I got hold of some aggregate numbers for a typical private American university. Last year New York University (NYU) collected $1.395 billion in tuition and fees from students (this is actual money received net of discounts (“financial aid”), i.e., not the aspirational rates that they publish). How much was spent on education? Faculty salaries were $395 million and an additional $82 million was paid to adjuncts.

A little arithmetic shows that the students paid 2.92 times what the university paid out to teachers.

Related: posting regarding the ratio back in Calvin Coolidge’s college days.