Has the college academic job market always been highly competitive and elitist?

[ucbalumnus]

@MWolf

Universities cannot compete with industry in salaries and bonuses, so the only thing that they can offer is something like tenure. Without tenure, only people who industry is not willing to pay much will become faculty.

However, today, only about a fifth of college instructors have tenure and perhaps another tenth are tenure-track but have not gotten tenure. Would that mean that most college instructors are “people who industry is not willing to pay much”?