Education: Professors’ Price

As a college professor, Johns Hopkins’ Economist Clarence D. Long is gloomily aware that his earning power has been steadily losing ground in the endless marathon with rising living costs. As a practicing economist, he is also professionally concerned by “this singular inability of the pedagogue to hold his place at the American banquet table.”

On Johns Hopkins’ well-financed campus, says Economist Long, an average professor earned $5,700 in 1940. With a salary of $7,975 today, he gets only $4,154 in terms of pre-World War II dollars. Says Long: “The decline in purchasing power of 27%—before a single per centum is deducted for income tax—would outrage anybody but a teacher.”

The usual explanation for this sad state of affairs is that income from endowments has been dwindling while costs are still going up. But that, says Long, is only part of the answer. “For one thing,” he points out in the current issue of the Johns Hopkins Magazine, “state universities—which put little reliance on endowments, and in some cases get more money from their legislatures in a single biennium than the entire wealth accumulated by Hopkins since 1875—have pushed up salaries no faster than private institutions.” Besides, in the 1940s, with the help of the Federal Government, “the universities took in more purchasing power per teacher but paid him less.” The difference was spent on buildings, maintenance and administration—”the physical and bureaucratic aspects of higher learning.”

To make matters worse, there has been a general reluctance to raise tuition fees. “At Johns Hopkins, for instance, student fees have gone up in the same proportion as salaries: 45%, or half the 90% rise in living cost in Baltimore . . . Because fees have not kept pace with other economic trends, a bachelor’s degree is an outstanding bargain, subsidized in good part by the professor.”

The outlook is dismal, Long concludes, and the problem is almost as old as formal education. Taking note of a similar situation more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek Philosopher Isocrates dourly counseled his colleagues: “They who teach wisdom . . . ought certainly to be wise themselves; but if any man were to sell such a bargain for such a price, he would be convicted of the most evident folly.”