Don’t Feed the Pigs: College Costs Soar Past $90,000 Annually
Boston University, Tufts, Wellesley College, and Yale aren’t the four best schools in the United States — just the four most expensive ones.
The private schools each charge in excess of $90,000 for the 2024–2025 school year, the Boston Globe reveals. If you went to any of those schools, then you know that means a four-year degree now adds up to more than $360,000.
Speech isn’t the only thing not free on college campuses.
Sixty years ago, the average cost of college at a four-year institution approached $1,300, or about $12,000 in current dollars.
What changed?
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Most obviously, our dollar is worth their dime. The Federal Reserve, with the encouragement of profligate legislators and presidents, inflated the currency.
One can maybe blame university economics departments for teaching harebrained ideas regarding money. But it seems more honest to just to give them a pass and put the blame on the central bankers for that.
An answer more germane to the universities comes from a 2021 academic journal article titled — of all things — “What’s that smell? Bulls*** jobs in higher education.”
The authors of the Review of Social Economy article point out that “between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the US increased by 92%, during which time total student enrollment increased by 78%. During this same period, however, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, due in part to the proliferation of part-time and adjunct faculty, the percentage of full-time faculty decreased from 67% to 54%, whereas the percentage of administrators who were full-time increased from 96% to 97%.”
What do these people do?
Some act as ideological commissars.
We learned earlier this year that the University of Michigan boasts more than 500 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) full- and part-time positions costing around $30 million annually. This does not include administrators paid to ensure compliance with Title IX and other civil-rights ukases. Tabbye Chavous, the university’s top diversity administrator, makes $402,800 annually — more than the president of the United States.
Other administrators, adopting the role of Your Cruise Director Julie McCoy, work in something called “student life.”
The University of Iowa, Louisiana State University, and the University of Missouri all boast “lazy rivers” — a metaphor, one gathers, for campus life. Baylor students enjoy a 53-foot climbing wall. Washington University in St. Louis features chair massagers in its “Zen Den.”
Schools strongarm enormous sums from students and their parents. Where do they get the money? So much of it comes from the federal government. The more Washington doles out in student aid, the more lavish the campus perks and nonsense administrative jobs. In fact, rather than reduce the cost of college, increased aid neatly correlates with an increased burden imposed by schools on the parents and students paying for a four-year degree. Yale, Wellesley, Tufts, and BU charge what they can get away with charging — understanding that imposing more costs creates incentive for politicians to increase aid, which encourages more costs, which encourages more aid, which encourages more costs, and so on.
Still, the president, not understanding moral hazard, incentives, or supply and demand, keeps exacerbating the problem he pretends to solve. As a calculation error by the Department of Education delays financial aid for students, the president, in seeming defiance of an earlier Supreme Court decision, last week erased the student loan debts of teachers, nurses, firefighters, cops, and other employees of government. This comes atop a February boast that the administration “approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions.”
This is a subsidy of the $402,800 DEI commissar at Michigan and the LSU lazy river. None of it lowers the cost of college for anyone anywhere. We know this because the government keeps pouring more and more tax dollars to decrease college costs, and college costs continue to speed past rates of inflation.
Somewhere someone laughs. He wears tweed, a turtleneck, and wire-rimmed glasses.
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