I was reading this article last night (Tamim Ansary, “How College Costs Could Lead to a Market Crash”).Thinking about Ansary’s observations that (1) it's becoming ever more expensive and (2) it's becoming ever more indispensable.

When I read those observations to Deviant Wife, she said, “Both of those observations are also true of gas are they not?” Why yes, I believe they are. (It’s not that Deviant Wife didn’t know that about education. I was telling her about the subject of the entire article, which was precisely as the title suggests. She interrupted me – as all wives do – to make the aforementioned observation.)

“Those darn greedy universities,” she said.

She makes a good point, I think. In recent days, on talk stations in my location, many callers (e.g., one lady, to the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday) have made the claim that only greed (i.e., the greed of oil companies) explains the high cost of fuel at the pump, and that the oil companies have banded together to make us pay the price they want us to pay. These callers have also claimed that oil companies should be “fair” and cut back on their profits because everyone needs fuel. In other words, like university educations fuel is “becoming ever more expensive” and “ever more indispensable.” So why don’t universities, in order to be fair, and since everyone pretty much needs a university degree now-days, just drop their prices? (And, of course, those publishers should do the same.)

Observe a few facts about university professor salaries (from the most recent years I could get figures for in a hurry):

Private Research Universities Where Average Salary of Full Professors Exceeds $125,000, 2004-5

University Professors’ Average Salary

Rockefeller University $169,173
Harvard University $163,162
Princeton University $151,077
Stanford University $148,548
University of Chicago $148,426
California Inst. of Technology $145,745
Yale University $145,550
University of Pennsylvania $143,409
Columbia University $140,391
New York University $138,087
Northwestern University $136,326
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology $135,005
Emory University $131,898
Duke University $131,246
Cornell University (endowed units) $131,092
Washington University in St. Louis $128,385
Georgetown University $127,135


Public Universities Where Average Salary of Full Professors Exceeds $110,000, 2004-5

University Professors’ Average Salary

University of California at Los Angeles $123,328
University of California at Berkeley $121,781
New Jersey Inst. of Technology $121,509
University of Maryland at Baltimore $120,529
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor $120,173
Georgia Inst. of Technology $118,960
University of Virginia $118,073
Rutgers University at Newark $116,433
SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn $115,478
University of California at San Diego $113,838
Rutgers University at New Brunswick $112,874
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $112,722
Penn State University $112,580
Rutgers University at Camden $112,387
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign $111,820
University of Maryland at College Park $111,037
University of Connecticut $110,922
University of California at Santa Barbara $110,637


Think about all those middle class families, taking out second mortgages to pay, not for fuel at the pump, but for those indispensable university educations.

Now, I ask, what do university professors do to earn salaries like those? They don’t have to give anyone a return on investment. They don’t have to turn a profit. The customer (i.e., the student or his parents, as the case may be) shows up and is told (1) how much he shall pay for the product and (2) when he has received a product that he shall have to be satisfied with. The university takes a student’s money, and then puts the student to work to earn what he’s paying the money for. And it is the professor, not the student, who decides if the student has received what he’s paying for. That’s a really sweet deal.

I design structures which, if not designed properly, could result in serious injury, even death. I don’t make what a university professor makes. Odd when you think about the higher stakes involved in my line of work. (Although, I must admit, I do make a very decent salary.) Not only that, but it is the customer who tells me if he’s satisfied with the product, not the other way round. (Oh, yes. And my company doesn’t band together with other companies in our line of work to make them pay us what we want. It’s very company for itself.)

Salaries aside. People need the product which universities sell; and they need it just about as badly as they need fuel. Maybe more so, since they need jobs in order to buy that fuel, and a university education in order to get the jobs. Those greedy universities (run and staffed mostly by liberals, oddly enough) should just drop their tuition costs. It’s what most of them want oil companies to do.

It’s only fair.

NOTE: You might want to split a relevant hair with me. You might want to point out that universities are non-profit institutions and oil companies are for-profit institutions. But the non-profit status of universities only means that (insofar as they operate in the black) the surplus does not inure to the benefit of any individual, or group of them, as his private property. It certainly does not mean that universities don’t make money; it certainly does not mean that they do not take in more than it costs them to operate. With respect to the amount charged for the product, the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is a distinction without a relevant difference. You might also want to raise the issue of Exxon Mobiles hundreds of billions in profit last year. But since that amounts to 10%, I will of course want to know if there are any universities who managed to take in 10% more last year than it cost them to operate.