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Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money

Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?

moduspol 7y ago
I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
- pirocks 7y ago
  On the case of California all the salaries of public employees aka. University of California employees are public, Googleable information.
- klipt 7y ago
  > Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
  - moduspol 7y ago
    It's not really reasonable to compare a residential ISP to one for a college campus. It probably is cheaper if you count only the Internet service itself, but everything between that ISP and each end user's device has significant fixed and maintenance / upgrade costs attached. Your residential ISP can give you an all-in-one modem / WiFI router and you're good to go.

Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?

moduspol 7y ago

I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.

pirocks 7y ago
On the case of California all the salaries of public employees aka. University of California employees are public, Googleable information.
klipt 7y ago
> Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
- moduspol 7y ago
  It's not really reasonable to compare a residential ISP to one for a college campus. It probably is cheaper if you count only the Internet service itself, but everything between that ISP and each end user's device has significant fixed and maintenance / upgrade costs attached. Your residential ISP can give you an all-in-one modem / WiFI router and you're good to go.