In addition, universities are using more graduate students and part-time instructors to do undergraduate teaching. If recruiting top-name research faculty is being done for the benefit of students, it must be like one of those new particle forces in physics whose strength increases with distance because faculty and students are growing increasingly apart. Douglas D. Osheroff, physics professor at Stanford, notes that the shortage of research faculty has driven up the sums universities are now finding they must pay to attract first-rate individuals. On average, academic salaries rose faster than the rate of inflation every year during the 1980s. Tuitions have risen faster than inflation because they are the only revenue that universities can unilaterally adjust upward.
Famous professors allow leading universities to command higher tuition fees.
Students will pay more to go to a big name university because that s where the blue chip career tickets are handed out. This is not a scheme to get rich, but a competition to maintain one s national ranking. Universities have to raise more money and promise lighter teaching loads just to keep from losing their own faculty. The price tag just to stay in the game is enormous. A department can lose its high ranking in a few short years, leaving the university loaded with expensive tenured faculty who are accustomed to low teaching loads.