In Depth November 29, 2007, 11:55AM EST

The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League

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Although salary gains have consistently outpaced inflation, it is the addition of new teaching positions that is chiefly responsible for driving up the cost of instruction. Harvard, the largest of the Ivies, employs 2,164 faculty members, 55% more than in 1997-98. All of the Ivies increasingly are emphasizing small-group learning, independent study, and hands-on experience. "It's a much more personal connection between teacher and student, and a lot less delivering education in large lecture halls with armies of teaching assistants," says Carol L. Folt, a Dartmouth biology professor who doubles as its dean of faculty.

The Ivies' heavy spending to enlarge and upgrade their faculties has contributed to an ever-widening salary gap between private and public universities. The $106,496 average salary earned by full professors at PhD-granting public universities in 2006-07 amounted to just 78% of what their counterparts earned at private universities, according to the American Association of University Professors. This figure was 91% in 1980-81.

The Ivies' superior spending power puts even the finest public universities at a disadvantage in the competition for faculty. One of the many academic areas in which Yale has brought its financial muscle to bear is physics, which until recently was chaired by Ramamurti Shankar. "Yale told us: Let's go after who you want. We will make it happen,'" says Shankar, who is particularly proud of having bested several other top private schools to lure the quantum mechanics expert Steven M. Girvin away from Indiana University, a Big Ten public stalwart. "There was a huge war," Shankar says. "Everybody wanted him." Shankar declines to disclose the price he paid for Girvin in 2002, but says that the going annual rate today for theoreticians of his caliber is $400,000 to $600,000, which includes salary and research support. This is for an assistant professor, the level at which Yale does most of its hiring. The price tag for top experimentalists, who have far more extensive laboratory needs, is $1.5 million to $2 million, according to Shankar, who remains on the Yale faculty.

To house their enlarged faculties, the Ivies have turned their campuses into continuous construction zones. Each now boasts a new science facility that is its most expensive structure ever. At Stanford, the distinction belongs to the $140 million "Bio-X" building. Designed by the famed British architect Norman Foster, the glass-walled center provides offices and labs for 30 faculty members whose research combines cutting-edge subspecialties in biology and medicine. Over the next few years, says Stanford President John L. Hennessy, the school plans to invest an additional $600 million to put up five more buildings at an astronomical cost of $800 per square foot on average. Under President Amy Gutmann, Penn is launching its expansion onto 24 acres adjoining its Philadelphia campus by building three high-tech medical research facilities at a total cost of $682 million. Harvard is beginning work on a $1 billion complex that includes a new stem cell institute, the first stage of a planned 200-acre adjunct campus in Allston, Mass.

THE RESEARCH EDGE

Ivy administrators argue that gathering the best researchers in resource-rich havens has a synergistic and broadly beneficial effect. Scientists are more likely to do their best work, expanding knowledge and improving lives, when attached to academia's deepest pockets, or so holds the rationale for Ivy aggrandizement. The research productivity of elite private universities is roughly twice that of their public counterparts, according to a recent study of America's 102 top research universities by economists James D. Adams and J. Roger Clemmons. The study measured volume of academic papers and citations during 1981-99. "You are going to have an edge in research if you have great students, but not too many students; freedom from bureaucratic and political meddling; and generous alums who are more interested in academics than the football program," says Adams, acting head of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private college in Troy, N.Y.

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