For once I find myself agreeing with David Strom

Halls of Ivy get ever greener:

"It's embarrassing," said Roger Bowen, general secretary of the Washington-based American Association of University Professors. "We call it market competition, but universities should not be victimized by market forces; that's not what they're about. ... To the extent we force ourselves into market competition, we're going to see presidential salaries go up ... and you're going to see tuition go up."To have a small college [Carleton] with 1,800 to 2,000 students paying its president almost half a million dollars seems out of line," said David Strom, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and a Carleton graduate.

But Minnesota college officials say the rising salaries are unavoidable. They say the pool of applicants for such jobs has shrunk, and the job is a lot tougher. College presidents, they say, must now do more fundraising and public relations, and must have the savvy and finesse to schmooze successfully with potential benefactors such as wealthy alumni and legislators.

OK, so: these University presidents get paid more because they need to do more fundraising, and yet tuition is still skyrocketing? Shouldn't they be compensated for levels of fundraising that keep tuition affordable? Who is benefiting from this (alleged) increase in fundraising? Thank you, "market forces", for doing whatever it is you're doing to improve higher education in America.

Oh yeah, I should add that I'm tired of journalists using the scientific-sounding phrase "market forces" to refer to selfish competitive money-lust. It would be interesting, for instance, to find a "market force" that ended homelessness or kept tuition affordable...