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."
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...).