Universities: Anxiety Behind the Facade

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however, the quest for funds is a matter of life and death. "The less well-endowed university," says Brewster, "is literally finding its back to the wall as it tries to be competitive in faculty, facilities and programs." Occidental President Richard C. Gilman, while confident that his own school will survive, predicts that 250 private colleges will either merge with other institutions or collapse within the next five years. Already Temple and the Universities of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kansas City, and Houston have quietly surrendered their status as entirely independent private schools, have become affiliated with state systems.

From Amherst to Yankton, U.S. college presidents have a simple but thoroughly convincing explanation of the financial crisis: the cost of higher education is rising infinitely faster than academic revenue.

The rapidly expanding professorial paycheck is a major source of school deficits. Staff salaries account for about 50% of total expenses at a large university like Yale, and across the nation, professors are getting raises of 7% a year. In 1950, the national average for all college-level teachers was $5,310; today it is $11,265. Harvard, which paid its top professors no more than $12,000 in 1947, will offer $28,000 next year; its 548 full professors average $20,000. And teachers take it for granted that the average will go even higher. "The senior faculty members expect a review of their salaries every year," complains Harvard's Arts and Sciences Dean Franklin Ford. "No one seems to remember back in the '30s, when it was every four or five years." Also on the rise are college payrolls for nonteaching services. At Kalamazoo College, for example, janitorial salaries have climbed 40% in the past five years—and no one, ruefully notes Columbia's Kirk, "ever wants to endow janitorial services."

Facing Competition. One reason why professorial salaries have skyrocketed is the increasing competition that private schools face from public universities. As higher education has become a politically popular field for legislators to support, the best of the state universities have found ample funds to lure professors from private universities with promises of sky-high salaries and unlimited research facilities. Some educators are worried about the growth of the public multiversities. Although two-thirds of the nation's 2,173 colleges and universities are private, their share of student enrollment has slipped from 50% in 1950 to 35% today.

New breakthroughs in knowledge have led to a proliferation of specialized studies that constitute another severe strain on the resources of the private college and university. M.I.T. now offers its students an array of 2,966 courses—half of which did not exist a decade ago. Before World War II, a single professor could teach everything that Columbia expected a student to know about China; now he would pick up fragments of Sinology from 20 specialized scholars. Many of these new sciences, moreover, are primarily graduate specialties—and the universities run heavy deficits operating top M.A. and doctoral programs. University of Chicago officials estimate that they spend $13,000 a year to train a grad student in medicine or biology who pays only $1,980 in tuition.

Bottomless Pits. Keeping up with new knowledge also means