THE FALL SEMESTER IS UPON US

In ten days, I shall start flying up to New York from North Carolina every Tuesday to teach at Columbia.  Once again, I shall co-teach a seminar in the Sociology Department with Todd Gitlin, a very well-known radical activist and author who was, among many other things, the third President of SDS and my student at Harvard in 1960.  The course, which I designed, is called Mystifications of Social Reality, and in it we talk about Marx’s demystification of capitalism, Edwin Wilmsen’s demystification of Ethnography, Karl Mannheim’s analysis of ideological and utopian thinking, Charles Mills’ demystification of social contract theory, my account of the demystification of the American Myth, and Todd’s critique of identity politics.

At the very end of the course, if time permits, I thought it might be fun to spend some time demystifying the Columbia undergraduate education, of which they are inordinately proud on Morningside Heights.  To start, I had three bits of incommensurable data: the tuition I paid at Harvard in 1950, the salary I earned as a new tenured Associate Professor at Columbia in 1964, and the undergraduate tuition charged this year at Columbia.  Clearly nothing much could be made of that collection of apples and oranges, so I went in search of some more facts, and with the very kind assistance of some research librarians in Butler Library at Columbia and a nominal fee of $30 to compensate someone for digging documents out of the archives, I very soon had in hand the tuition at Columbia every five years from 1950 to the present.  It turned out, by the way, that in 1950 Harvard and Columba charged the same tuition.  Here is what I was told:

1950	$600
1955	$750
1960	$1450
1965	$1900
1970	$2500
1975	$3680
1980	$5730
1985	$10,280
1990	$14,472
1995	$19,730
2000	$25,044
2005	$31,924
2010	$39,296
2015	$50,526
2019-20	$58,920

But that was not terribly helpful, because over that seventy year period, the dollar has undergone a considerable inflation, so I Googled a CPI Deflator [Consumer Price Index calculator, for the uninitiated], and tediously converted all the nominal dollars into 2019 dollars.  I then calculated the percentage real dollar rise over each five year stretch [more an amusement than a labor, to quote Immanuel Kant], and came up with this table:

1950	$600	$6309		1990	$14,472	$27981	14.9%
1955	$750	$7153	13.38%	1995	$19,730	$33043	18.1%
1960	$1450	$12568	75.7%	2000	$25,044	$36,992	12%
1965	$1900	$15426	22.7%	2005	$31,924	$41,207	11.4%
1970	$2500	$16362	6.1%	2010	$39,296	$46155	12%
1975	$3680	$17293	5.7%	2015	$50,526	$55469	20.2%
1980	$5730	$17501	1.2%	2019-20	$58,920	$58920	6.2%
1985	$10,280	$24354	39.2%

   Year            Tuition        in 2020 $     % increase    Year              Tuition            in 2020 $    % increase  

The first thing that pops out of this chart is that the education offered by Columbia [and Harvard] in 1950 cost $6309 a year in 2019 dollars, while the cost of a 2019 Columbia education in those same 2019 dollars is $58,920.  So in real terms, Columbia’s education costs 9.3 times as much now as it did in 1950.

How come?

Well, the first answer that comes to mind is that the education now on offer at 116^th st. and Broadway in Manhattan is 9.3 times better than the education offered there in 1950.  So I thought about that.  To be sure, I was a student at Harvard, not at Columbia, in 1950, but I made the heroic assumption that the two educations then were roughly comparable.  As I am teaching at Columbia this year, I can judge firsthand the quality of the education it now offers.  It will perhaps not come as a surprise to you to learn that after careful consideration, I have concluded that the education Columbia now offers, even though I have a hand in offering it, is in fact not noticeably better than the education offered to me seventy years ago at Harvard.  [I shall resist the old man’s temptation to say that it was better then than now.  Just as good is all I need for this analysis.]

If the education is not nine times as good, then maybe it costs nine times as much to produce.  Well, in the Liberal Arts, the principal, indeed nearly the only, cost of an undergraduate education is the salaries of the professors who provide it.  Once again, I used the bits of data I had and sought out some additional data in an effort to evaluate this proposed explanation.  I wasn’t teaching at Columbia in 1950, but I was in 1965.  I was then a newly tenured Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department, and my salary in 1965 dollars was $11,000.  This was pretty much the bottom of the salary range.  Columbia did not have to bid up to get me.  If I may adapt an iconic line from Renée Zellweger in Jerry McGuire, they had me with hello.

Eleven thousand dollars in 1965 is the equivalent of a bit more than $89,000 today.  Google tells me a low end Associate Professor at Columbia these days is making upwards of $120,000, so there has been maybe a 33% increase in pay.  Columbia has of course responded, as any rational corporation would, by seeking cheaper labor, which it happily finds not overseas, which could create problems for office hours and such, but right on the campus.  In 1950, the jewel in the crown of Columbia’s undergraduate curriculum, Contemporary Civilization, or CC as it is usually called, was taught by professors.  [The course, even then, was 31 years old, having been created in 1919 just after WW I.]  Today, all but a handful of the 62 sections scheduled each semester are taught by graduate students and new PhDs who cannot find regular tenure track Assistant Professors. 

In short, Columbia does not charge nine times as much today for its undergraduate education as it in 1950 because the education is nine times as good, nor because it costs nine times as much to produce.  Why then?

That is the subject for another post, but I will offer one simple answer that might start us on the road to an answer.

Because they can.