U of Ideas of General Interest -- September 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; [email protected]
HIGHER EDUCATION
Public universities losing to privates in high-cost race for prestige
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A large gap has widened between what private and public research universities pay their faculty members, with private institutions in the lead. For full professors, the gap is five times what it was just two decades ago, according to research by a University of Illinois professor.
In the shadow of that gap -- produced, in large part, by revenues from rising tuition and tuition-based government aid -- the nation's elite public universities are quickly becoming second-tier institutions, says F. King Alexander, a professor of higher education. "The question is, are we content with allowing our greatest public universities to become the faculty training grounds for private universities -- because that's what's happening," Alexander said.
From 1980 to 1998, the gap between private and public research universities in their average salaries for full professors grew from $3,000 to $15,600. For all ranks of faculty members, the gap grew even more dramatically, from $1,900 to $14,400. (All amounts in 1998 dollars.)
"People need to understand why there's pressure to continually increase tuition in most of the premier public universities, and this is a big piece of it," Alexander said.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, "public universities used new tuition revenues to offset losses in state appropriations," Alexander said. During the same period, private schools raised tuition at comparable and even higher rates, "using the new revenue to give themselves a competitive advantage, a considerable market advantage that is represented by the disparities that currently exist."
Ultimately it's about prestige, Alexander noted. "The higher education marketplace is being driven by a prestige phenomenon that continuously fuels a 'Cold War' of expenditure growth," he wrote in a paper to be published later this year in a special financial issue of the Journal of Staff, Program, & Organization Development. Like the Soviet Union in the 1980s arms race, public universities are on the short end of a spending race, with limits on their ability to compete.
It's important to point out, Alexander said, that much of the money fueling the growth is tuition. "And it's tuition money supported by government tuition-based policies, in the form of direct student aid," from which private schools benefit disproportionately. "That's kind of the heart of it. Institutions that have autonomous control over their student tuition have had the ability to out-spend competitor institutions that have been constrained by state legislatures, boards of governors, and other public bodies."
Even many university presidents and provosts are not aware of how the situation developed, Alexander has found. "What they see right now is just a massive disparity; what they don't see is that those disparities didn't exist in 1980." As a result, many have been asking their states in recent years for additional funds and special programs to retain their best faculty members, he noted, but even in the rare cases when they get them, "these temporary remedies are only small Band-Aids on the larger issue, because these disparities continue to widen each year."
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