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College Presidents Making $1M Rise with Tuition and Student Debt

139 points by wyldfire 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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LeeHwang 9y ago
This is just offensive. I know so many kids with degrees just struggling under debt and poor job prospects. We need a reformation for universities and their contract with society.
- randomdata 9y ago
  Why does one take on debt they cannot afford, especially when they lack a good career to help pay for it, in the first place? From the stories I've taken in from people attending college over the years, I suspect it is because they see people like these administrative staff, who will tell you they got there by going to college, making serious amounts of money and are willing to take a chance that they too will become that person in the future. Which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The schools are incentivized to ensure that a small group of college graduates are paid handsomely to make their product look more attractive, and more students taking notice of that attractiveness allows them to pay those people even more. Despite substantial growth in college attainment over the last number of decades, incomes for the general population have remained stagnant and job quality is in decline. That fact is reported in the news almost daily, it feels like. It is no secret that the average person is going to see no workplace gains by going to college, otherwise incomes would be going up and/or job quality would be rising with increasing attainment. It appears to me, however, that some are willing to gamble on the small chance they are the exceptional case that gets the exceptional job (like College President). Ultimately, the colleges are providing what the students want: A perceived chance, albeit small, of significant upward mobility. Until their desires change, it is going to be difficult to change that outward contract.
  - pessimizer 9y ago
    > It is no secret that the average person is going to see no workplace gains by going to college, otherwise incomes would be going up and/or job quality would be rising with increasing attainment. Incomes do go up and job quality does rise with increasing educational attainment, and empirically the average person is going to see workplace gains by going to college. People are not going to college solely to gamble on a chance to make million dollar salaries. That's a bizarre outlook that excludes every middle class job that increasingly tends to require a college degree. Hell, most college administrators don't make more than middle class salaries.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      > Incomes do go up and job quality does rise with increasing educational attainment I really don't think this is found in the data. Among the general population, incomes are quite stagnant, and job quality is considered to be falling. At best, it is no better than in the past. With the rising rates of educational attainment, if what you say is true, incomes should be rising along with job quality. That does not appear to be happening. What we do see that those with higher educational attainment are the ones who are more likely to have the higher paying and better jobs, but that is not the same thing as incomes increasing and job quality improving with increased levels of schooling. All that really tells us is that those who have the most difficulty in the workplace (those with mental disabilities, for instance) are also most likely to have less formal education. Which comes as no surprise to, well, anyone. > That's a bizarre outlook that excludes every middle class job that increasingly tends to require a college degree. That is a bizarre outlook. Employers are not a charity to help out those with college debt. Unless the law requires it, employers couldn't care less about where you went to school. And the jobs that do require it by law are vanishingly small. We covered why those with post-secondary educations are more likely to get those better jobs (high achievers tend to be high achievers in everything they do), but that does not mean it is a requirement or is increasing as a requirement. The only thing increasing is the rate of post-secondary attainment, which understandably will result in more and more jobs filled with college graduates. Of course. That's just basic math. > Hell, most college administrators don't make more than middle class salaries. Along with everyone else. Why would you take on that massive debt if you knew you were guaranteed to end up in the same place as you otherwise would? Especially when education is a life-long endeavour. You can always go to college once you have saved up the necessary cash. There is no rush. The only reasonable explanation I see here is that people see the small chance of significantly improving their situation beyond the average middle class person. Which, given the costs of post-secondary education, is a pretty big gamble. There has to be some kind of substantial reward potential given the high stakes. Not just another middle class lifestyle like almost everyone else in the country. That would never justify the costs.
ddorian43 9y ago
Trickle down from the administrate & sports facilites. Also, what do universities do with $1B ?
- _acme 9y ago
  Schools don't generally spend their endowments; what they do is use the profits (if any) from investing the endowment to fund the school's budget (academic and otherwise), because tuition alone doesn't nearly cover the cost of operating a college let alone a university.
paultopia 9y ago
Forget about the presidents. At least they have a real job. What about the football coaches, who make really obscene amounts? This article lists a ton of state school coaches making way the hell more than any president. http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/17892134/michigan-wolverines-coach-jim-harbaugh-salary-tops-list-college-football-coaches http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/17892134/mic...
- distances 9y ago
  Sports clubs should be separated from schools and universities. I've got no idea why they are bundled together.
  - omegaham 9y ago
    Because the university affiliation turns minor league football / basketball into national television and gets people to spend millions of dollars on tickets and merchandise. No one watches the NBA D-league, but they're happy to watch the Tar Heels play. Similarly, no one watches arena ball, but they're happy to fill the stadium and watch Oregon State lose every week. It also serves as extremely effective advertising for the university. The fact "Bama Bama Bama, Bama Bama Bama Bama, Bama Bama Bama" is a valid sentence on ESPN week in and week out adds up to weeks of coast-to-coast advertising for Alabama, and enrollment statistics reflect.
    - gbacon 9y ago
      Roll Tide to that.
    - HarryHirsch 9y ago
      But they are advertising the wrong thing. A university is supposed to engage in teaching and research, not sports. They can keep their Street Fighting Math and Integration Bee teams, but football needs to go, it gives the students and the public the wrong idea.
      - 9y ago
bmcusick 9y ago
I hope everyone's in on the joke that "non-profit" just means that someone other than a class of people called "shareholders" siphons off all the profits. It doesn't mean "low cost".
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  Non-profit + government money + charity has honestly been some of the most wasteful spending I've ever seen (as a developer, not as an accountant). And I don't imagine humans are that different between healthcare and education industries.
- chasing 9y ago
  That's a very pejorative and mostly inaccurate way of putting it. "Non-profit" doesn't mean people can't earn good money -- it means the organization exists for a purpose other than profit and, therefore, gets some tax breaks. Most people I know who work in non-profits are paid below-market for their skills.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > Most people I know who work in non-profits are paid below-market for their skills. This is true, but orthogonal - the complaint is about how much the bosses make, not how much the workers make.
    - cmiles74 9y ago
      And the fact that they are using their non-profit status as an excuse to pay their employees less than market value, while the executive suite cashes huge check,s is deplorable.
      - chasing 9y ago
        No, non-profits tend to underpay simply because they often have less money. Well-funded non-profits probably pay at-market rates. Or higher.
  - 9y ago
kenjinp 9y ago
This is unsurprising, as those of you who have read "Dictators Handbook" will remember, college campuses are organizations governed by leaders with small constituencies and sort of mathematically lead to crony-ism and big payouts for supporters. The system is set up to incentivize this behavior, and the universities need to be reorganized to achieve any other outcome.
jdlyga 9y ago
Huge fan of Georgia Tech's online masters program. It's in the top 10 graduate computer science programs in the world, and it's the same curriculum and same degree that you would get on campus. But the total cost of the program is around $7,000 dollars. Their reasoning? You don't pay for the stadium, the student fitness center, career advisers, etc. You only have to pay for the cost of the online program, professors, and TA's.
- mr337 9y ago
  My comp sci building was the worst building out on the campus. We did get brand new rec centers and redid sports complexes for the fun of it. The irony is the university still calls for alumni donations.......
  - beamatronic 9y ago
    More than one university with a $1B endowment fund still asks for donations too.
    - compiler-guy 9y ago
      Non-profits are just like any other corporation in terms of how much revenue they want: the just want more. A company can imagine more ways to invest and make more. A non profit can think of many more things to do in keeping with its mission. Whether that's expanding a school or making the school nicer. The demand for funds in insatiable, regardless of whom.
    - _acme 9y ago
      All schools with greater than $1b endowments still ask for donations. What school doesn't ask for donations?
- exhilaration 9y ago
  FWIW Georgia Tech's online masters program has been discussed several times on Hacker News and the feedback was pretty negative. EDIT: Comments below have corrected my recollection, previous discussions were mixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263
crimsonalucard 9y ago
If those presidents aren't paid that level of salary how will students learn? Students need a great university leader in order to guide them on how to learn. Also how will researchers produce science without a powerful leader pointing the way? Its like my boss, if my boss wasn't paid to sit in a chair all day to tell me to program an entire operating system, how would i be able to do it? I'd be lost without a great leader. We need to pay these leaders 5 million dollars because of the great talent they have in telling other people what to do.
junkscience2017 9y ago
the ongoing hypocrisy of luxury resorts draining the wealth of a generation so professors can espouse socialism is an important, if not essential facet of our Hunger Games world at Stanford, a blade of grass cannot deviate by a millimeter, yet the professors decry capitalism
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I think you're being downvoted because the ideology espoused by professors at Stanford has very little to do with spending on administration and facilities which drive costs.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    > ideology espoused by professors at Stanford Would it be appropriate if the comment said "ideology espoused by college presidents" . Here is OSU presidents who make around 3 mil giving a speech about how little people at lower levels get paid. http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/dr-michael-v-drake-delivers-wusm-homer-g-phillips-lecture/article_ad079520-3c47-11e3-a32a-001a4bcf887a.html http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/dr-michael-v-drak...
rdtsc 9y ago
I remember my tuition rising sharply while the school was building things like a new rec center with a large pool and a lazy river. (Yes, I think there is obvious irony there installing a lazy river on a college campus and making students take 6 figure loans to pay for it). In the meantime the evening college which had people trying their hardest to work and go to school was strapped for funds, couldn't afford printer paper and was printing exams double sided in a tiny font.
- Retric 9y ago
  Students are free to go to less expensive schools. However, as long as people underestimate debt, spending more to attract more students is simply rational behavior.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    You say that people underestimate debt, but it goes the other way too. My experience as a poor child growing up was that I could see no way to afford university fees, because the numbers looked too big. Loans wouldn't make a difference because I couldn't comprehend the subjective experience of making so much more money later in my career. Thankfully, college fees were abolished in my country (Ireland) in 1996. It enabled me personally to envision going to college where I couldn't before.
    - pdxandi 9y ago
      I had the same experience. I knew I was covering my college tuition and even in 2000, I couldn't understand how I could ever afford out of state tuition and room and board. I had near perfect grades and solid test scores, but the financial obligation scared the hell out of me and I had no idea private schools handed out big scholarships for good students. I ended up staying in town and going to my local state college and had a good experience, but I completely missed out on the prospect of going to a top university where I would meet other ambitious and curious people. I worked part-time to full-time for four years to pay for my tuition, and it was tough. I wish I could've been immersed in college and academia and even college-life, but the cost just felt like a huge barrier when I was 18 years old. TL;DR: I fear poorer people may be more afraid to attend college because of the costs, causing an even greater gap between the haves and have-nots.
awinder 9y ago
Reminder: big banks were giving out 1M+ bonuses to traders / c-suite executives in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, while being bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of trillions. We're now re-tooling the entire tax code to give them more money, but we're gonna crack the whip because of 58 -- thats fifty-eight -- college heads making over 1M in salary.
- EduardoBautista 9y ago
  You want top talent, you have to pay for it. Otherwise they will just go work somewhere else.
Cd00d 9y ago
College president is essentially a sales job, where fundraising is the primary objective. These salaries, while optically horrible, should reflect the success of the president at bulking up the endowment. Like in many industries, a great sales person can often become one of the highest compensated employees, because it's still only a portion of what they generated. I think an important conversation to be having is what are the universities doing with the massive endowments they've built up?
- fastball 9y ago
  This might seem crazy, but I actually think the point of a college president is to ensure that his college is teaching students effectively and for as little expenditure as possible...
  - Hooke 9y ago
    The parent comment makes a fair point in my opinion. The job you're describing is done by the #2 at a university (provost or executive vice chancellor or whatever title they want to use). The president's job is to court 7 and 8 figure donations and to be a symbolic figurehead. Not all of this money is wasted; often the donations go toward supporting research or paying grad student stipends. Administrative bloat is a huge problem at universities but I actually no longer see the presidential salaries as being very objectionable relative to other forms of waste I've seen, like the money spent on stadiums or unnecessary luxury amenities.
    - froindt 9y ago
      Of course it varies by university, but in Iowa the state universities (possibly with the exception of UNI) pay for their athletic programs using no tax dollars. Of course there are still millions donated to athletics which doesn't help the greater student body. If schools didn't have athletic programs, would the donations have been made to the university at large?
  - mercutio2 9y ago
    President, in US academic nomenclature, equals “chief salesman for soliciting donations from rich alumni.” Provost is the term of art for the person responsible for the academics/culture/safety and happiness of students. I didn’t understand this when I was in college (and I was dating a provost’s daughter!), not sure how it would have helped me as a student to have understood this, though.
at-fates-hands 9y ago
I can understand why president's make a lot of money. From the article: The chart-busting payday for Hatch, who has headed up Wake Forest since 2005, was partly from compensation of more than $3 million that came due in 2015 "President Hatch's compensation over the course of his tenure reflects his exceptional leadership," trustee chair Donna Boswell said. The school has raised nearly $800 million under Hatch, she said. So they paid the guy $3 million and got over $800 million back in return while he's the university? As a student or faculty, that would be good news for me. More endowments, better facilities, more scholarships. The one thing I do not understand is how technology has made everything more efficient. How is it education seems to be one of those areas where despite the advances in technology, tuition seems to still go up, certain courses and majors demand more and more course materials, and the debt students have to incur is greater and greater. When I was in college in the mid aughts, they made a huge deal about giving all the students laptops as opposed to having huge computer centers and the millions they were saving by doing so. And yet, every year since then, tuition went up. It's totally baffling to me.
jd007 9y ago
Isn't this just that colleges are paying the market rate for good executives because they want to get talented and experienced people to run them well? Colleges are very complex and are definitely no easier to run than similarly sized companies.
- Glyptodon 9y ago
  I still suspect they could get 90% of the performance at half the price by recruiting differently. And of course, if the return on that extra 10% dwarfs half the salary, of course it makes sense to pay for the extra 10%, too, I suppose.
PatientTrades 9y ago
Endowments should be taxed. How about let some of those billions that major universities are sitting on trickle down to those of use at the bottom? Uni Presidents raking in millions and administration buildings expanding every year. Liberals still some how defend this behavior, its incomprehensible.
bradleyjg 9y ago
These organizations try to have it both ways. On the one hand they go to the government and ask for all kinds of tax benefits on the basis that they are doing good for society, but on the other hand when you ask why their employees make so much money they say that's just how capitalism works. If their own employees aren't willing to sacrifice for their mission, why should the rest of us in the form of tax concessions?
jimhefferon 9y ago
I see people writing who comment about excessive expenses, for instance for fancy facilities. I'm a prof (not in any kind of administrations, though), and when I went to state school in 76 there were non of these things, for sure. But I have been in meetings where the admissions folks say "Prospective students read in US News that they should ask about athletic facilities and ours is significantly worse than our competitors" and the next thing you know we are building a knockout gym. I perfectly understand the decision. (It reminds me of the kind of stuff you read in Jared Diamond's Collapse, where the system globally has problems that everyone can see but locally they are forced to act in the same way as everyone else.)
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  An insane amount of spending is just a dick measuring and box checking competition between schools. They're worried that when some entry level journalist needs to write another top-ten article to meet their quota they won't be on the list and that when some other publication read by college counselors aggregates all those BS lists they won't make the cut. In dining services we'd spread ourselves super thin in order to check boxes and QoS would slide. Then we'd get a bunch of complaints about QoS and cut back. Wash rinse repeat.
deleted 9y ago
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crankylinuxuser 9y ago
As mentioned in a reddit thread(1) of the same article: "Let's see, average amount of student loan debt per graduate is $30k. Student loans are usually a life-altering debt, designed to take decades to pay off. That means for every year this chode gets paid $1M, 33.3 students are stuck with paying off his yearly salary for the next 20 years. " And that's just 1 person. And it's pretty easy to connect the dots to the real problem, being that of administration is the one making the rules now for education, not the faculty and academics. (2) (3) Now, there is an argument that because more regulations and laws are passed, that is why administration is being.. bloated. I'm not so sure how true this is, but is is another factor that does seem to take a part of the whole situation. (4) (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_college_presidents_making_1_million/dr4vzqg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_coll... (2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat-campus-academia-shrinks-students-suffer/ https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat... (3) http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-universities/ http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-univers... (4) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Much-/146641 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Mu...
- kharms 9y ago
  Under his tenure the endowment raised an additional $800,000,000. Assuming a conservative 2% spend-down, that's an additional $16,000,000 per year, forever. If he gets paid $3,00,000 per year, forever that's still $13,000,000 in new money, or using your math - 433 students' tuition.
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    We can show by rising tuition prices the money's going "somewhere". And given administrations stratospheric rise, I'd say it's a safe claim to start looking at the university presidents, the long list of VP's of $stuff, assistant VP's of $more_stuff, the piles of directors... And the list goes on. And I can damn near guarantee that the "433 students tuition" will instead be spent on "Philanthropy" via constructing more buildings. I'm seeing it right now in my town, with skyrocketing rents everywhere, gentrification, and school pricing run amok (wife is trying to get in grad school).
dcole2929 9y ago
To me this issue is basically the same as most other pay discrepancy issues in other fields. It all boils down to directly attributable results. If a college endowment increases by 800 million under a presidents stewardship he can point to that as directly attributable to him. It doesn't mean others didn't assist but it's a very public win for him. It's hard to argue that he doesn't deserve 1% of that. With professors it's hard for them to argue that they are the reason why the college has X number of dollars with any clarity. Unless some alum donates a lot of money and says specifically this is because of this or that teacher it's impossible for them to quantify their worth to the school. Thus admin staff who can do that see their salaries increase commiserate with what they can argue they bring to the school, while the professors who should be more important are left behind. Schools are a business today and that's reflected in their priorities of money > education.
- ataturk 9y ago
  Then they need to start using tuition, room & board, and book prices as a measure of success and not fundraising that never trickles down.
- ihsw2 9y ago
  How do you reconcile that with external effects? Surely a college endowment increases for reasons outside of the college presidents' actions and it is not directly attributable to him/her. If all college endowments grow in lockstep with demographic/economic growth then surely it stands to reason that college endowment growth can be attributed to this. While is foolish to assert that demographic/economic growth is 100% responsible, it is equally foolish to assert that college presidents are 100% responsible for endowment growth.
  - dcole2929 9y ago
    Absolutely, but it's up to the board or whatever functions similarly at a university to make that decision. I'm not laying out an algorithm for president's inflated salary just explaining what i see to be the reasoning behind it. Like most things, compensation isn't a reflection of absolute truth but of what one can argue to be reasonable. I'd imagine you could take the increase in endowment and compare to the average schools increase across the same time period or some other such metrics, if one were so inclined.
ataturk 9y ago
Flies in the face of everything educators say their mission is about. School Superintendents needs their collective wings clipped, too.
marcoperaza 9y ago
Tuition has skyrocketed yet class-size keeps going up and many tenured professorships are in fact being abolished across the country. Where is the money going? To an explosive growth in administrative (ie non-academic) staff. With the government giving out loans to anyone who wishes to attend, colleges have no reason to keep their costs in check. Dartmouth, my alma mater, has about one employee per student. Most of these people do nothing, at best. Many are engaged in running one of the dozen or so administrative departments, one for every kind of minority imaginable, dedicated to indoctrinating students in how much they are oppressed by the white-male patriarchy. Most are just bureaucratic paper pushers who are totally unnecessary. Another chunk is overpaid low-skill laborers who are making several times the market rate in the area, but are unionized and protested (with the support of naive students) when there was an attempt to bring their compensation down slightly. And to be clear, I don’t blame any of these groups for protecting their own interests, I blame the college leadership for not doing what must be done. The college overpays for building projects by whole-number multiples and is generally getting ripped off by contractors. The solution is to limit the amount of federal government student loans per year to a much smaller number. The colleges will kick and scream and complain of "evil [political party]" stealing education from babies' mouths, or something like that. But then they'll quietly start making the tough decisions to cut their ridiculous expenses and bring tuition down.
pmarreck 9y ago
Make college more accessible by providing low-interest financing > college prices rise due to supply and demand > students end up in more and more debt > college presidents (and profs, and the colleges themselves) profit massively. All of these things are direct consequences of each other.
Kevin_S 9y ago
As others have mentioned, the problem is that people don't know what presidents do. Academic decisions are made by provost, the second in command. A president's job is basically only fundraising from mega donors and being at events mega donors are. If they are excellent at that, any president is worth more than $1 million a year. All the rest is peripheral.
CaptSpify 9y ago
The thing that everyone hates the most about schools is the administration. The most expensive part of schools is the administration. Seems pretty obvious to me which part of schools needs slimming down.
En_gr_Student 9y ago
Wrong/weak metrics. A better metric than the max, one that is less susceptible to noise, and more indicative of the trend, is the sum of an upper quantile. A common one is the "top 1%". I would have loved to see a graph of the total remuneration to the top 1% of college leaders (pres and others) by year.
bawana 9y ago
time for colleges and universities to issue IPOs. I want to buy shares in Harvard or Stanford. Certainly the presidents of the schools will be baited with the prospect of EVEN MORE money as their shares hit the stock exchange. Options could be used to attract post graduate students?! By monetizing the sport of education maybe we'll get Americans interested in higher education again? And then the rascals in the bureaucracy will learn to fear the SEC. Schools will become politicized. Campaign contributions will flow to politicians from major universities to foster favorable legislation. I cant wait to see how complicated we can make the lives of our children. Eventually people will choose to stop reproducing, just like in Japan, because of the complexification.

139 points by wyldfire 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago

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LeeHwang 9y ago

This is just offensive. I know so many kids with degrees just struggling under debt and poor job prospects. We need a reformation for universities and their contract with society.

randomdata 9y ago
Why does one take on debt they cannot afford, especially when they lack a good career to help pay for it, in the first place? From the stories I've taken in from people attending college over the years, I suspect it is because they see people like these administrative staff, who will tell you they got there by going to college, making serious amounts of money and are willing to take a chance that they too will become that person in the future. Which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The schools are incentivized to ensure that a small group of college graduates are paid handsomely to make their product look more attractive, and more students taking notice of that attractiveness allows them to pay those people even more. Despite substantial growth in college attainment over the last number of decades, incomes for the general population have remained stagnant and job quality is in decline. That fact is reported in the news almost daily, it feels like. It is no secret that the average person is going to see no workplace gains by going to college, otherwise incomes would be going up and/or job quality would be rising with increasing attainment. It appears to me, however, that some are willing to gamble on the small chance they are the exceptional case that gets the exceptional job (like College President). Ultimately, the colleges are providing what the students want: A perceived chance, albeit small, of significant upward mobility. Until their desires change, it is going to be difficult to change that outward contract.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  > It is no secret that the average person is going to see no workplace gains by going to college, otherwise incomes would be going up and/or job quality would be rising with increasing attainment. Incomes do go up and job quality does rise with increasing educational attainment, and empirically the average person is going to see workplace gains by going to college. People are not going to college solely to gamble on a chance to make million dollar salaries. That's a bizarre outlook that excludes every middle class job that increasingly tends to require a college degree. Hell, most college administrators don't make more than middle class salaries.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    > Incomes do go up and job quality does rise with increasing educational attainment I really don't think this is found in the data. Among the general population, incomes are quite stagnant, and job quality is considered to be falling. At best, it is no better than in the past. With the rising rates of educational attainment, if what you say is true, incomes should be rising along with job quality. That does not appear to be happening. What we do see that those with higher educational attainment are the ones who are more likely to have the higher paying and better jobs, but that is not the same thing as incomes increasing and job quality improving with increased levels of schooling. All that really tells us is that those who have the most difficulty in the workplace (those with mental disabilities, for instance) are also most likely to have less formal education. Which comes as no surprise to, well, anyone. > That's a bizarre outlook that excludes every middle class job that increasingly tends to require a college degree. That is a bizarre outlook. Employers are not a charity to help out those with college debt. Unless the law requires it, employers couldn't care less about where you went to school. And the jobs that do require it by law are vanishingly small. We covered why those with post-secondary educations are more likely to get those better jobs (high achievers tend to be high achievers in everything they do), but that does not mean it is a requirement or is increasing as a requirement. The only thing increasing is the rate of post-secondary attainment, which understandably will result in more and more jobs filled with college graduates. Of course. That's just basic math. > Hell, most college administrators don't make more than middle class salaries. Along with everyone else. Why would you take on that massive debt if you knew you were guaranteed to end up in the same place as you otherwise would? Especially when education is a life-long endeavour. You can always go to college once you have saved up the necessary cash. There is no rush. The only reasonable explanation I see here is that people see the small chance of significantly improving their situation beyond the average middle class person. Which, given the costs of post-secondary education, is a pretty big gamble. There has to be some kind of substantial reward potential given the high stakes. Not just another middle class lifestyle like almost everyone else in the country. That would never justify the costs.

ddorian43 9y ago

Trickle down from the administrate & sports facilites. Also, what do universities do with $1B ?

_acme 9y ago
Schools don't generally spend their endowments; what they do is use the profits (if any) from investing the endowment to fund the school's budget (academic and otherwise), because tuition alone doesn't nearly cover the cost of operating a college let alone a university.

paultopia 9y ago

Forget about the presidents. At least they have a real job. What about the football coaches, who make really obscene amounts? This article lists a ton of state school coaches making way the hell more than any president. http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/17892134/michigan-wolverines-coach-jim-harbaugh-salary-tops-list-college-football-coaches http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/17892134/mic...

distances 9y ago
Sports clubs should be separated from schools and universities. I've got no idea why they are bundled together.
- omegaham 9y ago
  Because the university affiliation turns minor league football / basketball into national television and gets people to spend millions of dollars on tickets and merchandise. No one watches the NBA D-league, but they're happy to watch the Tar Heels play. Similarly, no one watches arena ball, but they're happy to fill the stadium and watch Oregon State lose every week. It also serves as extremely effective advertising for the university. The fact "Bama Bama Bama, Bama Bama Bama Bama, Bama Bama Bama" is a valid sentence on ESPN week in and week out adds up to weeks of coast-to-coast advertising for Alabama, and enrollment statistics reflect.
  - gbacon 9y ago
    Roll Tide to that.
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    But they are advertising the wrong thing. A university is supposed to engage in teaching and research, not sports. They can keep their Street Fighting Math and Integration Bee teams, but football needs to go, it gives the students and the public the wrong idea.
    - 9y ago

bmcusick 9y ago

I hope everyone's in on the joke that "non-profit" just means that someone other than a class of people called "shareholders" siphons off all the profits. It doesn't mean "low cost".

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
Non-profit + government money + charity has honestly been some of the most wasteful spending I've ever seen (as a developer, not as an accountant). And I don't imagine humans are that different between healthcare and education industries.
chasing 9y ago
That's a very pejorative and mostly inaccurate way of putting it. "Non-profit" doesn't mean people can't earn good money -- it means the organization exists for a purpose other than profit and, therefore, gets some tax breaks. Most people I know who work in non-profits are paid below-market for their skills.
- geofft 9y ago
  > Most people I know who work in non-profits are paid below-market for their skills. This is true, but orthogonal - the complaint is about how much the bosses make, not how much the workers make.
  - cmiles74 9y ago
    And the fact that they are using their non-profit status as an excuse to pay their employees less than market value, while the executive suite cashes huge check,s is deplorable.
    - chasing 9y ago
      No, non-profits tend to underpay simply because they often have less money. Well-funded non-profits probably pay at-market rates. Or higher.
- 9y ago

kenjinp 9y ago

This is unsurprising, as those of you who have read "Dictators Handbook" will remember, college campuses are organizations governed by leaders with small constituencies and sort of mathematically lead to crony-ism and big payouts for supporters. The system is set up to incentivize this behavior, and the universities need to be reorganized to achieve any other outcome.

jdlyga 9y ago

Huge fan of Georgia Tech's online masters program. It's in the top 10 graduate computer science programs in the world, and it's the same curriculum and same degree that you would get on campus. But the total cost of the program is around $7,000 dollars. Their reasoning? You don't pay for the stadium, the student fitness center, career advisers, etc. You only have to pay for the cost of the online program, professors, and TA's.

mr337 9y ago
My comp sci building was the worst building out on the campus. We did get brand new rec centers and redid sports complexes for the fun of it. The irony is the university still calls for alumni donations.......
- beamatronic 9y ago
  More than one university with a $1B endowment fund still asks for donations too.
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
    Non-profits are just like any other corporation in terms of how much revenue they want: the just want more. A company can imagine more ways to invest and make more. A non profit can think of many more things to do in keeping with its mission. Whether that's expanding a school or making the school nicer. The demand for funds in insatiable, regardless of whom.
  - _acme 9y ago
    All schools with greater than $1b endowments still ask for donations. What school doesn't ask for donations?
exhilaration 9y ago
FWIW Georgia Tech's online masters program has been discussed several times on Hacker News and the feedback was pretty negative. EDIT: Comments below have corrected my recollection, previous discussions were mixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263

crimsonalucard 9y ago

If those presidents aren't paid that level of salary how will students learn? Students need a great university leader in order to guide them on how to learn. Also how will researchers produce science without a powerful leader pointing the way? Its like my boss, if my boss wasn't paid to sit in a chair all day to tell me to program an entire operating system, how would i be able to do it? I'd be lost without a great leader. We need to pay these leaders 5 million dollars because of the great talent they have in telling other people what to do.

junkscience2017 9y ago

the ongoing hypocrisy of luxury resorts draining the wealth of a generation so professors can espouse socialism is an important, if not essential facet of our Hunger Games world at Stanford, a blade of grass cannot deviate by a millimeter, yet the professors decry capitalism

ch4s3 9y ago
I think you're being downvoted because the ideology espoused by professors at Stanford has very little to do with spending on administration and facilities which drive costs.
- dominotw 9y ago
  > ideology espoused by professors at Stanford Would it be appropriate if the comment said "ideology espoused by college presidents" . Here is OSU presidents who make around 3 mil giving a speech about how little people at lower levels get paid. http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/dr-michael-v-drake-delivers-wusm-homer-g-phillips-lecture/article_ad079520-3c47-11e3-a32a-001a4bcf887a.html http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/dr-michael-v-drak...

rdtsc 9y ago

I remember my tuition rising sharply while the school was building things like a new rec center with a large pool and a lazy river. (Yes, I think there is obvious irony there installing a lazy river on a college campus and making students take 6 figure loans to pay for it). In the meantime the evening college which had people trying their hardest to work and go to school was strapped for funds, couldn't afford printer paper and was printing exams double sided in a tiny font.

Retric 9y ago
Students are free to go to less expensive schools. However, as long as people underestimate debt, spending more to attract more students is simply rational behavior.
- barrkel 9y ago
  You say that people underestimate debt, but it goes the other way too. My experience as a poor child growing up was that I could see no way to afford university fees, because the numbers looked too big. Loans wouldn't make a difference because I couldn't comprehend the subjective experience of making so much more money later in my career. Thankfully, college fees were abolished in my country (Ireland) in 1996. It enabled me personally to envision going to college where I couldn't before.
  - pdxandi 9y ago
    I had the same experience. I knew I was covering my college tuition and even in 2000, I couldn't understand how I could ever afford out of state tuition and room and board. I had near perfect grades and solid test scores, but the financial obligation scared the hell out of me and I had no idea private schools handed out big scholarships for good students. I ended up staying in town and going to my local state college and had a good experience, but I completely missed out on the prospect of going to a top university where I would meet other ambitious and curious people. I worked part-time to full-time for four years to pay for my tuition, and it was tough. I wish I could've been immersed in college and academia and even college-life, but the cost just felt like a huge barrier when I was 18 years old. TL;DR: I fear poorer people may be more afraid to attend college because of the costs, causing an even greater gap between the haves and have-nots.

awinder 9y ago

Reminder: big banks were giving out 1M+ bonuses to traders / c-suite executives in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, while being bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of trillions. We're now re-tooling the entire tax code to give them more money, but we're gonna crack the whip because of 58 -- thats fifty-eight -- college heads making over 1M in salary.

EduardoBautista 9y ago
You want top talent, you have to pay for it. Otherwise they will just go work somewhere else.

Cd00d 9y ago

College president is essentially a sales job, where fundraising is the primary objective. These salaries, while optically horrible, should reflect the success of the president at bulking up the endowment. Like in many industries, a great sales person can often become one of the highest compensated employees, because it's still only a portion of what they generated. I think an important conversation to be having is what are the universities doing with the massive endowments they've built up?

fastball 9y ago
This might seem crazy, but I actually think the point of a college president is to ensure that his college is teaching students effectively and for as little expenditure as possible...
- Hooke 9y ago
  The parent comment makes a fair point in my opinion. The job you're describing is done by the #2 at a university (provost or executive vice chancellor or whatever title they want to use). The president's job is to court 7 and 8 figure donations and to be a symbolic figurehead. Not all of this money is wasted; often the donations go toward supporting research or paying grad student stipends. Administrative bloat is a huge problem at universities but I actually no longer see the presidential salaries as being very objectionable relative to other forms of waste I've seen, like the money spent on stadiums or unnecessary luxury amenities.
  - froindt 9y ago
    Of course it varies by university, but in Iowa the state universities (possibly with the exception of UNI) pay for their athletic programs using no tax dollars. Of course there are still millions donated to athletics which doesn't help the greater student body. If schools didn't have athletic programs, would the donations have been made to the university at large?
- mercutio2 9y ago
  President, in US academic nomenclature, equals “chief salesman for soliciting donations from rich alumni.” Provost is the term of art for the person responsible for the academics/culture/safety and happiness of students. I didn’t understand this when I was in college (and I was dating a provost’s daughter!), not sure how it would have helped me as a student to have understood this, though.

at-fates-hands 9y ago

I can understand why president's make a lot of money. From the article: The chart-busting payday for Hatch, who has headed up Wake Forest since 2005, was partly from compensation of more than $3 million that came due in 2015 "President Hatch's compensation over the course of his tenure reflects his exceptional leadership," trustee chair Donna Boswell said. The school has raised nearly $800 million under Hatch, she said. So they paid the guy $3 million and got over $800 million back in return while he's the university? As a student or faculty, that would be good news for me. More endowments, better facilities, more scholarships. The one thing I do not understand is how technology has made everything more efficient. How is it education seems to be one of those areas where despite the advances in technology, tuition seems to still go up, certain courses and majors demand more and more course materials, and the debt students have to incur is greater and greater. When I was in college in the mid aughts, they made a huge deal about giving all the students laptops as opposed to having huge computer centers and the millions they were saving by doing so. And yet, every year since then, tuition went up. It's totally baffling to me.

jd007 9y ago

Isn't this just that colleges are paying the market rate for good executives because they want to get talented and experienced people to run them well? Colleges are very complex and are definitely no easier to run than similarly sized companies.

Glyptodon 9y ago
I still suspect they could get 90% of the performance at half the price by recruiting differently. And of course, if the return on that extra 10% dwarfs half the salary, of course it makes sense to pay for the extra 10%, too, I suppose.

PatientTrades 9y ago

Endowments should be taxed. How about let some of those billions that major universities are sitting on trickle down to those of use at the bottom? Uni Presidents raking in millions and administration buildings expanding every year. Liberals still some how defend this behavior, its incomprehensible.

bradleyjg 9y ago

These organizations try to have it both ways. On the one hand they go to the government and ask for all kinds of tax benefits on the basis that they are doing good for society, but on the other hand when you ask why their employees make so much money they say that's just how capitalism works. If their own employees aren't willing to sacrifice for their mission, why should the rest of us in the form of tax concessions?

jimhefferon 9y ago

I see people writing who comment about excessive expenses, for instance for fancy facilities. I'm a prof (not in any kind of administrations, though), and when I went to state school in 76 there were non of these things, for sure. But I have been in meetings where the admissions folks say "Prospective students read in US News that they should ask about athletic facilities and ours is significantly worse than our competitors" and the next thing you know we are building a knockout gym. I perfectly understand the decision. (It reminds me of the kind of stuff you read in Jared Diamond's Collapse, where the system globally has problems that everyone can see but locally they are forced to act in the same way as everyone else.)

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
An insane amount of spending is just a dick measuring and box checking competition between schools. They're worried that when some entry level journalist needs to write another top-ten article to meet their quota they won't be on the list and that when some other publication read by college counselors aggregates all those BS lists they won't make the cut. In dining services we'd spread ourselves super thin in order to check boxes and QoS would slide. Then we'd get a bunch of complaints about QoS and cut back. Wash rinse repeat.

deleted 9y ago

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crankylinuxuser 9y ago

As mentioned in a reddit thread(1) of the same article: "Let's see, average amount of student loan debt per graduate is $30k. Student loans are usually a life-altering debt, designed to take decades to pay off. That means for every year this chode gets paid $1M, 33.3 students are stuck with paying off his yearly salary for the next 20 years. " And that's just 1 person. And it's pretty easy to connect the dots to the real problem, being that of administration is the one making the rules now for education, not the faculty and academics. (2) (3) Now, there is an argument that because more regulations and laws are passed, that is why administration is being.. bloated. I'm not so sure how true this is, but is is another factor that does seem to take a part of the whole situation. (4) (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_college_presidents_making_1_million/dr4vzqg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_coll... (2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat-campus-academia-shrinks-students-suffer/ https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat... (3) http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-universities/ http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-univers... (4) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Much-/146641 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Mu...

kharms 9y ago
Under his tenure the endowment raised an additional $800,000,000. Assuming a conservative 2% spend-down, that's an additional $16,000,000 per year, forever. If he gets paid $3,00,000 per year, forever that's still $13,000,000 in new money, or using your math - 433 students' tuition.
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  We can show by rising tuition prices the money's going "somewhere". And given administrations stratospheric rise, I'd say it's a safe claim to start looking at the university presidents, the long list of VP's of $stuff, assistant VP's of $more_stuff, the piles of directors... And the list goes on. And I can damn near guarantee that the "433 students tuition" will instead be spent on "Philanthropy" via constructing more buildings. I'm seeing it right now in my town, with skyrocketing rents everywhere, gentrification, and school pricing run amok (wife is trying to get in grad school).

dcole2929 9y ago

To me this issue is basically the same as most other pay discrepancy issues in other fields. It all boils down to directly attributable results. If a college endowment increases by 800 million under a presidents stewardship he can point to that as directly attributable to him. It doesn't mean others didn't assist but it's a very public win for him. It's hard to argue that he doesn't deserve 1% of that. With professors it's hard for them to argue that they are the reason why the college has X number of dollars with any clarity. Unless some alum donates a lot of money and says specifically this is because of this or that teacher it's impossible for them to quantify their worth to the school. Thus admin staff who can do that see their salaries increase commiserate with what they can argue they bring to the school, while the professors who should be more important are left behind. Schools are a business today and that's reflected in their priorities of money > education.

ataturk 9y ago
Then they need to start using tuition, room & board, and book prices as a measure of success and not fundraising that never trickles down.
ihsw2 9y ago
How do you reconcile that with external effects? Surely a college endowment increases for reasons outside of the college presidents' actions and it is not directly attributable to him/her. If all college endowments grow in lockstep with demographic/economic growth then surely it stands to reason that college endowment growth can be attributed to this. While is foolish to assert that demographic/economic growth is 100% responsible, it is equally foolish to assert that college presidents are 100% responsible for endowment growth.
- dcole2929 9y ago
  Absolutely, but it's up to the board or whatever functions similarly at a university to make that decision. I'm not laying out an algorithm for president's inflated salary just explaining what i see to be the reasoning behind it. Like most things, compensation isn't a reflection of absolute truth but of what one can argue to be reasonable. I'd imagine you could take the increase in endowment and compare to the average schools increase across the same time period or some other such metrics, if one were so inclined.

ataturk 9y ago

Flies in the face of everything educators say their mission is about. School Superintendents needs their collective wings clipped, too.

marcoperaza 9y ago

Tuition has skyrocketed yet class-size keeps going up and many tenured professorships are in fact being abolished across the country. Where is the money going? To an explosive growth in administrative (ie non-academic) staff. With the government giving out loans to anyone who wishes to attend, colleges have no reason to keep their costs in check. Dartmouth, my alma mater, has about one employee per student. Most of these people do nothing, at best. Many are engaged in running one of the dozen or so administrative departments, one for every kind of minority imaginable, dedicated to indoctrinating students in how much they are oppressed by the white-male patriarchy. Most are just bureaucratic paper pushers who are totally unnecessary. Another chunk is overpaid low-skill laborers who are making several times the market rate in the area, but are unionized and protested (with the support of naive students) when there was an attempt to bring their compensation down slightly. And to be clear, I don’t blame any of these groups for protecting their own interests, I blame the college leadership for not doing what must be done. The college overpays for building projects by whole-number multiples and is generally getting ripped off by contractors. The solution is to limit the amount of federal government student loans per year to a much smaller number. The colleges will kick and scream and complain of "evil [political party]" stealing education from babies' mouths, or something like that. But then they'll quietly start making the tough decisions to cut their ridiculous expenses and bring tuition down.

pmarreck 9y ago

Make college more accessible by providing low-interest financing > college prices rise due to supply and demand > students end up in more and more debt > college presidents (and profs, and the colleges themselves) profit massively. All of these things are direct consequences of each other.

Kevin_S 9y ago

As others have mentioned, the problem is that people don't know what presidents do. Academic decisions are made by provost, the second in command. A president's job is basically only fundraising from mega donors and being at events mega donors are. If they are excellent at that, any president is worth more than $1 million a year. All the rest is peripheral.

CaptSpify 9y ago

The thing that everyone hates the most about schools is the administration. The most expensive part of schools is the administration. Seems pretty obvious to me which part of schools needs slimming down.

En_gr_Student 9y ago

Wrong/weak metrics. A better metric than the max, one that is less susceptible to noise, and more indicative of the trend, is the sum of an upper quantile. A common one is the "top 1%". I would have loved to see a graph of the total remuneration to the top 1% of college leaders (pres and others) by year.

bawana 9y ago

time for colleges and universities to issue IPOs. I want to buy shares in Harvard or Stanford. Certainly the presidents of the schools will be baited with the prospect of EVEN MORE money as their shares hit the stock exchange. Options could be used to attract post graduate students?! By monetizing the sport of education maybe we'll get Americans interested in higher education again? And then the rascals in the bureaucracy will learn to fear the SEC. Schools will become politicized. Campaign contributions will flow to politicians from major universities to foster favorable legislation. I cant wait to see how complicated we can make the lives of our children. Eventually people will choose to stop reproducing, just like in Japan, because of the complexification.