10 ms·

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. Th

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing. It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can. Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.

moneywoes 6y ago
Is it private or public
- whyhow 6y ago
  It's probably public since he knows their salaries. you can get a hold of most college employee salaries through state ran databases.
  - jhart99 6y ago
    You can also pull salaries of key personnel for non-profits from their tax forms which covers manu(most) private universities.
vmchale 6y ago
If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators. I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.
- jdkee 6y ago
  In the telecom industry we had an adage, “Always cut staff before line.” Staff were overhead but line produced revenue. The same applies to teaching but it is not in the self-interest of administrators to cut staff. They will soon find out the truth.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers. To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.
  - hagy 6y ago
    To a large extent, anyone can already get access to the top university lectures in the world for a range of subjects already. Since top universities, chiefly MIT, have been recording and publicly sharing full-course classroom lectures for years. I think this shows that students care about more than just the lectures.
xiaolingxiao 6y ago
which college is this, if you don't mind me asking? I mean the dean of HR is making 1million ...
- cjmaria 6y ago
  This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.
  - francis_t_catte 6y ago
    It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was: $945,000 in salary $276,474 in bonuses $31,874 in nontaxable benefits $5.8 million in deferred compensation plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :| p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer_Polytechnic_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer...
      - swimfar 6y ago
        A 2015 Time Magazine article cited Jackson as the highest-paid college president ... for a stunning $7.1 million in total. That works out to more than $1,000 per student at her school".
    - sct202 6y ago
      That's pretty ridiculous considering that RPI's endowment isn't that big, so it's not like she could justify from fundraising.
  - ben7799 6y ago
    Bingo.. I wrote the original post, I went to RPI. Dr. Jackson started the spring of my senior year.
Ididntdothis 6y ago
Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off. The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Yea we really need to buck this trend, if anything we should be using city resources to prop up people affected by COVID so the cities economics don't collapse.
- chriskanan 6y ago
  There was a post a day or two ago about how remote work makes it harder for people to value employees except as utilities, whereas if they work closely they value them more. Top administrators are in charge of who gets cut, and they probably interact with other admins the most or rely on them personally for some task, so they are most sensitive to laying them off versus park staff (or faculty) who they don't interact with often, if at all. They aren't visible.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    This alienation is what will cause more and more problems for society. It used to be nobility that had no idea of the lives of regular people. Now it’s the managerial and investor class who are losing touch with the rest of society by contracting out things, offshoring and reducing everything to simple numbers.
zbrozek 6y ago
It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat condensing out of the ether who needed to be appeased. No meant no, but a yes was never enough. To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action. It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vkou 6y ago
  > Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value. When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount. All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people. It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.
  - 6y ago
zxcvvcxz 6y ago
Institutions that earn money without creating enough real productivity attract parasites.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Same thing happened to hospitals.
xsc 6y ago
Name the school, no need to defend the guilty.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  We can have a discussion without the pitchforks I this forum.
yoyohello13 6y ago
I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere. The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.
- onemoresoop 6y ago
  Yeah, hope this is clear that this is not happening everywhere. However, where it’s happening it should be exposed.
- GillBates666 6y ago
  Thank you for your comment. That really fixed my perspective and calmed be down a bit. I'm a sucker for ragebait lol.
- justatestttt 6y ago
  That makes your school an outlier. You have to go down 502 schools on this list before you run into a leader that makes less than 200k/year. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensation#id=table_private_2017 https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...
  - yoyohello13 6y ago
    You seem to be looking at private schools which are going to pay higher, I’m talking about public. Also that dataset is not at all representative. In fact, it seems to skew high. Of the 9 big schools in my state, only 2 are listed and they are the 2 biggest. The biggest, wealthiest schools have higher paid executives. Of all the public schools in the country mine is probably a little below the median.
enitihas 6y ago
If you haven't watched "Yes Minister", give it a try. It is a very good satire on beaurecracy.
- lstodd 6y ago
  If only it was a satire. It is as an accurate depiction as you might wish for. EDIT: the reality is worse.
  - bambataa 6y ago
    The Thick of It is far more accurate.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
Those who want to learn more about the alumni complaints can go to this web site: https://renewrensselaer.org/ https://renewrensselaer.org/ It's really sad the plunder.
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  I attended RPI and recently had to recommend to a friend that they not send their child there. It made me sad. But the way the administration, and Shirley in particular, have been treating the students and the school has been so horrible.
mnm1 6y ago
> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping. This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US. Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.
- jboog 6y ago
  I agree with the thrust of your argument but my flagship state university is still affordable for anyone. It's not cheap, but in state tuition even if you pay sticker isn't so high you can't pay it off in a reasonable amount of time (in state tuition is ~$9k). It's a great university too (UNC) so part of the way they keep tuition for in state cheap is out of state students pay almost as much as private school tuition and there's a ton of OOS willing to pay it. Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment. Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)
bedhesd 6y ago
Maybe international students have begun to replace donations from alumni, so the university sees its alumni as more of a product than a relationship
austinl 6y ago
Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!
- gumby 6y ago
  I learned (when MIT shut down my former dorm) that they track the six year graduation rate (doubt anyone is attending all of the six years). That seems more sensible.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    When I was in college, there was one (only 1) student who took 6 years to graduate. Students passing by him would often mumble "7 years of college, down the drain!" (I won't spoil the joke, google it!) As I recall, only a small handful took 5 years. This drifting along failing to graduate seems to be a modern phenomenon.
    - gumby 6y ago
      I was class of 1986, graduated 1988 (though TBF I had a full time job in another part of the country for my last two years so taking classes was...complicated). This is undergrads, I know of a grad student who took 13 years (and three theses he refused to submit) until they handed him a PhD and showed him the door. Obviously in his case he didn't lack brains, just had a longstanding psychological issue. Even for those who get doctorates, outside a small number of fields (e.g. CS) there's a long, soul-killing gantlet of post docs and RAs before either a position is obtained or you give up.
mac01021 6y ago
Can someone explain to me the economics driving salaries for presidents of public/nonprofit universities up to $500k-$1M? Are the people in these positions in possession of a skill that non of the people who would gladly hold the post for $150k have? What is it? They're hired by a board of regents, right? What is the BOR looking for that they value so highly?
- darwinwhy 6y ago
  College presidents/chancellors don't do as much administrating as they do fundraising from alumni and donors. This is more true the higher up in university prestige you go. The amount of value they bring in from donor contributions far outweighs their salaried cost.
  - hagy 6y ago
    Exactly. University presidents easily pay for their salary many times over just through their fundraising activities. Presidents aren't chosen for their administrative prowess, but instead for their professional network and informal connections. Further, most people that could serve as president could easily draw a much larger salary in the private sector and many were formally C-level executives at larger companies where were paid such a salary. For them, becoming a university president is more about prestigious and service to an institute they value than it is about maximizing compensation. I think the problem to focus on is the large and ever growing number of administrators and staffers throughout universities. One stat that always makes my eyes bulge is that while student enrollment and professors have both grown by about 50% between 1970 and 2010, yet the number of administrators have grown by 85% and administrative staffers grew by 240%! [0] If anything, administrators and staff should've decreased due to productivity improvements from technology. There is so much fat to be cut from administrative ranks. [0] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administrators-ate-my-tuition/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administ...
    - lumost 6y ago
      No one works in a vaccuum. If students and alumni are paying for prestige, then you need staff to ensure the prestige is maintained and grown. However if students and alumni are paying/investing in education you may need significantly less staff and more professors/teachers. If you add the staff that a university president brings in to the payroll is the 5 million dollar/year president actually worth more than the 500k/year president?
ineedasername 6y ago
From personal experience in the industry right now, this is not the case at all institutions. I certainly haven't done a survey, but I know of a few that have been very equitable in their refund policy.

moneywoes 6y ago

Is it private or public

whyhow 6y ago
It's probably public since he knows their salaries. you can get a hold of most college employee salaries through state ran databases.
- jhart99 6y ago
  You can also pull salaries of key personnel for non-profits from their tax forms which covers manu(most) private universities.

vmchale 6y ago

If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators. I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.

jdkee 6y ago
In the telecom industry we had an adage, “Always cut staff before line.” Staff were overhead but line produced revenue. The same applies to teaching but it is not in the self-interest of administrators to cut staff. They will soon find out the truth.
PeterisP 6y ago
The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers. To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.
- hagy 6y ago
  To a large extent, anyone can already get access to the top university lectures in the world for a range of subjects already. Since top universities, chiefly MIT, have been recording and publicly sharing full-course classroom lectures for years. I think this shows that students care about more than just the lectures.

xiaolingxiao 6y ago

which college is this, if you don't mind me asking? I mean the dean of HR is making 1million ...

cjmaria 6y ago
This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.
- francis_t_catte 6y ago
  It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was: $945,000 in salary $276,474 in bonuses $31,874 in nontaxable benefits $5.8 million in deferred compensation plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :| p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer_Polytechnic_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer...
    - swimfar 6y ago
      A 2015 Time Magazine article cited Jackson as the highest-paid college president ... for a stunning $7.1 million in total. That works out to more than $1,000 per student at her school".
  - sct202 6y ago
    That's pretty ridiculous considering that RPI's endowment isn't that big, so it's not like she could justify from fundraising.
- ben7799 6y ago
  Bingo.. I wrote the original post, I went to RPI. Dr. Jackson started the spring of my senior year.

Ididntdothis 6y ago

Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off. The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.

Avicebron 6y ago
Yea we really need to buck this trend, if anything we should be using city resources to prop up people affected by COVID so the cities economics don't collapse.
chriskanan 6y ago
There was a post a day or two ago about how remote work makes it harder for people to value employees except as utilities, whereas if they work closely they value them more. Top administrators are in charge of who gets cut, and they probably interact with other admins the most or rely on them personally for some task, so they are most sensitive to laying them off versus park staff (or faculty) who they don't interact with often, if at all. They aren't visible.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  This alienation is what will cause more and more problems for society. It used to be nobility that had no idea of the lives of regular people. Now it’s the managerial and investor class who are losing touch with the rest of society by contracting out things, offshoring and reducing everything to simple numbers.

zbrozek 6y ago

It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat condensing out of the ether who needed to be appeased. No meant no, but a yes was never enough. To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action. It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vkou 6y ago
> Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value. When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount. All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people. It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.
- 6y ago

zxcvvcxz 6y ago

Institutions that earn money without creating enough real productivity attract parasites.

heavyset_go 6y ago

Same thing happened to hospitals.

xsc 6y ago

Name the school, no need to defend the guilty.

TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
We can have a discussion without the pitchforks I this forum.

yoyohello13 6y ago

I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere. The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.

onemoresoop 6y ago
Yeah, hope this is clear that this is not happening everywhere. However, where it’s happening it should be exposed.
GillBates666 6y ago
Thank you for your comment. That really fixed my perspective and calmed be down a bit. I'm a sucker for ragebait lol.
justatestttt 6y ago
That makes your school an outlier. You have to go down 502 schools on this list before you run into a leader that makes less than 200k/year. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensation#id=table_private_2017 https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...
- yoyohello13 6y ago
  You seem to be looking at private schools which are going to pay higher, I’m talking about public. Also that dataset is not at all representative. In fact, it seems to skew high. Of the 9 big schools in my state, only 2 are listed and they are the 2 biggest. The biggest, wealthiest schools have higher paid executives. Of all the public schools in the country mine is probably a little below the median.

enitihas 6y ago

If you haven't watched "Yes Minister", give it a try. It is a very good satire on beaurecracy.

lstodd 6y ago
If only it was a satire. It is as an accurate depiction as you might wish for. EDIT: the reality is worse.
- bambataa 6y ago
  The Thick of It is far more accurate.

xhkkffbf 6y ago

Those who want to learn more about the alumni complaints can go to this web site: https://renewrensselaer.org/ https://renewrensselaer.org/ It's really sad the plunder.

RHSeeger 6y ago
I attended RPI and recently had to recommend to a friend that they not send their child there. It made me sad. But the way the administration, and Shirley in particular, have been treating the students and the school has been so horrible.

mnm1 6y ago

> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping. This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US. Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.

jboog 6y ago
I agree with the thrust of your argument but my flagship state university is still affordable for anyone. It's not cheap, but in state tuition even if you pay sticker isn't so high you can't pay it off in a reasonable amount of time (in state tuition is ~$9k). It's a great university too (UNC) so part of the way they keep tuition for in state cheap is out of state students pay almost as much as private school tuition and there's a ton of OOS willing to pay it. Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment. Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)

bedhesd 6y ago

Maybe international students have begun to replace donations from alumni, so the university sees its alumni as more of a product than a relationship

austinl 6y ago

Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!

gumby 6y ago
I learned (when MIT shut down my former dorm) that they track the six year graduation rate (doubt anyone is attending all of the six years). That seems more sensible.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  When I was in college, there was one (only 1) student who took 6 years to graduate. Students passing by him would often mumble "7 years of college, down the drain!" (I won't spoil the joke, google it!) As I recall, only a small handful took 5 years. This drifting along failing to graduate seems to be a modern phenomenon.
  - gumby 6y ago
    I was class of 1986, graduated 1988 (though TBF I had a full time job in another part of the country for my last two years so taking classes was...complicated). This is undergrads, I know of a grad student who took 13 years (and three theses he refused to submit) until they handed him a PhD and showed him the door. Obviously in his case he didn't lack brains, just had a longstanding psychological issue. Even for those who get doctorates, outside a small number of fields (e.g. CS) there's a long, soul-killing gantlet of post docs and RAs before either a position is obtained or you give up.

mac01021 6y ago

Can someone explain to me the economics driving salaries for presidents of public/nonprofit universities up to $500k-$1M? Are the people in these positions in possession of a skill that non of the people who would gladly hold the post for $150k have? What is it? They're hired by a board of regents, right? What is the BOR looking for that they value so highly?

darwinwhy 6y ago
College presidents/chancellors don't do as much administrating as they do fundraising from alumni and donors. This is more true the higher up in university prestige you go. The amount of value they bring in from donor contributions far outweighs their salaried cost.
- hagy 6y ago
  Exactly. University presidents easily pay for their salary many times over just through their fundraising activities. Presidents aren't chosen for their administrative prowess, but instead for their professional network and informal connections. Further, most people that could serve as president could easily draw a much larger salary in the private sector and many were formally C-level executives at larger companies where were paid such a salary. For them, becoming a university president is more about prestigious and service to an institute they value than it is about maximizing compensation. I think the problem to focus on is the large and ever growing number of administrators and staffers throughout universities. One stat that always makes my eyes bulge is that while student enrollment and professors have both grown by about 50% between 1970 and 2010, yet the number of administrators have grown by 85% and administrative staffers grew by 240%! [0] If anything, administrators and staff should've decreased due to productivity improvements from technology. There is so much fat to be cut from administrative ranks. [0] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administrators-ate-my-tuition/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administ...
  - lumost 6y ago
    No one works in a vaccuum. If students and alumni are paying for prestige, then you need staff to ensure the prestige is maintained and grown. However if students and alumni are paying/investing in education you may need significantly less staff and more professors/teachers. If you add the staff that a university president brings in to the payroll is the 5 million dollar/year president actually worth more than the 500k/year president?

ineedasername 6y ago

From personal experience in the industry right now, this is not the case at all institutions. I certainly haven't done a survey, but I know of a few that have been very equitable in their refund policy.