New Study by Turner College Economist Explores Rising College Costs

New research by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and João Ricardo Faria of Florida Atlantic University relates the diffusion of critical theory into American colleges to the creation and growth of soft graduate programs associated with the ideologies that form the modern generation or wave of critical theory, which is often referred to as cultural Marxism. Mixon and Faria develop a formal model showing that the growth of these soft, politically correct graduate programs leads to increasing university costs and tuition, growing bureaucratic offices and expansion of these same graduate programs, and greater faculty pay and employment. The formal model constituting the bulk of the study also provides conditions that lead the number of bureaucrats at an institution to eclipse the number of faculty employed by the institution. The study, which appears in a recent issue of Theoretical Economics Letters, concludes that the spiral in costs and tuition can only be restrained and controlled through an intertemporal optimization process wherein universities recognize that costs and tuition fees are functions of time and the number of graduate students enrolled in these soft programs.