6 ms·

A coach is probably the highest-paid public employee in your (US) state

27 points by soundsop 13y ago

magic_man 13y ago
A coach probably brings more revenue into your school than any other employee.
- jofer 13y ago
  Typically, it's only into the athletic department, though. At least at the big state schools I've been at, money from athletics/merchandizing/etc goes to athletics and only athletics. Beyond paying for athlete's education, etc, the money isn't going back into education in any direct way. However, the coach's salary is typically paid out of the athletic revenue stream, not directly from state funds, which makes it a bit of a moot point. (Note: To the best of my knowledge (which isn't much) this holds for Univ. of TN, Univ. of AL, and Univ. of WI. It's probably different at many other schools.) Of course, all that having been said, the popular sports entirely fund all of the less popular, but still very meaningful athletic programs. There's also a _lot_ to be said for the secondary effects of having a popular sports team on the overall prestige and income of a university.
  - dman 13y ago
    I never got the link between sports programs and academic prestige.
    - slg 13y ago
      It is basically a marketing expense. There are countless reports of applications going up due to a successful sports team. When applications go up, a school can be more selective and choose better students. More selectiveness and better students will lead to a higher academic prestige. Basically anything that makes a school more attractive will eventually help bolster academic prestige.
    - jofer 13y ago
      Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as well. However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their undergraduate program based partly on the football team.
      - ry0ohki 13y ago
        I chose my school partly because I followed the basketball team as a kid. It's free marketing. I never heard of half of the small division III schools in my area, but all of the big state schools were on my radar because of sports.
        eurleif 13y ago
        >It's free marketing. Expensive marketing.
        pitt1980 13y ago
        that's a big chunk of everything, when you buy a pop out of the machine, what fraction of what your paying for is raw material + production cost and what percentage is so the can pay for superbowl ads so the next time you're thirsty their brand is the first the pops into your head?
      - bryanbuckley 13y ago
        where you go for undergraduate engineering isn't that big of a deal, right? In my case I said no to a top 10 engineering undergraduate school offering some scholarship and yes to the University of Alabama which was my grandad/dad's alma mater and thus our football team, an in-state school with cheaper tuition offering a lot of scholarship, and not Auburn University which had a slightly better engineering program rank but were UofA rivals. Had a _great_ uni experience and would make the same choice every time. Had no trouble getting a job in a large company as a kernel developer straight from uni. Sure maybe doing MIT or Stanford I could have been a HVT for ~Google or I would have been in an impromptu startup by junior year.. but those student ticket prices!!! Roll Tide. Still fly back a few times per season to go to games.
    - ISL 13y ago
      When the Virginia Tech football team made it big, the average incoming SAT score increased markedly. A quick look for historical data failed, but if you can find the data, the big shift should have occurred with the class matriculating in 1994±1. Correlation is not causation, but it's not implausible that notability in athletics can have sympathetic effects for funding and student quality. If only there were a daily 'Science' section in the newspaper to go alongside 'Sports'....
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - pitt1980 13y ago
    the accounting that goes into whether a sports program is profitable or not is sort of tricky scholarships are counted at the full tuition rate its obvious that the marginal cost of educating 80 some football players isn't 0, but its not obvious that its the full tuition rate a sizeable chunk of students are offered some sort of financial package to attend a university, some non zero percentage of football players come from low income situations such that it is unlikely they would be paying full tuition sans the scholarship also a dispropotionate number of scholarship athletes are from out of state, if they disappear its unlikely that the replacement 80 some students would be paying as much out of state tuition
    - jofer 13y ago
      Good point. However, alumni donations are often strongly correlated to the performance of the sports teams (at universities with traditions of popular sports teams, anyway). Donations are a non-trivial part of a university's income stream. Also, a prestigious sports team can definitely boost undergraduate enrollment. It's effective advertising, as several people have pointed out. From an academic standpoint, I've seen the bad side of popular sports teams (_Heavy_ pressure on professors and TA's to give star players high grades despite a complete lack of attendance.). I personally feel like most (particularly in the southeast US) of the large schools with popular sports teams have absolutely awful undergraduate programs. That's partly just a function of being a large university, though. There are certainly negatives along with the positives.
teej 13y ago
An employee with specialized skills who runs a profit center in an organization makes the most money? Color me surprised.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  Profit centers, eh? http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21.html http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21...
  - wtvanhest 13y ago
    From your link: Of the 119 FBS football teams, 68 (57.1 percent) finished the year in the black. Of the 119 FBS schools playing men's basketball, 67 teams made a profit. One of those same 119 schools made money in women's basketball in 2008. FBS football teams recorded a median net profit of $1.95 million. Men's basketball at the same schools produced a median profit of $518,000. No other sport at the FBS schools, measured by median values, showed a program in the black. so yeah, profit centers.
    - prostoalex 13y ago
      The facility cost is shifted to university's balance sheet. Most calculations assume that the cost of building and maintaining a stadium and supporting infrastructure is zero. I'm going to sound like an economist that refuses to pick up a $20 bill (if it's real, somebody else would've picked it up), but there's, for example, profit opportunity in on-campus food catering. So a bunch of private contractors sign up with university to operate their own facility, hire their own staff, and give the university a cut of the earnings or licensing fee. Why has no for-profit corporation stepped up to build up a stadium, hire coaches and players, license the university name and then enjoy the profits?
      - bostonpete 13y ago
        An athletic program in isolation may not be profitable, but I think most schools view it as an important way to keep alumni involved and believe the increase in alumni donations more than offsets any loss they may take in athletics.
Shivetya 13y ago
What about elected state employees? I know in Georgia the top two are tax commissioners. The real issue isn't their salary so much as the pensions and other retirement perks many already highly compensated public employees, elected, appointed, or otherwise, collect, and how soon they can collect. Throw in double dipping and the numbers get high quick
ttrreeww 13y ago
And a CEO or Sales guy is probably the highest paid employee of a software company.
- GabrielF00 13y ago
  But the CEO and the Sales guy are key to the software company's mission. The football coach is not key to either education or research.
  - JoeKM 13y ago
    That's silly, the coach is key to the athletics department he was hired to work for, just as the CEO and sales guy are key to their respective departments (or in the case of the CEO, the entire company).
    - ttrreeww 13y ago
      So innocent :) CEOs more often then not, are not essential to the company. Sales guy maybe, but plenty of them sell based on company inertia. Now a coach on the other hand...
bluedino 13y ago
And the highest-paid person you graduated high school with is probably a player (assuming you went to a run-of-the-mill public school) A guy I graduated with plays in the NBA, and makes somewhere around 6 million a year, which is about the league average. He'll probably be retired in a few more years but he'll still have had a good 10-12 years of making an extremely high salary.
- maxmcd 13y ago
  I would be surprised if there is a public school to cover every professional athlete. A quick google returns ~27,000 public high schools in the US. Can't imagine there are that many professional athletes.
- callmeed 13y ago
  That's okay, it probably won't last: Sports Illustrated estimated in 2009 that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-athletes-and-financial-trouble/54465664/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-a...
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Very common. A kid who got drafted the same year from the rival high school across town OWES the team that drafted him $10 million.
bluedino 13y ago
Is the data out there find out what the highest paid programmer/database administrator/'IT manager' is per state?
dpritchett 13y ago
I was extra tickled that the highest paid public employee in Nevada (read: Las Vegas) is a plastic surgeon.
larrik 13y ago
Hey, my state is the only one where the highest paid employee is specifically for women's sports. He is not a woman himself, though. Nevada is completely appropriate, though.
ebbv 13y ago
This is really misleading because while state colleges are ostensibly public institutions nowadays most of them (especially ones that pay their coaches a shit ton of money) are not receiving the majority of their funding from public sources.
gnoway 13y ago
An old thread now, but I thought this article was pretty topical, re: one of the highest-paid coaches in college football: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-magic-of-nick-saban-everyone-wants-to-go-to-alabama/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-magic...

27 points by soundsop 13y ago

magic_man 13y ago

A coach probably brings more revenue into your school than any other employee.

jofer 13y ago
Typically, it's only into the athletic department, though. At least at the big state schools I've been at, money from athletics/merchandizing/etc goes to athletics and only athletics. Beyond paying for athlete's education, etc, the money isn't going back into education in any direct way. However, the coach's salary is typically paid out of the athletic revenue stream, not directly from state funds, which makes it a bit of a moot point. (Note: To the best of my knowledge (which isn't much) this holds for Univ. of TN, Univ. of AL, and Univ. of WI. It's probably different at many other schools.) Of course, all that having been said, the popular sports entirely fund all of the less popular, but still very meaningful athletic programs. There's also a _lot_ to be said for the secondary effects of having a popular sports team on the overall prestige and income of a university.
- dman 13y ago
  I never got the link between sports programs and academic prestige.
  - slg 13y ago
    It is basically a marketing expense. There are countless reports of applications going up due to a successful sports team. When applications go up, a school can be more selective and choose better students. More selectiveness and better students will lead to a higher academic prestige. Basically anything that makes a school more attractive will eventually help bolster academic prestige.
  - jofer 13y ago
    Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as well. However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their undergraduate program based partly on the football team.
    - ry0ohki 13y ago
      I chose my school partly because I followed the basketball team as a kid. It's free marketing. I never heard of half of the small division III schools in my area, but all of the big state schools were on my radar because of sports.
      - eurleif 13y ago
        >It's free marketing. Expensive marketing.
        pitt1980 13y ago
        that's a big chunk of everything, when you buy a pop out of the machine, what fraction of what your paying for is raw material + production cost and what percentage is so the can pay for superbowl ads so the next time you're thirsty their brand is the first the pops into your head?
    - bryanbuckley 13y ago
      where you go for undergraduate engineering isn't that big of a deal, right? In my case I said no to a top 10 engineering undergraduate school offering some scholarship and yes to the University of Alabama which was my grandad/dad's alma mater and thus our football team, an in-state school with cheaper tuition offering a lot of scholarship, and not Auburn University which had a slightly better engineering program rank but were UofA rivals. Had a _great_ uni experience and would make the same choice every time. Had no trouble getting a job in a large company as a kernel developer straight from uni. Sure maybe doing MIT or Stanford I could have been a HVT for ~Google or I would have been in an impromptu startup by junior year.. but those student ticket prices!!! Roll Tide. Still fly back a few times per season to go to games.
  - ISL 13y ago
    When the Virginia Tech football team made it big, the average incoming SAT score increased markedly. A quick look for historical data failed, but if you can find the data, the big shift should have occurred with the class matriculating in 1994±1. Correlation is not causation, but it's not implausible that notability in athletics can have sympathetic effects for funding and student quality. If only there were a daily 'Science' section in the newspaper to go alongside 'Sports'....
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- pitt1980 13y ago
  the accounting that goes into whether a sports program is profitable or not is sort of tricky scholarships are counted at the full tuition rate its obvious that the marginal cost of educating 80 some football players isn't 0, but its not obvious that its the full tuition rate a sizeable chunk of students are offered some sort of financial package to attend a university, some non zero percentage of football players come from low income situations such that it is unlikely they would be paying full tuition sans the scholarship also a dispropotionate number of scholarship athletes are from out of state, if they disappear its unlikely that the replacement 80 some students would be paying as much out of state tuition
  - jofer 13y ago
    Good point. However, alumni donations are often strongly correlated to the performance of the sports teams (at universities with traditions of popular sports teams, anyway). Donations are a non-trivial part of a university's income stream. Also, a prestigious sports team can definitely boost undergraduate enrollment. It's effective advertising, as several people have pointed out. From an academic standpoint, I've seen the bad side of popular sports teams (_Heavy_ pressure on professors and TA's to give star players high grades despite a complete lack of attendance.). I personally feel like most (particularly in the southeast US) of the large schools with popular sports teams have absolutely awful undergraduate programs. That's partly just a function of being a large university, though. There are certainly negatives along with the positives.

teej 13y ago

An employee with specialized skills who runs a profit center in an organization makes the most money? Color me surprised.

prostoalex 13y ago
Profit centers, eh? http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21.html http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21...
- wtvanhest 13y ago
  From your link: Of the 119 FBS football teams, 68 (57.1 percent) finished the year in the black. Of the 119 FBS schools playing men's basketball, 67 teams made a profit. One of those same 119 schools made money in women's basketball in 2008. FBS football teams recorded a median net profit of $1.95 million. Men's basketball at the same schools produced a median profit of $518,000. No other sport at the FBS schools, measured by median values, showed a program in the black. so yeah, profit centers.
  - prostoalex 13y ago
    The facility cost is shifted to university's balance sheet. Most calculations assume that the cost of building and maintaining a stadium and supporting infrastructure is zero. I'm going to sound like an economist that refuses to pick up a $20 bill (if it's real, somebody else would've picked it up), but there's, for example, profit opportunity in on-campus food catering. So a bunch of private contractors sign up with university to operate their own facility, hire their own staff, and give the university a cut of the earnings or licensing fee. Why has no for-profit corporation stepped up to build up a stadium, hire coaches and players, license the university name and then enjoy the profits?
    - bostonpete 13y ago
      An athletic program in isolation may not be profitable, but I think most schools view it as an important way to keep alumni involved and believe the increase in alumni donations more than offsets any loss they may take in athletics.

Shivetya 13y ago

What about elected state employees? I know in Georgia the top two are tax commissioners. The real issue isn't their salary so much as the pensions and other retirement perks many already highly compensated public employees, elected, appointed, or otherwise, collect, and how soon they can collect. Throw in double dipping and the numbers get high quick

ttrreeww 13y ago

And a CEO or Sales guy is probably the highest paid employee of a software company.

GabrielF00 13y ago
But the CEO and the Sales guy are key to the software company's mission. The football coach is not key to either education or research.
- JoeKM 13y ago
  That's silly, the coach is key to the athletics department he was hired to work for, just as the CEO and sales guy are key to their respective departments (or in the case of the CEO, the entire company).
  - ttrreeww 13y ago
    So innocent :) CEOs more often then not, are not essential to the company. Sales guy maybe, but plenty of them sell based on company inertia. Now a coach on the other hand...

bluedino 13y ago

And the highest-paid person you graduated high school with is probably a player (assuming you went to a run-of-the-mill public school) A guy I graduated with plays in the NBA, and makes somewhere around 6 million a year, which is about the league average. He'll probably be retired in a few more years but he'll still have had a good 10-12 years of making an extremely high salary.

maxmcd 13y ago
I would be surprised if there is a public school to cover every professional athlete. A quick google returns ~27,000 public high schools in the US. Can't imagine there are that many professional athletes.
callmeed 13y ago
That's okay, it probably won't last: Sports Illustrated estimated in 2009 that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-athletes-and-financial-trouble/54465664/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-a...
- bluedino 13y ago
  Very common. A kid who got drafted the same year from the rival high school across town OWES the team that drafted him $10 million.

bluedino 13y ago

Is the data out there find out what the highest paid programmer/database administrator/'IT manager' is per state?

dpritchett 13y ago

I was extra tickled that the highest paid public employee in Nevada (read: Las Vegas) is a plastic surgeon.

larrik 13y ago

Hey, my state is the only one where the highest paid employee is specifically for women's sports. He is not a woman himself, though. Nevada is completely appropriate, though.

ebbv 13y ago

This is really misleading because while state colleges are ostensibly public institutions nowadays most of them (especially ones that pay their coaches a shit ton of money) are not receiving the majority of their funding from public sources.

gnoway 13y ago

An old thread now, but I thought this article was pretty topical, re: one of the highest-paid coaches in college football: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-magic-of-nick-saban-everyone-wants-to-go-to-alabama/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-magic...