EclectEcon

Students are affected by poor resource allocation in other ways. Class sizes have grown since 2000 because of a 20 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment, without an equivalent increase in full-time faculty. Students are closed out of classes because there are not enough faculty to teach them. Graduate students, the life-blood of a research university, have dropped by 10 percent since 1970. Instead of hiring new faculty and attracting new graduate students, the university has devoted scarce resources to boosting the number of athletic coaches and staff by 25 percent since 1994. What's more important at the university, better education or better games?

(We continue to manage with half the faculty we had in the late 1980s, and I have now counted 10 or 11 requests to get into my closed classes, which sold out during November early registration. If there were some way I could run my classes as an independent contractor ...)

... Ask a professor to meet more classes or larger classes, see if he hits the top journals as frequently. Hire adjuncts to meet multiple sections of introductory classes: the remaining tenured faculty who were hired to direct dissertations will get the message. Devote some of your capacity to chasing the excess demand for prestige degrees, listen to the discontent from in-state parents and students.