Part I: Identifying the Problems
American colleges have undergone substantial changes during the last three decades.
- Rising tuition costs, which have far outpaced the rate of inflation, are nearly universal.
- Most growth has come in non-instructional areas.
- Many schools have added layers of administration, seen their rosters of administrators substantially enlarged, and spent millions of dollars on non-instructional construction such as recreation centers, student unions, and administrative buildings.
- A serious re-shuffling of labor has degraded the ranks of teachers
- Tenured and tenure track (TTT) positions have been replaced by contingent faculty (ie. non-tenure track) who now make up the majority of teachers
- Contingent faculty fall into two broad groups: part-time labor (adjuncts and graduate students) and full time labor (mostly lecturers and visiting faculty).
There are many explanations for these wide ranging changes, as well as varying degrees of change among America’s hundreds of colleges. For example, private colleges are generally less dependent on public largess, though many of them do in fact receive public subsidies from federal, state, and even local governments. Meanwhile, the public colleges that rely more heavily on public spending face different circumstances depending on which states they’re in; each has different budgets and policies for supporting higher education. In some states there has been 
extreme volatility in funding while some have been more stable, though in almost all states, public funding as a share of public college budgets has declined.
This has led schools not only to raise tuition rates, but to also seek substantial revenue from fund raising, which runs the gamut from alumni contributions, to naming rights to campus buildings, to exclusive contracts with junk food venders. For example, many schools have cut deals with either Pepsi Co. or Coca Cola, Inc. granting one or the other exclusive rights to sell beverages on their campus.
Good luck finding something healthy to drink.
From a labor point of view, the most alarming development is the creation of an exploitative two-tiered labor system for teachers.
Contingent faculty receive lower pay, fewer benefits (if any), and have no job security, generally working on short contracts. Some are only 10 months long. Most are 4. For schools that run on a trimester schedule, adjunct contracts may be only 3 months long. Indeed, labor conditions are so insecure that many schools will not even admit to firing contingent faculty except for the rare instances that take place mid-semester; when adjuncts, lecturers, and the like are effectively fired, colleges often insist otherwise, claiming that the these temp workers are simply not having their expired contract renewed.
When it comes to justifying the degraded working conditions of contingent faculty, college administrations have a choice. On the one hand, they could say it is because contingent faculty are inferior teachers. They could disingenuously claim that this is a class of worker not good enough at their craft to earn a TTT position.
Of course colleges do not actually say this, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s not true. But beyond that, while such a claim would rationalize labor exploitation, at least to some people, it would greatly upset parents and students who are paying the ever higher rates of tuition, the faculty themselves, and institutions like U.S. News and World Report that issue the college rankings many administrators are so keen on.
The other “justification” for exploiting workers is more honest: that colleges are simply taking advantage of a labor glut and engaging in crass exploitation to produce a two-tiered system in which the lower tier of workers gets less compensation and no job security despite being, on the whole, every bit as good at their job as the higher tier of workers.
The problem with admitting to this is that, aside from being a very distasteful thing to say publicly, colleges don’t want to draw attention to the fact they are actually complicit in creating the labor glut that they themselves exploit. All colleges are guilty, for they have eliminated positions in the higher tier and created more and more jobs in the lower 
Predictably, American colleges simply try to avoid publicly talking about their two-tiered labor system.
This situation has contributed to an increasingly hostile climate between faculty and administration. Many TTT faculty blame college administrations for the two-tiered labor system, the loss of TTT jobs, and the exploitation of an expanding lower tier of labor. A common accusation is that college administrations have grown bloated at the expense of faculty.
Meanwhile, administrators often play into stereotypes about professors by accusing them of being out of touch with “the real world,” in this case the realities of modern college budgets. For example, they point out that some administrative growth is the result of federal regulations, not discretionary spending. New federal regulations demand increased administrative expenditures to ensure compliance. Furthermore, some administrative costs, like IT support, didn’t exist thirty years ago.
And for their part, contingent faculty are often embittered by the entire situation, quick to blame all sides, and not unreasonably so.
fThe reality is that many phases of society, in and out of academia, are to blame for the current problems in higher education.
Many state governments, alarmed at higher education’s share of discretionary spending, have slashed funding, thereby forcing schools to make tough choices that are almost guaranteed to produce negative results.
Many administrations have gone on to make dubious choices about resource allocations, in part because of budget cuts, but also in part of misplaced priorities, such as a growing corporate culture that stubbornly insists non-profit schools should be run like for-profit businesses, and students should be treated like “customers.”
Many TTT professors are either safely ensconced in their tenured positions or working towards such, while doing nothing to challenge the two tiered labor system they profit from.
Many parents and students, as consumers, have rolled over. Convinced of the supposed necessity of a college education, some have let themselves be bullied into putting up with spiraling costs and a problematic teaching system. Others have taken a lackadaisical approach to examining a product they will spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on, and are largely unaware of the situation. Indeed, so long as parents and students put up with all of this, nothing is likely to change anytime soon.
And even contingent faculty themselves must, at a certain point, take a modicum of responsibility for their situation. They are clearly the most victimized class in this scenario, frequently having accumulated five- o
r even six-figure debt as graduate students while spending years earning poverty wages so they could train for this career. However, the current labor market conditions took a noticeable turn for the worse nearly 6 years ago, and have been very bad regardless since the 1970s. It is important to enter doctoral programs with a realistic understanding of one’s chances of obtaining a TTT job, and to give serious thought about how long one is willing to be a contingent faculty while pursing a TTT job, and what the other reasonable options are if that fails.
Again, not to blame the victim. Excepting the small fraction of adjuncts, such as retirees, who really do want occasional part time work, the vast majority of contingent faculty have every reason to feel angry and aggrieved; they are in fact being grossly exploited. But the complexities of their career choices at various stages are one part of a large, complicated equation.
In Part II, I will attempt to crack open that equation by going inside the numbers.