Something Fishy...

This has been bothering me for quite a while now and I was wondering if anyone could enlighten me a bit on the subject. No matter how I do the math I just can't figure out why education costs so darn much. I'm going to take a look at Harvard's tuition and its costs since their tuition is not much higher then UVA's out of state tuition, because the relevant information was easier for me to attain about Harvard, and because its professors are paid much higher then ours here at UVA. Their tuition for 2 full time semesters is ~$35,500 (UVA's out of state tuition is ~$33,700). So for 1 semester that's $17,750. Assuming 5 classes taken on average(Actually it looks like at Harvard its normal to take only 4 courses a semester but I'll give it the advantage of an additional course per semester) would mean an average cost of 3,550 per class, and since the average class size in Harvard is 37 students this means the school collects $131,350 per class taught. The average salary at Harvard is an incredible $168,700 (Harvard pays higher salaries to professors then anywhere else). I'm going to assume that Harvard professors teach an average of 2 courses a semester. That would be about 3 hours in the class room per week per class, perhaps another 3 hours per week in class preparation per week, and 3 hours more per week in grading student work. I pretty much just made up the time for a professor's work load outside of class but I figured it can't be too different then the 2 hours of work we students are expected to do per hour of class work we do. If this is accurate it would mean professors are doing roughly 18 hours of week (full-time employment is 35-40 hours a week) for about 9 months of the year in order to teach 4 courses. That by itself seems to be a rather silly waste of resources but when we look at the numbers involved things get truly obscene.

If we recall the cost of a single course, $131,350, and we multiply that by the number of classes a professor is expected to teach, 4, we come up with $525,400. We can subtract from this the average faculty member's salary of $168,700 a year leaving $356,700. Can this be justified? Even after subtracting out the seemingly ridiculous cost of the salary of the people who actually teach us (who are effectively working part time for 9 months a year) we are still left with more then 2/3 of the tuition to account for. That means that even if we were to assume that the school some how needed enough people to support the professors on a 1 to 1 ratio with the professors, which should be considered ludicrous since they are little more then paper shufflers, that would still leave $188,000 left over. That number only represents 4 courses so if we divide it by 4 and then we multiply it by 5 we can see how much from each of our normal load of 5 courses is left over after over paying the professors and faculty: $235,000 per semester.

To make this as simple as possible we should imagine that the school is as small as possible. Let's say that hypothetically this Harvard is only a single building with 1 class room with 2.5 professors and 1 room for the other 2.5 faculty members that it apparently takes to teach 5 courses in a semester(This also gives Harvard the benefit of the doubt when it comes to expense because it makes sense that efficiency should grow with size, and if it didn't then there is no reason to have schools larger then this in the first place). After subtracting the pay of the faculty this still leaves $235,000 to pay for the facilities... Of a 2 room building which his occupied by 42 people... For one semester... For comparison 3 of my apartments, utilities and all, would put me back less then $4,500 for a semester... Where the hell is all of our money going?

Its true that I leave out stuff like the cost of research, sports activities, ect but I also leave out revenues from book store sales, research fees, ticket sales for sports events, alumni donations, ect. I can't make any sense of this. Even with ridiculously over paying professors, hiring a ridiculous amount of over paid faculty, and reducing the school to the most inefficient size possible, the numbers still don't add up. A nauseating amount of waste is happening here with our money and, since we are in a public university, with the money of tax payers.

What exactly is causing this? Is it some weird market effect where competition doesn't push prices down because people are more willing to go to Universities that cost a lot because degrees from such places are seen as being much more valuable? Why hasn't some entrepreneur gotten a wiff of this situation and offered to pay the best professors in the country $200,000 a year to teach at half the cost of Harvard's tuition while still allowing for a healthy profit by minimizing other incredibly unnecessary costs? Wouldn't students go for that, or is there something I'm missing here that students are getting out of these incredibly expensive schools? Would a degree from a efficient school with the best professors in the nation, but perhaps not much else, be worth less then a degree from Harvard which costs twice as much?

This seems like a situation where the only likely reason for why this is happening is some sort of hidden government involvement which is preventing such competition from being created. is there something about school accreditation or some similar thing that is preventing competition?