After receiving his PhD in 1970, the author has spent almost 30 years conducting research on the economics of higher education, chairing faculty budget committees at Cornell, serving as a Cornell vice president and then as a trustee of both Cornell and SUNY, and being associated with innumerable national commissions and higher education…

Endowments of major universities such as Cornell have received much attention over the past few years. Last academic year, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation into the finances of universities with endowments that exceeded $500 million dollars and required all of these universities to file reports detailing their finances.…

Average faculty salaries differ widely across fields at American colleges and universities and the magnitudes of these field differences in salaries have been growing over time. What is less well known, however, is that at any point in time there are wide differences in the magnitudes of field differences in faculty salaries across academic…

This paper focuses on three academic labor market issues that researchers at Cornell University are addressing currently: (1) the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to the salaries of their counterparts at private higher education institutions; (2) the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries…

This study uses institutional level data from the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis of the State University of New York (SUNY) System to investigate reasons for growth in the share of faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities who are part-time or full-time without tenure track status. It presents background data on how the…

This report briefly summarizes findings from the 2002 Cornell Higher Education Research Institute survey of start-up costs at the over 220 universities classified as research and doctoral universities by the Carnegie Foundation in 1994. It reports the mean start-up cost packages across institutions for new assistant professors and senior faculty,…

This paper sketches the reasons for the tremendous increase in university expenditure on research out of internal funds including changes in federal indirect cost reimbursement policies and the growing cost of start-up funds for new faculty. It presents evidence, based on a survey of department chairs, deans, and vice presidents for research at…

By last spring, most faculty members at public institutions of higher education were justifiably pessimistic about their likely salary increases for the 2003-04 academic year. Many states were running large budget deficits for the second or third year in a row and no longer had reserves to draw upon to balance their budgets. These shortfalls…

This paper discusses the growing resource imbalance that is emerging between public and private institutions of higher education and the growing inequality of resources that is occurring within the public and private sectors. It illustrates implications of some of these changes for patterns of faculty compensation and faculty turnover observed…

This book explores the causes of tuition inflation, using Cornell University (New York) as a prototypical institution. There are 9 sections with 20 chapters. Section 1, "Setting the Stage," includes (1) "Why Do Costs Keep Rising at Selective Private Colleges and Universities?" and (2) "Who Is In Charge of the…