Are American universities giving you what you pay for?

During an economic slowdown, prices usually fall. But there’s just one sector of the economy that’s bizarrely insulated from reality: Academia.

Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College just hit $53,166 per year. That’s like buying a C-Class Mercedes every year — without the car. Other colleges are comparable, with even state school tuition rising to levels some parents find impossible.

We figure it’s worth it. Universities offer students not just a degree that’s valued in the marketplace, but a chance to broaden their interests and deepen their souls; to gain a solid grounding in the fundamentals that made our civilization.

That’s the theory. But what if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?

That is exactly what happened in academia over the past 30 years, according to Emory University Professor Mark Bauerlein, whose American Enterprise Institute paper “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own” explores the secret that most professors are paid based not on the quality (or even quantity) of their teaching, but rather on the volume of scholarly articles and books they can produce.

Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays and reviews. During the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year.

But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished. Unit sales for such books now hover around 300.

At the same time, the relations between teachers and students have declined. Forty-three percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial coursework, costing $2 billion annually.

One national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class. Forty-one percent only do so “sometimes.”

Prestigious professors frequently have little interaction with students at all. Students must seek out professors in scanty office hours.

Meanwhile, the research these professors are turning out — at least in the humanities — is increasingly obscure and often politicized. When dealing with well-studied writers like William Faulkner or Herman Melville, they pursue ever more oddball interpretations. Or professors switch gears and write about popular culture.

Too many universities have given up on providing solid guidance to students’ choice of courses. Graduates of Ivy League colleges can emerge without having ever read Hamlet, the Bible or the Declaration of Independence.

At the pricey Sarah Lawrence College, a typical course on four canonical U.S. authors is “Queer Americans: James, Stein, Cather, Baldwin.” Many leading schools offer similar fare.

It’s essential to carefully scope out each college. Call the admissions office and ask the student to teacher ratio, and the percentage of classes taught by graduate students.

Is there a core curriculum of solid classes in Western culture, American history and great works of literature? Ask a professor how highly teaching (versus research) is valued in tenure decisions.

After all, the teaching is what you’re paying for. Leave the tab for all that research to those 300 people who actually buy the books.

John Zmirak, Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of “Choosing the Right College 2010-11: The Whole Truth about America’s Top Schools” and Collegeguide.org.