The cost of higher education in the USA
from David Ruccio
Now and in the coming weeks, many U.S. college students will be preparing for the resumption of classes. Some of them will be worrying about the escalating tuition and fees and wondering if they’ll be able to pay them. Many others, for whom college might have been considered as a possibility, will be locked out by rising college costs or will have to consider going deeper into debt.
That’s because, as Allison Linn [ht: ja] explains,
the cost of tuition and fees has more than doubled since 2000. That’s a bigger percentage increase than, well, pretty much anything else.
source [pdf]
Here’s another version of the fact that college costs have been rising much faster than overall inflation:
No wonder there’s a growing debate about whether or not a college degree is worth it, and right-wing academic populism is on the rise.
One thing is clear: the escalation of college tuition and fees is not being driven by professors’ salaries.
Here are the annual percentage increases in faculty salaries for the past decade:
And here’s the difference between increases in faculty pay and the growth of faculty salaries:
There’s a looming crisis here: as colleges and universities continue to raise their tuition and fees, students and their families are getting squeezed (because their wages and salaries are stagnant, and they can’t take on any more debt) and faculty members are not seeing those tuition hikes show up in their own pay (and so they need to ask where all the money is going to).
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—– look inside —– $5.94 / $20.00
—– look inside —– $4.90 / $8.00
—– look inside —– $15.99
—– look inside —– $5.99 / 12.99
—– look inside —– $5.93 / $12.99
—– look inside —– $4.97 / $9.90
—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
How come “Real World” economics, but no “real world” college degrees? It’s just the letters after one’s name that separates the poor schmuck who may have “real world” experience, but, sorry,: we don’t have any other means of dealing with all the job applicants.
So where IS that money going to?? Is it to new buildings? Higher level administrators? Football and basketball programs? Seeing this price increase in graph form really hammers home the nearly unbelievable cost of a college education. I still think that the next “bubble” to pop will be in higher ed….
One thing I wonder about: For public colleges, is the collapse of state support one of the major reasons for this seeming increase? Elite private colleges hiked their rates because they can — everybody wants into Harvard, there’s a waiting list to get in, so they can hike their tuition to whatever the market can bear, and with the advent of student loans the market can bear a *lot*. But the elite private colleges enroll only a few percent of college students…
Most of the money is going to make up for cuts in state spending, at least at public schools. In fact, if you broke it down by public and private, I think you’d see that public was going up much faster than private. This is a shameful thing. I think the rest is going to administration. Also, because of the increase in adjunct rather than full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty positions, the actual outlays for faculty salaries overall are probably decreasing quite a bit more than these data show. Adjuncts at my university get about $5500 per course with no benefits.