I'm a nearly-finished Ph.D. candidate, and when people complain to me about how bloated and inefficient the government is, I think to myself "Wow, that sounds like a pretty good system."
A typical graduate teaching assistant at my university has about 10 lab sections per academic year. The lab fees--just the lab fees, not tuition--from just one section is enough to pay the TA's salary for the entire year. Even if you include the outrageously-inflated graduate tuition that a TA-ship pays, lab fees from just three lab sections cover the entire compensation package.
The tuition from just one big lecture section is enough to pay a tenured professor's salary for almost two entire years (and a tenured professor should be teaching 5-6 courses per year).
Some of the rest of the money goes to pay for the country-club campus, but most of it disappears into the black hole of bureaucracy.
And we haven't even started to talk about the scam of "overhead" that the university charges on federal research grants--30% straight off the top, except for very large purchases. Want to have a new electrical outlet installed in the lab? You have to use the university's maintenance department (and its inflated hourly rates--at least 3x what you'd pay a licensed/bonded union electrician) and pay overhead on top of that!
I'm a nearly-finished Ph.D. candidate, and when people complain to me about how bloated and inefficient the government is, I think to myself "Wow, that sounds like a pretty good system."
A typical graduate teaching assistant at my university has about 10 lab sections per academic year. The lab fees--just the lab fees, not tuition--from just one section is enough to pay the TA's salary for the entire year. Even if you include the outrageously-inflated graduate tuition that a TA-ship pays, lab fees from just three lab sections cover the entire compensation package.
The tuition from just one big lecture section is enough to pay a tenured professor's salary for almost two entire years (and a tenured professor should be teaching 5-6 courses per year).
Some of the rest of the money goes to pay for the country-club campus, but most of it disappears into the black hole of bureaucracy.
And we haven't even started to talk about the scam of "overhead" that the university charges on federal research grants--30% straight off the top, except for very large purchases. Want to have a new electrical outlet installed in the lab? You have to use the university's maintenance department (and its inflated hourly rates--at least 3x what you'd pay a licensed/bonded union electrician) and pay overhead on top of that!