
Three Reasons for Those Hefty College Tuition Bills - Futurebot
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/upshot/three-reasons-for-those-hefty-college-tuition-bills.html?ref=economy
======
Jun8
When people complain about the exponential increase in costs of higher
education and healthcare the first things that gets cited is the salaries of
professors and doctors, yet when I talk to friends in these industries about
this they roll their and give a big LOL. Someone must be wrong.

Focusing on professors, one the one hand there are people who argue that
salaries have not really increased _that_ much: For example [1] claims that
"During [the past decade], the salaries of public-college professors, when
adjusted for inflation, rose by less than 1 percent at doctoral and
baccalaureate institutions and fell by more than 5 percent at master’s
universities." [2] has good data on sociology professors that show that "Over
the past 21 years the average sociology faculty salary for all ranks more than
doubled in current dollars, increasing by 133 percent by AY 2003/2004."
Finally, [3] has some cool plots that you can play with, that show 3x to 4x
increase in the time span 1975-2012.

So, professor salaries have increased _considerably_ , as this article also
states, but it's not enough to explain the huge increase in tuition.

[1][http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-
budge-2...](http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-
budge-2012/131432)
[2][http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html](http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct04/fn17.html)
[3][http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-
in-f...](http://highereddatastories.blogspot.com/2014/07/changes-in-faculty-
salaries-over-time.html)

------
a3n
The reason tuition increases is that we have tuition. If public institutions
were tuition free, this wouldn't be an issue. And yes, we have the money; we
already spend the equivalent of total tuition on other things. We just haven't
decided to spend the money on tuition, instead of on some of those other
things. We have the choice.

