Not entirely. Take a look at Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...). Universities grew enormously from 1945 – 1975. During that time, too, a disproportionately large number of students majored in English in particular, as well as other humanities disciplines. During that 30-year period, universities expanded and especially grad programs expanded—by 900%.

Most of those grad programs are still pumping out PhDs, even though the market for PhDs is weak. ABDs are a huge economic win for universities. So we have a situation in which supply has far outpaced demand for decades.

At the same time, I'd argue that there's a huge amount of bogosity in humanities departments, and that bogosity has mostly gone unaddressed (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-d...).

I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?

Most cost increases appear to come from technology, ancillary services (gyms are popular punching bags in this regard) and administrative staff (everything from diversity deans to grant writers).

I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?

I think this is precisely the issue: the system selects for people who become very, very invested in the system.

Another important change involves the elimination of mandatory retirement: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/silver_lining/2011/04/ple.... Until the early 1990s, tenure care with an expiration date around age 65. Someone who got tenure would be on the books for 25 – 35 years. Today tenure doesn't have an expiration date—someone can be on the books for 50 years or longer. That makes tenure much more onerous.

I'd like to see universities shift from a tenure-based system to a long-term-contract-based system. This has downsides but its downsides seem better than the current tenure-based downsides.

I agree on tenure costs. It seems like they're really bloating the system in the name of academic freedom. I get it at the large research universities where the professors bring in lots of research money, but is it really worth it elsewhere? People say it's a bulwark against poor administrators making short term decisions, but that's what the rest of the world has to deal with too.

Perhaps just timeboxing the tenure part would work. "The department has X tenured slots. After 65, you can stay on as an untenured professor emeritus at a lower salary."

For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.

No, instructor-time is moot. Maybe instructor training is important; maybe a quality syllabus helps; a good book is key. But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.

  -Prepare lessons 
  -Answer student questions (during and) after class
  -Grade homework
  -Prepare, proctor, and grade examinations

I'd estimate that 1/4 to 1/2 of students will stay after for question time, or show up to office hours. Those few minutes are wildly different for a class of 10 vs a class of 100.

If you have a 50-minute class, and you choose to have a 45-minute lecture and 5 minutes of question time, you can spend 1 minute each with the 1/2 of your 10 students. With a class of 100, you can have a crowd of 50 where maybe 10% of them can get your attention.

Additionally, many lecturers have office hours - time specifically allotted to meet with students. If you kept 2 hours a week, you could give an additional 12 minutes to each of your 10 students a week. With a class of 100, you can hope that only 1/4 of your students show up.

Furthermore, in a lecture of 10, it's very easy to ask an incidental question and go onto a short educational tangent. In classes exceeding 25, it's very difficult to retain control of such a large body of people, and so the instructors work very hard to ignore such tangents and keep everyone on track.

Not to mention the order of magnitude difference in grading 100 assignments vs grading 10.

I'm less-convinced that instructor-time is a myth. But maybe I'm biased by experience.

The test questions were just mixtures of questions from previous years.

So three hours of class, plus two (mandated) office hours. I'm assuming there was some time spent coordinating the grad students, but still... that doesn't seem like much work.

Much like anywhere in life.

Depends on the class. I once had a colleague say that he'd teach the intro class to 5000 students in the basketball arena. For that class, at that university, it would probably work.

I'm teaching a senior-level econometrics class to 10 students right now. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, typing into RStudio throughout the class. I help students when they can't get things to run properly. We have plenty of other interaction. They each do unique homework sets and their own project. There's no way that class would work with 100 students, or for that matter, more than 15 students.

Is the number of people with degrees in medieval literature actually decreasing, or just not increasing as much as the number of engineers?

Seems more likely that there are just a lot more students who can attend university now, and the sustainable way for this to happen is for most of them to be encouraged to go into particularly employable fields. This would fit with the observation that there's currently a huge oversupply of humanities Ph.D.'s with no academic positions waiting for them.

We can still be nostalgic for the loss of things that weren't yet perfect.

There's little misty-eyed nostalgia for 18th century universities, there is for the 1970s.

The issue for me isn't that 10k tuition fees is so bad (once you add non-teaching staff, or teaching-supporting staff, rent for facilities, administration, equipment, licensing access to libraries etc it'll be at least 15k). It's the fact that studying is supposed to be a full-time occupation. We don't ask of 12 year olds to work a 40 hour week, but we do of 20 year olds despite the fact they have as many classes but a higher study load outside of class.

Now if we consider that studying ought to be a full-time occupation, there's obviously an opportunity cost to studying or lack thereof. It's not just having to pay 15k per year for tuition, it's also forgoing the opportunity to work a job and make money to pay every expense a non-studying adult human normally needs to pay, rent, food, insurance etc. Another $15k per year is on the low-end.

So you end up with 30k over 4 years, at an average of 5% interest rates you easily graduate with 150k debt.

This is unworkable. So we require of students to work extra jobs next to their studies, knowing juggling a 70h work week for years on end while still living under crappy circumstances negatively affects studies, health etc. We require students to choose jobs that are most financially rewarding (knowing all too well that pursuing remuneration over everything else leads not to happiness, and that at the higher end the correlation between salary and benefit to society is weak). We see students accessing higher education with funds from family, something reserved for the (upper) middle class, and even for these kids it's very normal to have to not view studying as a full-time occupation despite being enrolled in a full-time program, and even so average debt in many countries sits around 30-50k.

Meanwhile, a country like Germany is offering free tuition, without having invented a magic money machine.

The "commoners" of today want to learn engineering and practical things so they can improve their standard of living, which is unfortunate for the overall percentage of educators in social sciences.

And now, instead, they exclude Asians. Progress!