If the govt didn't guarantee student loans
- Thread starter ChkitOut
- Start date
+1
Sorry, rew, I did not see your post until now. I had gone back to this thread to retrieve for a friend in academia the links I posted.
You raise a perfectly good question, and your observation that most in the private sector have seen their real wages, while not exactly "slashed", slowly decline. Those at the upper end of the middle class are holding their own against inflation, and of course the real income of the wealthy has increased over the same time that mid to lower middle class real wages have been declining. It is no wonder that families are so hard pressed to meet educational costs in the face of declining real wages!
So to answer your question, if you look at University Professor salaries in the Ph.D. granting institutions you will see that they fall into the category of the mid to upper middle class. Consistent with the broad data, we find that their salaries have more or less kept pace with inflation, and their real earnings have essentially stagnated, whereas lower middle class workers have seen their real wages decline.
Against this backdrop of stagnant real faculty salaries, colleges and universities have seen a decline in real revenues, because while tuition increases have kept pace with inflation, state and local subsidies have steadily declined. The truth is that our public institutions of higher learning are struggling to make ends meet, and have been forced into all manner of cutbacks. The limiting factor in determining the quality of these institutions is the faculty, not the physical facilities nor the students. An outstanding faculty attracts outstanding physical facilities and outstanding students.
To answer your good question: In the U.S., which is a thoroughly capitalist nation, colleges and universities, having decided that the quality of their faculty is the limiting factor in the quality of education they can offer, are going to enter the market place for each discipline with as competitive an offer as they can muster. Bidding for the best faculty, with other colleges and universities and private industry as competitors. The competitive marketplace has resulted in faculty salaries being what they are.
A still better question might be why should middle class wages not have kept up with real inflation? I would argue that they should have, and the fact that they have not points to a defect in the U.S. economy and more specifically to spending priorities at the federal level, and fiscal mismanagement, and possibly defective tax structure. Those with the power to alter the current economic path, viz., Congress, should take note of this warning sign and move to correct the problems created by declining middle class real wages.