Bret Devereaux

Meanwhile, business-style management imposes all new administrative overhead as admin. functions are moved out of the faculty departments and into big centralized administrations that look more like companies. The thing is, there's no effective cost control...17/xx

...because the Pale Horse of the Business Model is federally subsidized student debt. 18-year-olds are not great at calculating long-term cost-benefit; offer them a fun time now for money paid in the future and most will take it. So more admin, more amenities, more debt. 18/xx

To be clear, basically none of this massive increase in tuition - and it is *massive* - goes to professors. Let me repeat that: BASICALLY NONE OF THIS MONEY GOES TO ANYONE WHO TEACHES. (rip your ears, I know). 19/xx

Instead - it's hard to get good data - but instructor pay has probably gone *down* over the same period. Not because professor pay has been cut, but because the teachers have been adjunctified under the business-model imperative to cut costs. 20/xx

75% - SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT - of university instructors are non-tenure track and more than half - *more*than*half* are adjuncts! (https://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/ …). So the average *teacher* - not professor because most aren't anymore - gets paid LESS. 21/xx

Now you might ask - why the Business Model of Education? Well the answer is it goes back to our first horseman - legislatures looking to cut back on universities demanded this model as a way to cut costs and have continued to demand it even after the economy improved. 22/xx

Here's the thing: it's all a false economy. No, not that the economy is fake - it's fake savings. Like when you overbuy at the grocery store because everything is on sale - you haven't 'saved' anything - you've spent more. It's that kind of false economy. 23/xx

Not only does the amenities-admin-tuition inflation turn into a treadmill going nowhere, but adjunctification is just as bad for the core mission of the university. Because you are burning these adjuncts out at a fearful rate; overloaded and underpaid...24/xx