Why college costs so much

Tired of doing your job but still want to collect your full paycheck? Imagine you could require your employer to hire someone else to do nearly all of your work so you only had to show up three to six hours a week and then only do the parts of your job you most felt like doing while your fill-in, earning barely more than minimum wage with no benefits, did all the grunt work.

Imagine further that you had lifetime job security, summers off and six months of additional guaranteed vacation every three years; that everyone in your job category, amounting to most of your employer's work force, had that sort of deal; and that your employer, instead of worrying about the expense, was able to pass the entire cost onto the customers while according you and your colleagues annual pay raises several times the rate of inflation.

As Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus point out in their new book "Higher Education?" that's the deal every tenured faculty member gets at America's public universities and at most larger private schools. Their hired grunts are the "adjuncts." As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus point out "it is immoral and unseemly to have a person teaching exactly the same class as an ensconced faculty member but for one-sixth the pay."

If nothing else, the need to maintain duplicate staffs — one grotesquely underpaid, the other lavishly overpaid and underemployed — has helped push college costs to the point where students and their parents end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Debts of comparable magnitude accrue to the increasing number of public-university students who never attain degrees, though the schools' ostensible primary mission is to make widespread higher education affordable. Indisputable is a college is unaffordable when four years of attendance leave students and their parents with debts exceeding $30,000.

Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus document how America's universities have evolved into asylums run by the lunatics. In Connecticut, for example, the legislature and governor retain the right to intervene decisively, but they have insulated themselves from higher-education governance through layers of independent boards, and those boards are run by administrators and faculties for the benefit of administrators and faculties.

That's been the national trend. As The Wall Street Journal noted: "For all the high-minded talk, Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus conclude, colleges and universities serve the people who work there more than the parents and taxpayers who pay for 'higher education' or the students who so desperately need it.'" Within such a framework, it was no surprise the Connecticut State University system's governors voted the other day to give the system's presidents a 5 percent "cost-of-living" raise to cover a year in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the cost of living went down.

This year, Connecticut will elect a new governor and legislature. It's time for those seeking to represent taxpayers to tell them clearly what they will do to restore affordability to Connecticut's state colleges and universities, even if that means taking back much of the delegated authority that has been grossly abused by its college and university governing boards.

A good starting point would be for the governor and legislature to insist upon the end of the absurd and exorbitant duplicate staffing, and that those on the faculty be required to do an honest amount of in-class work for their paychecks.