking of importance in higher ed is always administration 1st—now including many lawyers that run the show, faculty a distant second, and then students close behind. In my area we frequently lose professors to industry and private practice because salaries are at least 30 to 50% higher—I would have left long ago if not for my rural roots and gone to industry near a city.
The liberal arts are a very different story where degrees are offered in all manner of useless and unmarketable drivel. I still support tenure because without it, liberals would silence ALL conservative opinion.
There is a lot of truth to this. Huge numbers of entire offices on campus solely devoted to everything from improving the "college experience" of students to making sure students graduate in a timely manner to ensuring we're "inclusive" of every minority group under the sun (conservatives need not apply) to outreach to the illegal population (new favored group). These administrative offices exist only to run these specialized programs and are generally very well-staffed and generously funded.