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Both are well-grounded in reality. Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school

Both are well-grounded in reality. Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students, that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student. But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries. And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need money. It seems like a win-win-win all around. But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings, faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal financial controls of grants and donations.

ghaff 6y ago
>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student. Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades. Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow. It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.

ghaff 6y ago

>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student. Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades. Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow. It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.