A Healthy Does of Education

[QUINNSCOMMENTARY]

We have all heard the story before, the sector’s costs are going up substantially above the rate of inflation, but few people ask why. CEO pay at many of the organizations providing services so important to Americans has risen beyond the rate of inflation and also beyond the trend for compensation in other areas. In fact, many would say these leaders are overpaid. And yet, Americans continue to pay with little question, it’s a very emotional issue after all.

Just look at some of these CEO pay packages:

E. Gordon Gee $1,346,225

Mark Emmert $887,870

John T Casteen III $797,048

The list goes on. How are they justified? Well, as you may suspect defenders say “pay increases are necessary to attract and keep leaders capable of overseeing their complex and often large institutions.

Where have you heard that before, that’s right out of the corporate America compensation manual, some excuse for high pay, uh?

What a mess our health care system is in.

Perhaps, but I am talking about colleges and the pay of college presidents. The above individuals are the Presidents of three public universities, that’s public state schools.

According to the Wall Street Journal, pay for college presidents increased by 7.6% between 2007 and 2008. Did you receive a pay raise of 7.6%? For 2008 the average raise in corporate America was about 3.75%.

College costs are similar to health care; they are justified by playing on emotions and the desire of parents to have the best for their children. Money is spent on big new buildings while tenured professors don’t’ teach classes under the guise of research and the requirement to publish while making small fortunes on side consulting deals.

And like health care, people donate to schools; leave them fortunes in wills enabling even more inefficiency and less accountability. Higher education like health care needs to get back to basics.

My youngest of four children graduated from college ten years ago, before that I had one, two or three in college for ten straight years. I like many parents was determined to give my children more opportunity than I had, they were going to go to the best schools they could get into, and they did. They attended college at schools ranked in the top 25 in America and I am still paying off the debt in the form of a mortgage on my home, that otherwise would have been paid off ten years ago.

Did they get a good education, I suspect they did, three went on to receive Masters degrees (on their own dime), but did we all get our moneys worth, could that good education have been achieved for a lot less, I suspect it could have.

If I had to do it all over again, I would most likely do it again, I wanted the best for my children and I wanted them to be better educated that I am.

And if you have a loved one who is ill, you want the best for them as well, and who cares what it costs to achieve that? Therein lies the essence of the problem and why both higher education and health care are able to sustain what would otherwise be logically unsustainable.



Consider the following as well:

From: Why Does College Cost So Much? 2-12-07 By Mark HuffmanConsumerAffairs.com

The rate of increase has been sharply higher in some years than others. For example, in 1964, when the first Baby Boomers headed off to college, tuition inflation rose 4.61 percent, which was more than four times faster than the overall inflation rate. Between the years 1980 and 1982, when raging inflation in the economy increased a total of 30 percent, tuition costs surged by 40.3 percent, and have been steadily rising ever since.

Increases in tuition since 1992 have been steady, but comparatively tame, never rising above six percent, as the overall inflation rate has hovered around 2.5 to 3.0 percent.

But all those yearly increases have taken a toll.

In 43 of the last 49 years, college tuition inflation has exceeded the nation's inflation rate, with the cumulative increase pushing the costs beyond many students' ability to pay.