If the price of a bottle of Coke had risen at twice the rate of inflation every year for the past two decades we would all be drinking Pepsi. Perhaps if student learning had also doubled in that period we could be less troubled by what seems to be a set of costs out of control. But, what a number of Federal study commissions and anecdotal reports from employers would suggest is the contrary. The rest are adjuncts who hold academic posts at other universities and work for Jones, either teaching or working as 'content experts'. Now, such freelancing isn't unheard of in higher education.
Faculty write textbooks that frequently lead to a similar relationship with a publisher.
Given the current misalignment of institutional goals and faculty rewards in most of higher education, such freelancing arrangements on the part of some faculty may signal a positive trend. On the Net, market share means everything. The lesson of the Net is that centralized planning doesn't produce the results stemming from flattened, seemingly chaotic organizational structures such as the one that built the Net. The Net is complex and complicated but its complexity wasn't designed. It simply grew from the premise that by putting the intelligence out at the ends, thereby encouraging innovation, lots of people could make contributions to the whole product without needing to understand the whole product.