Nobody has ever asked to see my degree or if I have one. They only care what I can do and how much it will cost. I looked into taking a few classes but saw that tuition has quadrupled making 2 classes cost more than an entire semester when I was in school only 10 years ago. Not only that, there are fewer professors and more non-professors teaching. Professors still do not make 100k even if they teach all day every semester so all this extra money isn't going to them.
>Professors still do not make 100k even if they teach all day every semester
That's not true at all. When I was in school, I used the state's public employee salary lookup to checkout how much my professors made. Almost all of professors (all of the professors and associate professors, and several of the assistant professors) in my department were making more than 100k. In addition, I was in a low cost of living area compared to most of the US.
I looked outside of CS as well. Humanities departments weren't paying that much, but most 100k pretty normal in most of the hard science departments, and the business school professors were making even more than the CS department.
Sure the adjuncts and grad students weren't making anything, and there are too many of them.
Also no one has ever asked if I had a degree either, but that's because it was on my resume. Without a degree you're going to get screened out before you even talk to someone a lot of the time.
There are different strata of academic. The adjuncts make peanuts and are either people who are stuck with a vision of being in academia or outside professionals earning a buck.
Tenure track professors end up making good money, which imo is well deserved.
Now you also have this middle tier of professors who are wandering nomads on 2-3 year contracts. They have a professor title, make better money than adjuncts, but tend to get dropped at the end of the contract. My neighbors boarder is one of these folks -- she commutes about 200 miles from her home and stays in my town for 2-3 days. This is her third contract like this.
At large state universities pay is good. It goes down dramatically when looking st regional state universities and community colleges. Also over 50% of higher education is taught by non-tenured or tenure track faculty. Pay for such workers is low and frequently don't include benefits.
I wonder if anyone has done an itemized breakdown of where each dollar of tuition goes to? How much to the teaching staff, how much to building maintenance, etc. Would be interesting.
I don't have the numbers with me right now (on phone), but the ratio of administrators to professors has gone through the roof over the past few decades. This is where a lot of the money is going.
Facilities have also improved quite a bit at many schools.
Over the same period, the ratio of adjunct faculty to permanent faculty has also increased. Meanwhile, the permanent faculty are burdened with even more administrative duties (e.g., committees).
The administrators learned that they could eat high on the hog on the government's dime, and they have done so with a frightening degree of efficiency.
Then that brings up the next issue -- would students choose the simple college over the more expensive one? After all, they can get a loan for both, and many 18-year-olds make different (less beneficial) choices then they would later in life.
