| Easy: because it costs a lot. Average annual tuition at private 4 year colleges is $38k. Average faculty to student ratio among these schools is 10:1. Average salary for a professor at these schools is $134k. In other words, about 35% of college tuition revenue is going to faculty paychecks. This does not include staff, who are lower paid but far more numerous. For context, in a for-profit business, typically 15-30% of revenue goes to payroll. Then you have overhead for all these employees. And it's not like these people are being paid particularly lavish sums. If anything for their experience level they are typically underpaid. Education is just an incredibly labor intensive field. It doesn't help that having a low student:faculty ratio is seen as one of a university's most important metrics, so efforts to improve labor efficiency are disincentivized. Throw in facility upkeep, insurance, costs of marketing and recruitment. These institutions are generally not printing money. Yeah, the top few dozen schools with strong alumni networks and massive investment portfolios are flush with cash, but there are thousands of schools that aren't. |