skewed up

The Coming Education Revolution — Marginal Revolution:
"As in other fields what we are seeing is an increase in teaching inequality, at the top are high-salary superstars surrounded by apprentices who work long hours at low pay for a lottery ticket that for most will not payoff and at the bottom are lots of mid-skill adjuncts who do the drudge work of teaching remedial English and math."
Inequality and debt, too:
The Debt Crisis at American Colleges - Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus - Business - The Atlantic: How do colleges manage it? Kenyon has erected a $70 million sports palace featuring a 20-lane olympic pool. Stanford's professors now get paid sabbaticals every fourth year, handing them $115,000 for not teaching. Vanderbilt pays its president $2.4 million. Alumni gifts and endowment earnings help with the costs. But a major source is tuition payments, which at private schools are breaking the $40,000 barrier, more than many families earn. Sadly, there's more to the story. Most students have to take out loans to remit what colleges demand. At colleges lacking rich endowments, budgeting is based on turning a generation of young people into debtors.
The financial crisis has shown that our institutional architecture has grown artificially and is unsustainable.  Unable to grasp how this structure could be changed,  some want to keep the familiar structure and change the entire mission of the institution.  But the principle is as true in the ideological space called the "global free market" as it is locally and the same overbuilding will occur. Institutions that are structurally unsound and unattached to the people they should serve grow bloated by a finance sector whose money acts like chemical fertilizer spurring rapid and overly leggy growth and damaging the soil. If wages for most people have not risen in 30+ years, why weren't three-year degrees, streamlining and consolidation undertaken?

Why Has College Tuition Risen so Much? Ask the Administrators, Whose Ranks Have Grown 84% Since 1989 - Hit &Run : Reason Magazine:
"The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases."

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