Christianity Today

The cost of higher education has risen steadily at nearly 3 times the rate of inflation. It has increased in price more than health care, food, and utilities.

"Why are no politicians speaking about making university level education free or affordable." Oh, they are: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college," he said at the time. "What a snob.... We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do."

I have to second Tim's comments: I don't know how exactly Grand Canyon has lowered costs, but I doubt it is from paying lower faculty salaries. Our higher ed model is bloated, and the fact that Christian schools implicitly exclude all but the relatively well-heeled is clearly problematic. However, if anything, for reasons Tim cites, faculty should be making more while institutions shrink. And Europe? The solution is easy: higher taxes and virtually no private institutions to break up the state's monopoly on higher ed. I don't see that happening in the US any time soon.

Also, a little known secret to those outside the academy is that well over two-thirds of the college labor force is composed of non-tenure track, "contingent" faculty (typically hired and let go on a year-to-year basis), and graduate students. Adjuncts are typically paid $2-4k per class, and may have to teach 5 or more classes per semester just to eke out a subsistence above the poverty line. In many cases adjuncts and other contingent faculty are some of the best and most devoted teachers you'll find - but regardless of one's devotion to student's educational success, it's a challenge to provide top-quality education for their students when they're teaching 5 or 6 courses a semester and wondering if they'll still be able to keep the lights on at home. The myth of the overpaid, underworked professor is just that - a myth. 80+ hour weeks are par for the course, among both tenured and contingent faculty. I acknowledge that costs are a problem, but teacher salaries are not the source.

Brent, As a college educator, I agree with you that there are many serious issues facing higher education today, not least among them the skyrocketing costs. That said, professor salaries are not the problem. The national median salary for tenured and tenure track professors in the U.S. is $73,000. That may look like a lot at first glance, but a good portion of that is driven by the higher salaries schools have to offer to attract quality faculty in high-earning fields such as law, business, and medicine (who almost always end up making less in teaching than they would in the general market). The majority of faculty in the humanities, arts, and social sciences make far less than that. It's actually a challenge to attract and keep good faculty when in many cases, the compensation for the amount of work performed is far below what someone with a comparable job and training outside the academy would be paid.