Higher Education Provides General Public Benefits to All of Society and Particular Benefits

Higher education provides general public benefits to all of society and particular benefits to those who earn a degree. Over a quarter of Americans eventually earn bachelor’s degrees, and about 8% earn graduate degrees. Persons in those segments of society obviously get the greatest benefits from higher education, and it makes sense that they ought to pay more toward education than the people in the 40% of the American population who never take a college class. Yes it would be nice to have free higher education for everyone, but in fact, many people don’t want a higher education, many aren’t suited to higher education, and our society can be thriving and healthy with some fraction under 50% earning college degrees. On the other hand, those who do not directly benefit by earning a college degree indirectly benefit by living in a society where a large minority do earn such degrees. College-educated fellow citizens and taxpayers earn more money (and thus pay more taxes), and because of their higher education, we can expect the college-educated to be more innovative, more engaged in civil society, more dedicated to the values of our civilization, and more vigilant in protecting our rights. Presumably the college-educated leaders of our nation will be more humane, more enlightened, and more far-sighted than they would be if fewer of them had college educations. For these various reasons, it makes sense that everyone, through taxes and public spending, share some of the costs of higher education.

My questions concern fair public policies and fair educational prices. I’ll begin with some of my starting assumptions. First, college should be affordable so that it’s cost is never a determining factor preventing a student from earning a degree. Second, to be affordable, students should be able to graduate with minimal levels of debt, and by minimal levels of debt, I mean a level of debt that can be paid off within four or five years by paying perhaps 10% of their annual income, or, in other words, a debt load that is no higher than half what they might expect to earn in a year. A person entering a field where they might expect to earn $35,000 in their first year of work should go into that field with no more than $17,500 of college debt. Third, students should be able to focus on their studies and complete a degree in three to five years without needing to work significant hours to earn incomes while in school. I don’t mind students working ten hours per week to help make ends meet, but a full-time student ought to be devoting about 40-50 hours per week to their studies, and probably if they are traditional students between the ages of 18-22 they ought to have another 20 hours or so to interact with peers, engage in volunteer work or service learning projects, and variously apply what they are learning without needing to devote significant mental attention to vocational obligations. Some people will want to work full-time and take one or two courses per semester, and for them the situation is obviously different, but for traditional students, economic needs should be minimal, and they should be allowed to give adequate attention to their learning experiences.

The faculty who teach the students in higher education must be fairly compensated for their work. If a typical professor works 1800 to 2000 hours in the nine to ten months of their appointment, they should be paid a salary equivalent to what a year-round employee who also works 1800-2000 hours per year would earn. Faculty should be paid at a level that keeps pace with inflation if in general this is what other workers in an economy are experiencing. Very few people are qualified to teach in higher education, and the preparation for an academic career is lengthy, and during this preparation the future professors must endure economic hardships. The work requires exceptional intellectual and social skills, and a high degree of responsibility. These and other factors make it sensible that faculty ought to earn incomes that are equivalent to or higher than typical (median income) jobs in the economy. On the other hand, faculty work gives professors a high degree of physical comfort, significant autonomy, personal control over time use, and relatively little unpleasant, boring, dangerous, or monotonous work, and these advantages of academic work can be considered as a form of compensation that lowers the level of income faculty might fairly claim, and so while I believe faculty in universities ought to be paid more than whatever a median year-round full-time worker earns, I don’t think they have a fair claim to be paid far more than such a statistically average worker. The range of fair compensation for university faculty might range between 95% to 140% of median year-round full-time worker wages, but probably does not range between 150% and 200% unless a faculty has made extraordinary scholarly accomplishments or life achievements. However, universities must compete with other employers, and when faculty could fairly easily compete in other job markets (in private industry, government, or non-profit sectors) a university may well need to pay a competitive salary. Thus, professors in professional schools who might easily earn 200%-300% of median full-time year-around income if they took non-academic jobs may need to be compensated at a rate that falls within the same range.

Currently higher education is priced at the highest level that anyone can be expected to pay, and then it is the duty of the student and the student’s family to try to justify why they should pay less than the highest tuition levels. They do this by applying for financial aid, scholarships, and tuition breaks. This, the amount a family pays for a child’s college education is partly determined by how well the family does the work of seeking scholarships and financial aid. This is not a good system. For one thing, it requires universities to pay salaries to a class of professional experts who council families on how to get financial aid, and these professionals waste time and intellectual power in gaining a mastery over the arcane details of how financial aid works. It may be personally rewarding for financial aid officers, but I think universities and societies could find far more rewarding labors for persons with the talents used in this line of work.

Another premise I accept is that faculty ought to be compensated differently according to market forces and merit. Universities may want to use pay increases as incentives for those who do more significant research or more outstanding teaching. Some departments will have small pools of job applicants and need to pay higher salaries to attract good professors while other departments will have huge pools of applicants and be able to secure outstanding faculty with relatively low salaries. This is unfortunate, but is a fact of the market place, and I accept that universities must structure pay so that some fields have higher-paid faculty than others, and some faculty who are more productive or helpful to their universities may also earn higher pay than those who do a good job without really standing out from their peers in terms of teaching, scholarship, and service.

Finally, I believe universities need support staff and administrators, and these workers, like faculty, ought to be paid fairly so they can afford a decent standard of living. Administrators may work longer hours and have greater responsibilities than faculty, so it makes sense to me that some administrators ought to be paid more than typical faculty, but I don’t see administration as being so much more demanding or significant than teaching that administrators need to be paid far more than faculty. A dean, provost, or chancellor might reasonably earn twice the salary of a faculty member, but it would be unfair for even a top administrator to earn four or five times what an average faculty member earns. A secretary, janitor, or grounds crew worker might earn 60% to 80% of what a faculty member earns, but it would be unfair for such support staff to earn less than half of what faculty earn.

What are fair and honest salaries for employees at a university, what are fair and reasonable tuition rates, and what is the fair and just proportion of higher education expenses that should be carried by the entire society through taxes and public spending?

I propose to begin with fair tuition rates, given my ideas about college debt and pricing, and then consider fair pay rates for faculty and staff. Then, I want to consider how many faculty and staff are needed to provide adequate education to students. Once we know how many faculty and support staff we would have for a typical class of students, and we know how much those students should be paying, we will know how much of the faculty and staff salaries cannot be covered by fair tuition rates, and the gap that remains might be a fair amount for the public to fill through public spending. Of course, there are many costs not directly linked to teaching, such as building maintenance, recreation for students, library costs, energy, and so forth. These costs must also be considered.

In the cohort of people who have recently reached the age of 30, if we look at their educational attainment at age 29, it turns out that 28% of these Americans had earned a bachelor’s degree (including those who have gone on to earn a gradate degree), and 58% have taken some college.

If we look at the total American population over the age of 15 instead of the cohort born in the mid-1970s we see that about 24% have earned a bachelor’s degree (remember that this is including people aged 16-21, who we wouldn’t normally expect to have earned a bachelor’s degree yet).

All Americans over 15 (in 2006, according to the Census Bureau):

Percent with this as the highest level of education they have achieved.

1.07%Ph.D.

1.31%Professional (graduate) degree

5.65%Master's degree

16.01%Bachelor's degree (24.04% total with bachelor’s degrees if we are including those who have gone on to earn graduate degrees)

3.73%Associate's degree, academic

4.05%Associate's degree, occupational

18.21%Some college, but no degree

29.82%High school graduate

20.14%No high school degree

(28% have a bachelor’s degree and another 30% taken some college courses and perhaps even earned an associate’s degree, but not a bachelor’s degree).