I submitted the following Comment to the New York Times in response to their 8/5/09 article Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession.
I’ve been tenured University faculty for four decades and recently chose to retire (to adjunct status) at age 66. During that time I’ve made the institution (which has better name recognition than Lafayette) a ton of money by typically teaching a four/four load with more than 100 students per semester and I have never had a sabbatical. I would have been better off financially to have skipped graduate school (Princeton Ph.D.) and gone directly to teaching first grade in my children’s elementary school. Do not think this is a complaint about my academic experience. I have lived my life as I felt best and followed my own values, and I believe that I have made significant contributions to my institution.
But I am old school.
Recent hires teach fewer students but are required to publish in prestigious journals. They work their butts off just as much as I do. The work load is heavy and jobs are scarce. But my institution is primarily supported by tuition, and the change to a research focus has not been accompanied by a comparable increase in grant support sufficient to offset the released time from the classroom. And so income has been reduced.
This might be sustainable were it not for the large increase in administrative positions and student support positions. The latter might be understandable; the former seems highly misdirected. We have administrators and fund raisers coming out our ears, and administration is the fastest growing component of higher education.
Two factors impact on all this. One is the hope that, somehow, the computer and related technical advances will enable increased productivity/effectiveness for faculty working with students. Frankly, this hope seems unrealistic considering that a prime claim of my institution is about the individual attention given to each student. Second, more than ever, a college education now seems to be focused on job training and obtaining a good job after graduation. Money for education is seen as a financial investment, to be repaid by highly profitable employment. That is not the mindset that I encountered when I went into academia many decades ago.
Solutions? Wish I, or anyone, was sure of an answer. I do think that the rush to be flashier and offer more bells and whistles (when these things can cost a great deal of money) needs to be reined in. My campus is beautiful (at least superficially, some less visible parts are falling down) and I appreciate that, but some of this is unnecessary gloss and not substance. If your institution is basically tuition supported, focus on education and student contacts and hope that you will be recognized for that. Don’t expect student tuition to pay for all the research your faculty are doing. If your institution is basically grant supported, you can focus on research. I’ve been at both types of institutions, and when they followed this principle, they seemed to do all right. The problems started when they did otherwise.
p.s. Comments #s 25 and 17 raise some interesting issues where I can agree with some aspects and disagree with others. Some folks stay on too long. I retired when I turned 66 to avoid being worked to death – is this good, or not? This was my first summer off in decades, and so my wife and I were able to hike and backpack a great deal (frankly, we are in excellent shape for our ages). It may be that “old school” ways are too inefficient to be practical nowadays, but I believe that something important is lost otherwise. In my view, the basic survey courses are the core of education and I would be concerned with having less experienced instructors teach them. As a tenured faculty member, I have always made money for my institution while maintaining a modest (by today’s standards) research program. (My last graduate student received his MA in May.)