More on the Costs of Higher Education

By Steven L. Taylor. Apropos of James Joyner’s post on tuition costs, I had read a post over at HuffPo yesterday called Rich Colleges, Poor Professors. The piece highlights the low pay of adjuncts at American universities and is ultimately a call for unionization.
Setting aside one’s views on unionization, I would note that basic fact of large numbers of part time faculty is a real issue and underscores that the increases in tuition that we have been seeing in higher education is not flowing into the pockets of the faculty. The piece cites a Chronicle of Higher Education piece that notes that 70% of college faculty are non-tenure track.  While there is no breakdown of part-time v. full-time in the story, the bottom line is that non-tenure track faculty are cheaper than tenure-track faculty. Read more...