Deconstructing the ivory tower.

THE average four-year tuition at a public college or university equaled 36 per cent of a typical family's annual income in 1979. That same year, the price of a bachelor's degree at a private college averaged 84 per cent of yearly family income. By 1994, those figures had jumped to 60 per cent and 156 per cent, respectively. In addition, families also had to pay higher local, state, and federal taxes to subsidize colleges and universities.

What is driving up the price of college is a surge in faculty compensation, a plethora of federal mandates, and an escalation in administrative personnel. The American Association of University Professors reports that average salaries for professors at public universities rose by 108 per cent between 1980 and 1993, while those at private universities jumped by 134 per cent, nearly double the 75 per cent inflation during the same period.

Over the past two decades, the number of college and university faculty has increased by 30 per cent and the number of non-faculty jobs on campus has more than doubled. This trend toward greater bureaucracy is most pronounced at public universities, with administrative costs per student rising 19 per cent annually, four times as fast as spending on teaching, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Administrative costs, the fastest growing major component of college expenditures, currently consume 45 cents of every instructional dollar, compared to 19 cents in 1930.

College administrators explain that onerous government regulations have caused much of this escalation in bureaucracy. Federal mandates, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Student Right to Know Act and Campus Security Act, and numerous civil-rights regulations, have increased operating costs. Accreditation, for instance, has increasingly been linked to "appropriate" sexual, racial, and ethnic diversity on a college's governing board and faculty. But it's not cheap to develop outreach programs to boost minority faculty ratios and minority student enrollment, to fly in sensitivity experts to run sessions on sexism and racism, or to unmask patriarchal and Eurocentric biases in a curriculum.

Despite the massive increase in educational personnel, today's college students are faced with more absentee professors. Why? Partly, it's a result of compensation and tenure systems that denigrate teaching performance while rewarding the publication of articles of dubious significance. At most schools, a junior professor, in order to gain lifetime job security, is wise to abandon the classroom and allocate time to research, conferences, and publishing.

In dealing with these problems, college presidents face an especially tough task in delivering reform. Tenure protects professors from the kind of downsizing that's the norm in the rest of the economy. At Columbia, 25 department chairmen threatened to quit in the face of proposed budget cuts. At the University of California, the Board of Regents' recommendation to repeal racial quotas in admissions was met with bomb threats.

YET, on the demand side, college presidents face students who increasingly expect expensive sports programs, showy dorms, and "name" professors. At the University of South Carolina, the widow of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was paid $350,000 in travel and salary for teaching one class a week for three semesters. Meanwhile, over at the gym, "dozens of athletic coaches now command incomes in the $500,000 to $1 million range," including their lucrative commercial promotions, reports Carl Horowitz in Investor's Business Daily.

Is it worth it? In 1980, college graduates earned an average of 40 per cent more than high-school graduates. Today, that gap has grown to 75 per cent. And yet, in 1990, of the 29 million people 25 years and older with a college degree in the labor force, "5.8 million were underemployed, holding jobs for which a college degree was not needed," states C. Emily Feistritzer, Director of the National Center for Education.

What's on the horizon for academe is the same demands for accountability, efficiency, and competitiveness that now exist in the rest of the economy. "Those in the ivory tower will have to come down, get a little muddied, and explain the whole process of what it is they do," says Ohio Rep. Robert Hagan.