As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of:
(Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) )
And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.
When people talk about "disruption of education", they usually mean either online courses or boot camps. I think that's unfortunate. There are huge benefits to learning stuff the traditional way, by taking a class in person, on a schedule, with a curriculum and a teacher and an exam at the end. There are also huge benefits to hanging out with working scientists and picking up their enthusiasm. These are the important things about attending a university, and they aren't even that difficult or expensive to set up! Can we get that kind of "disruption", please?
Honestly, as an adjunct professor, you don't make much. Full time faculty are, on average, probably paid at least 3 times what you make (based on numbers from 2013).
That probably doesn't make you feel great, but as a percentage of costs, faculty salaries are still the biggest expense at all schools I know of.
Staff for non-academic activities outside of the VP chain and coaches are also generally much lower than faculty salaries - Student life, activities, diversity, etc are closer to what you make.
For those that are unfamiliar, when a faculty member wins a grant the university takes 50%+ for themselves. Right off the top. So if you are awarded a grant for $100k from DARPA, NIH or some other granting organization you'll only end up having ~$47k to spend. The rest goes straight to the pocket of the university.
This is actually untrue. People just think that because they don't understand how the overhead % works. 100% overhead would mean the university taking 50%. But all overheads are <= 65%, so no university takes more than half. It's about 1/3 in the top tier universities.
(Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) )
And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.