Where does all that tuition money go? Not to your professors, tenured or not

H/T to the brilliant Lisa Bates

So, you know that narrative about how lazy, evil tenured proffies are driving up tuition costs with their lavish salaries and putting little John and Suzie into crippling debt just to teach them useless things from Women’s and Black Studies? Um, yeah, not true. 

 Lawyers, Guns & Money, which gets a priori props for reminding us all of the fabulous Warren Zevon, has a write up of a budget analysis of major universities. I haven’t looked at the original study, but the results square with my perception of US higher education as I’ve worked in it.  Go read it, but I warn you, drink anything you have in your mouth because this nearly sent coffee through the nose: 

During this time, he finds that both gross and net tuition revenue rose by nearly 40% in real, inflation-adjusted terms. How did university administrators decide to spend this money? If you guessed “on hiring lots more underlings, and giving enormous raises to themselves,” you have just won an authentic Gordon Gee bow tie.