ECU Raises Tuition; No Recession for Professors

A lot of people have been completely insulated from the recession and have enjoyed "business as usual" with but a few distractions or pitfalls. Bankers, for example, have had it better than ever financially. What about college professors?

At eastern North Carolina's largest school, East Carolina University, tuition is going up and no cuts are to be made to academics. Check out the Chancellor's take on the budget and tuition increases. This is going on everywhere in the country and is not limited to public universities (although, those may be the first to fail if this situation continues). At ECU, the raising of tuition is nothing new. It happens every year as a result of unlimited student lending (see the parallels to the housing bubble) and the fact that the state legislature gets pressured more and more to reduce funding. The university knows it can get away with raising tuition as long as people can take out more loans with impunity and without risk. What's new? Now, you will see even deeper cuts to administrative staff (meaning longer lines and lower service), but NOT any reductions to pay and benefits of professors.

I no longer have access to ECU's faculty salary information (you have to have a school user name), but unless things have changed, the average faculty member makes well north of $50,000 per year and much higher in certain departments. What happened to Americans having to cut back and take lighter paychecks? This has not been the case at ECU or hardly any other universities. The burden is always absorbed by the customers. God forbid ANY university abolish the tenure system and kick some of the six-figured, leftist blow-hards out and balance the university's budget.

In effect, the tenure system is a form of unionization that allows senior members to hold the rest of the world hostage. As long as there's a mis-informed demand for college and an academic cartel allowing the tenure system, this problem will not go away and costs will sore even worse than health care prices. The other irony of all of this is that there is an enormous market of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there who would gladly take a job at a university for less than the cost it takes to pay tenured-for-life losers who cannot even be troubled to publish in the irrelevant journals their younger peers do. It's time to ditch the dead weight.

Peter Schiff was right once again. Education has been something I've followed closely for years now and I knew there was a bubble for some time. I was happy to see that Schiff joined in the criticism of the student-loan induced bubble. The costs of education are spiraling because of these awful no-risk loans that were designed to make things more affordable for the poor. ECU has made it clear that academics is the LAST area that will be touched by any kind of financial hardship. They would like you to believe this is because of a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, it has more to do with a commitment to the very powerful, shadowy union of the professors, who will never take a pay cut even as their universities desperately need to streamline.