Ladies and gentlemen, the higher education bubble is alive and well.
- A professor at UC Santa Barbara who has taught a film class on porn every year for the last 22 years earned a whopping $181,000 last year.
- At Syracuse University, administrators push retirement buyouts after an audit found more than 200 managers supervise one person apiece
- In California last week, University of California campus presidents were given pay hikes, boosting their salaries that already hover at anywhere from $400,000 to $700,000 annually.
- Louisiana State University continues construction of its $85 million leisure project, complete with a “lazy river” — even as the state grapples with overall budget woes and higher education cuts.
- A public university in Texas this summer hired a vice president for diversity and inclusion who will be paid $205,000 annually, reportedly more than the salary of any governor in the country.
Loosely defined, the bubble refers to a combination of several factors all coalescing at once, including the rising cost of tuition, the growing irrelevance of a liberal arts degree, ballooning student loan debt, and severe unemployment for college grads.
Some possible solutions have started to emerge — online college courses have exploded, and the $10,000 bachelor’s degree and three-year bachelor’s degree programs continue to gain steam.
But the heart of the problem — overpaid executives, underworked professors, administrative bloat, and a federal government that continues to churn out loans to support the massive system — remains.
In many ways, the higher education bubble is similar to pending Social Security insolvency or the public pension crisis. At some point, it’s going to come crashing down. It’s just a matter of when.