Judge Posner Explains How Yale Professors Became Upper Class Rent Seekers

Judge Posner has a history lesson:

I graduated from Yale College in 1959. Tuition, room, and board at Yale in the late 1950s was $2000 a year; this year it is $60,000. Adjusted for inflation, this is a more than threefold increase. Average salary for a full professor at Yale went from $13,000 in 1959 to $186,000 this year (excluding medical school faculty), which after correction for inflation, an almost twofold increase. The rates of increase in these two variables varies from college to college, but I believe it is generally true that college costs have risen significantly faster than faculty costs. One thing that has depressed the increase in faculty costs is the increasing use of graduate students and other part-time faculty in lieu of tenure-track faculty. In addition, the administrative staffs of colleges have grown rapidly, in part because of increased legal regulation of education.

Yale Professors: the rent-seeking upper class of American society. When is Yale University going to start paying its' "fair share" of federal taxation since they are a big business?