Manufacturing an Education

Lots of thought has gone into figuring out why the cost of college tuition has risen faster than inflation over the last decades and the easiest target has been the faculty. Administrators point out that labor costs are the largest proportion of any annual budget.

This is of course true for many institutions,

How to reduce labor costs is the concern of every institutional head, capitalist or otherwise. For a while the higher-ups imagined that applying corporate budget analysis would help sift out the "unproductive" elements of the university, classes with low enrollment, for example.

Industrial production has been mechanized tremendously over the last century, but higher education has not found any way to reduce the number of faculty comparable to the reduction in factory workers.

Perhaps this means that education requires personal attention. Humans interacting with other humans. The product is still an idealistic one, which is to say it requires more than manufacturing, it requires both the producer and the product to believe that more is happening in the exchange than simple creation of economic value.