Links for 8/26/10

Todd Zywicki

Many observers believe that the problem with higher education is that universities are basically run by its employees–the faculty–and that the faculty’s interests are not aligned with those of the students who they serve. But what Greene’s report hints at is a larger trend at work–more and more universities are run by their bureaucrats, not the faculty, and the incentives of bureaucrats are even more poorly aligned with student interests than the faculty…

during most of that period university endowments grew at record rates. This essentially gave university presidents and their minions a huge slush fund to play with without actually having to raise new funds from alumni. This created a growth in agency costs for senior university administrators. Finally, this allowed universities to continue giving raises to faculty while expanding the bureaucracy even more. Thus, the growth in bureaucratic spending was not coming out of a zero-sum pot, so that faculty were not monitoring the growth in the bureaucracy as much…

Higher education almost perfectly converts subsidies (whether direct or aid to students) into higher prices…

Jack Stripling

“Quite often what you see is my rhetoric says X, but my spending priorities say Y,” says Aceves…

“For way too long, academics have had a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to looking at resources, as if it’s something sordid that is best left unmentioned among civilized people,” Wellman wrote…

Brian Caulfield

In a few years, it’s going to be tough to convince the youngsters that music stores, real-world places that once distributed pricey content such as music and movies on physical media, actually existed before the Internet, digital media players, and, finally, Apple came along.

Music stores are gone, but universities — which distribute even pricier content via even more expensive stores, or ‘campuses’ — are still around. In fact, they’re more expensive than ever. Is Apple going to help do them in, too?...

How much Fidelity estimates parents need to save each week from the birth of their child in order to afford college: