Why does college
tuition go up every year? According to Vice President Joe Biden, higher faculty
salaries provide a partial explanation. “Salaries for college professors have
escalated significantly,” Vice President Biden said recently. (June, 2012, p. A1).
But the AAUP
disagrees. According to a recent AAUP report, faculty salaries have not kept up
with inflation. Professors have only received modest raises in recent years,
especially compared to college presidents, who are doing just fine financially.
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It would be a
mistake, however, to conclude that professors have not contributed to higher
tuition rates at our colleges and universities, because in fact they share part
of the blame. Here are some examples of
the way professors contribute to out-of-control college costs.
·
When
a professor insists on getting a course release to design a new course instead
of doing the work as part of the professor’s regular work load, college costs
increase.
·
When
a professor uses college funds to deliver a mediocre academic paper at a
conference in Europe simply to get an expense-paid trip to an exotic locale,
that action wastes a college’s money.
·
When
professors cap enrollment in their graduate courses at unreasonably low levels
in order to teach smaller classes, those decisions increase a college’s costs.
·
When
professors unilaterally decide to end their work weeks on Thursday instead of
Friday, as many of them do, those individual decisions have a financial impact.
In short, many decisions
that professors make to reduce their job responsibilities or serve their own
selfish interests have an impact on the cost of doing business at our nation’s
colleges and universities. Therefore, it would be misleading to say that the
nation’s college professors have not contributed to the spiraling cost of
attending college.
And who pays the
price for the colleges’ inefficiencies—including inefficiencies in the way
professors work? We know the answer.
Students pay the price as they borrow more and more money to pay escalating
tuition costs.
References
June, A. W. (2012, April 13).
College’s cost isn’t due to jumps in pay, AAUP says. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A1.
Thornton, S., & Curtis, J. W.
(2012). A very slow recovery. Washington,
DC: American Association of University Professors. Accessible at http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/Z/ecstatereport11-12/