Who Should Be Blamed for the Rising Cost of College?

Notwithstanding the title of this post, perhaps nobody deserves blame.

Sometimes, a good or service rises in price solely as a result of changes in supply and demand. And if the price of something climbs because of market forces, then it’s merely a reflection of unfettered exchanges between buyers and sellers.

But politicians and bureaucrats often distort market forces with subsidies. And even though consumers ostensibly benefit when government helps to pay for something, intervention can have very costly consequences.

I’ve already shared an amazing chart and a very powerful video to help explain how government subsidies in health care have created a third-party payer problem that has resulted in rapidly rising prices and considerable inefficiency in that sector.

Well, the good intentions of government also are causing problems for higher education.

Here’s a superb video from Learn Liberty, explaining why college expenses are skyrocketing.

The first part of the video shows that a college degree has become more valuable, so it’s understandable that the relative price of higher education has risen.

But then, beginning at about 1:55, the video discusses the role of subsidies. Echoing points I’ve made in the past, the professor explains how subsidies have simply generated higher prices. In other words, colleges have captured all the benefits, not students.

Business Week recently published a story that provides some glaring example of how universities have wasted all the additional money. Here are some remarkable excerpts.

“I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its 16 deans and 11 vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Ind., makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?” …Purdue is typical: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. “Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas. In a 2010 study, Greene found that from 1993 to 2007, spending on administration rose almost twice as fast as funding for research and teaching at 198 leading U.S. universities. …Trustees at the University of Connecticut are reviewing administrative salaries at the school’s main campus in Storrs, following a controversy over the compensation of the school’s former police chief, who received $256,000 annually—more than New York City’s police commissioner. …Mitch Daniels, a fiscal hawk who will become [Purdue’s] president when his term expires in January…says he wants to take a look at administrative costs that he suspects are “marbled” throughout the university—beginning with his office. In anticipation of his arrival in January, and without his knowledge, the school renovated the president’s 4,000-square-foot suite. The cost was $355,000, enough to send 15 Indiana residents to Purdue for a year.

Wow. Reminds me of this post about politically correct featherbedding at the University of California at San Diego. I can see why college administrators like this system. But it’s definitely bad news for students who get stuck on a treadmill of higher tuition and more debt.

P.S. At 2:18, the video has a discussion of how subsidies lead to higher costs, which then leads to more demands for additional subsidies. Hmmm…bad government policy leads to more bad government policy. Seems like there’s a term for that phenomenon.

P.P.S. I highly recommend the Learn Liberty videos. Here’s one on protectionism, one on the legality of Obamacare, and here’s another about how excessive federal spending is America’s real fiscal problem.

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The $822,000-per-Year Bureaucrat and the Death of California

Over the years, I’ve shared some outrageous examples of overpaid bureaucrats.

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to see that the worst example on that list comes from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America.

Well, the Golden State has a new über-bureaucrat. Here are some of the jaw-dropping details from a Bloomberg report.

The numbers are even larger in California, where a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.

Wow, $822,000 for a state psychiatrist. Not bad for government work. So what is Governor Jerry Brown doing to fix the mess? As you might expect, he’s part of the problem.

…the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime. …California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. …In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states or limited payments for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to collect $609,000 at retirement in 2011. …Last year, Brown waived a cap on accrued leave for prison guards while granting them additional paid days off. California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports. …The per-worker costs of delivering services in California vastly exceed those even in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio.

Actually, it’s not just that he’s part of the problem. He’s making things worse, having seduced voters into approving a ballot measure to dramatically increase the tax burden on the upper-income taxpayers.

I suppose the silver lining to that dark cloud is that many bureaucrats now rank as part of the top 1 percent, so they’ll have to recycle some of their loot back to the political vultures in Sacramento.

But the biggest impact of the tax hike – as shown in the Ramirez cartoon – will be to accelerate the shift of entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners to states that don’t steal as much. Indeed, a study from the Manhattan Institute looks at the exodus to lower-tax states.

The data also reveal the motives that drive individuals and businesses to leave California. One of these, of course, is work. …Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs. Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes. States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that many cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.

Yet another example of why tax competition is such an important force for economic liberalization. It punishes governments that are too greedy and gives taxpayers a chance to protect their property from the looter class.

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