Maggie's Farm

There may be an economic reason.

College educating, particularly most undergrad work, is very labor intensive. Despite all the labor-saving (labor-replacing) capital that has boosted productivity across the broad economy, most of college is spent face-to-face.

As capital replaces labor, it boosts productivity from the remaining labor. The substitution of capital for labor, then, lowers costs (and prices). But the remaining labor, being more productive, can command higher wages.

Colleges have to bid for labor services against the broad economy, where wages have risen thanks to capital-fueled productivity gains. But college educating didn’t get more productive (you still get the same sheepskin). So the cost of education rises out of scale from the general rate of inflation.

Rather than compare against the average inflation, compare against the inflation in wage rate for skilled/expert labor.

Now, I’m not saying the whole Big Ed thing isn’t dirty. And I want to see the eggheads brought back down to earth when technology finally crumbles the Ivory Tower. But college is expensive for more neutral reasons than just subsidy capture and feather-bedding.

And a related issue: The product of college has become less valuable even as prices of production have risen out of scale. It’s as if we have expert weavers training students on the hand loom while the “uneducated” are busy making acres of cloth on power looms in the real world. What could they possibly teach in 4 years that would make someone worth all they charge?

If you want to be a more valuable laborer, you need to know how to use tools (capital). That’s why vocational schools put people into better life positions more quickly: lower cost for learning more productive skills.

You make me see another point--

Tenured outsourcing to TAs lowers the average cost per instructor, so Big Ed could claim that their wages are not a big problem; they might even claim that teaching wages lag the general average. But to do so would ignore the total wage cost and the the cost per student or degree granted.

It would be as if Detroit kept union labor on the payroll while also hiring non-union workers to actually assemble the cars.

I suspect that this is what happens in pre-college education. The new teachers are not paid much, and that’s who we see when the NEA lobbies government. But we never see the older career teachers who are being compensated well above the average worker.