Colege is not bad but it is a scam that gets kids into a lifetime of debt aka slavery often for bullshit fake degrees with almost zero job prospects. All to benefit bloated school administrations and construction of A+ quality commericial bldgs that ldings. The kids pay forever to pay for these administrators and most professors gold plated pensions. I know one who taught at U of Illinois and his pension will probably blow up due to Ill and Chicago corruption.
On one level, you are blaming higher education as a whole for problems associated more properly to the failures of American capitalism and the economy. Higher ed didn't cause the shitty economy.
On another level, you equate higher education with employment services. Universities are not employment services.
While there are some profs, 50-year veterans of higher ed, who'll get golden pensions upon retirement, the vast majority of long-term tenured profs if that they lost their retirements in the financial scandals of the 2000s. And the vast majority of faculty at higher education institutions are not tenured and never will be. Guessing the average pay of the typical college instructor, it's probably in the $40,000 range. And not all college faculty are equal. Scientists, for example, usually get larger salaries as a result of various gov. and private sector grants. Liberal arts profs, like that art professor, may supplement their income from grants, which are usually very few and highly competitive such as 10,000 applicants for one $4500 grant. As for the bill borne by taxpayers, college instructing pays very little just as it always has historically in this nation (which is piss poor at education).
This site explains faculty salaries:
https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=24
The caveat here is that for full profs, most large state universities have very few of them, and adjunct instructors are the vast majority of college-level faculty (in DC area, they were compensated somewhere around $3500 per class taught, and max number of classes they could teach per semester would be 5 courses).
This is so because most of the instructors at the college level are TAs (grad students), or adjuncts, who are part time and can never get tenure. This dwindling down of college level faculty will continue until universities are only staffed by administrators and athletic department assistant ADs.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-allen-adjunct-professors-20131222-story.html
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has large data sets on faculty pay and number of tenure track faculty, but their site is subscription only and that's why I haven't linked any of that data.
There are manifold reasons why TAs and part-timers handle most of the teaching load at state U's, and I'd recommend any number of books written on this topic. Several have come out in the past ten years, but it's a result of states not wanting to foot the bill of a University as they did after WWII. From the 1950s through the early 1980s, American higher education was the envy of the world; and today, it gets very little respect even from the full profs and deans at America's state U's.
I will agree with you one point though--college is obsolete given that the only real skill one needs today to be competitive in our shitty economy is coding. From what little I understand about coding is that it can be self taught provided you know how to read, do a little math, and type.
But that's different than saying college is a scam because the U.S. economy sucks. College is a scam if you think of it as an employment service.
When does a university education pay off? For the student that really sucks the marrow out of their education, completing all assignments and readings, and even self-directs their own educational goals by third or fourth year, usually means that the graduate will be very well prepared to make it in a suck-ass economy like our own. This is one reason why lots of Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Ivy League grads continue to do well post-graduation.
