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.
Shut down all of the state and federal loan programs, and plow all of that money into investing in the state university systems, with nominal tuition fees.
Stop plowing tax dollars into multi-million dollar executive salaries, that do nothing to improve higher education. All of the boards of trustees in the article brazenly brag about how the compensation for these people is only based on "fund raising", not about providing quality educations at low cost.
So let them continue charging independently wealthy individuals $50,000 / year to educate their children, but it is obscene that a single dime of public money is being handed to these people.
But the available research suggests that if state lawmakers increased appropriations for public colleges and universities, it would be unlikely to have an effect as large as advocates assume. More state funding appears to buy pennies on the dollar in lower tuition. That makes increasing appropriations for public colleges and universities an ineffective—even wasteful—policy for keeping tuition low. It also implies that grant aid might deliver more bang for the buck than larger state appropriations.
What might explain why appropriations have such weak effect on tuition? Again, the studies discussed above do not offer much explanation, but two theories come to mind: perhaps universities look to exploit their pricing power in the market leading them to raise tuition whether appropriations rise or fall; or maybe when faced with a reduction in state funding, universities cut spending instead of raising tuition dollar for dollar. Those are excellent theories for future research to test.
To be sure, the research on the effects of state disinvestment is severely limited, and further work may yet find a stronger effect on tuition. But limitations are not a reason to continue assuming the effects are as large as many have claimed. Just the opposite.
The fact that the research is limited, and that it shows state disinvestment is not a major cause of rising tuition, are reasons to doubt the state disinvestment argument and the policy agenda attached to it. Researchers should see this as a call to action. They should be putting at least as much effort into measuring the effects of state appropriations on tuition as they do the Bennett Hypothesis—and employing the same rigorous analytical methods. They can also help determine what factors really are the primary drivers of tuition increases at public colleges if appropriations matter so little. Journalists should also change their approach in light of the evidence on state disinvestment. They should hold claims about the effects of state disinvestment on tuition to the same standards of evidence as they do claims about the Bennett Hypothesis.
Meanwhile, it is time to start calling the claim that state funding cuts are the primary driver of rising tuition what it really is: the state disinvestment hypothesis.
This is right. We used to all agree, as a society, that we would all benefit by people educating themselves, becoming then next generation of civil engineers, doctors managers, and maybe poets. But we no longer believe that, we believe that people should pay for it themselves.
I think that your viewpoint focuses on the people paying, but you are ignoring the people taking.
It's not fair to ask people to simply pay, and not allow them to hold the institutions accountable. Universities are packed with dead weight professors, dead weight majors, and dead weight administrators who take advantage of the blind belief that a bachelor's degree in anything is better than nothing.
The University of Florida got rid of its Computer Science program a few years ago, while expanding it's English department. Do you think that was a wise use of Florida taxpayer's dollars?
No other county in the world requires about twice the average annual income per year to cover the expenses of enrolling a single student in a university degree.
When a college degree is so expensive, the problem doesn't lie in the university's revenue.
I don't doubt the quality of GT, but rankings, especially the worldwide variety, are absurd at their face, and they are part of this self-destroying system that is causing runaway education costs.
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.
We need to make MOOCs the default choice for a college education. Traditional university is a minefield of money sucking scams, from book costs to extra fees to constant tuition inflation.
The reason for all the school debt is not the loan environment. It's the cost of schools.
> The reason for all the school debt is not the loan environment. It's the cost of schools.
There is an argument that the prices charged by the schools area result of the loan environment (both a market-based argument and a political argument that loans as the main affordability tool have displaced state subsidies; the former reduces the up-front cost but only by deferring it, the latter actually reduced the total cost to students.)
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".
I remember visiting someone in Northern Virginia. The neighborhood had very big houses with very nice cars in front of them. I asked him where these people work. AOL? Verizon? No, the answer was, mostly non-profits. That's when I understood what non-profit really means.
They are indeed largely interchangeable: A non-profit organization (NPO), also known as a non-business entity,[1] is dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view (Wikipedia).
There's a minor distinction because non-profit status is awarded by the state, but income-tax exemptions are administered federally (i.e. 501(c)). But in practice, every non-profit university also fits the definition of a charitable organisation.
I supposed I was thinking of trade associations (like the NFL) when I said not all non-profits are charities. Now that I say that though I wonder if there is a legal difference between the terms "non-profit" and "not for profit" and if one of those applies more appropriately to trade associations.
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.
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.
What for profit organization is desperately trying to hire Nathan Hatch away from Wake Forest for more than $4 million a year? Has anyone ever gone from running a university to running a fortune 500 company, or is that a comparison strictly designed to flatter?
You're misunderstanding the term "profit" in the legal phrase "non-profit."
I'm not defending high salaries at all non-profits. Yes, some people are overpaid despite being at a non-profit. But don't be confused about what the term "non-profit" means.
profits come after labor is paid, so how labor is paid is separate from how profits are spent. there's maybe a certain sort of nobility in a worker accepting to be underpaid to work at a non-profit they care about, but that maybe-certain-sort-of nobility doesn't transfer to the company underpaying its workers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many top schools (e.g., Harvard) are essentially free (both in terms of tuition and from loans) for children of families making under roughly $100,000.
Some schools also make promises. I went to a school that said that I couldn't get a scholarship the first semester, but that as long as I had over a 3.0 I could get one the following ones. I always had over a 3.0 and never got one (always given "yeah, you can apply", but then a run around until the deadline was past), even when I had several above 3.5. This happened to every person I know that transferred to the university. Transfer students (who did community college first), paid about the same as those that attended all 4 years.
> Students are free to go to less expensive schools.
Agree it's rational but it's still ironic. Things like Uncle Sam handing out loans like candy is not helping or states cutting fund to state school is also not great.
The less expensive school tactic from what I hear these days is to go to a community college for 2 years to get as many prerequisites in then switch to a more expensive university to graduate. The rational behavior from the more expensive university is then probably to refuse credits from community colleges so they can increase their profits and fleece students more.
> The rational behavior from the more expensive university is then probably to refuse credits from community colleges so they can increase their profits and fleece students more.
...which funnels those students into state schools that are usually forced by state regulation to allow CCs in the same state to operate feeder programs. The rich kids go to private schools or stick around to get masters and we're back where we were decades ago only all the numbers are much bigger, the minimum amount of degree is higher (a 2yr is the new high school diploma, a masters is the new bachelors, etc.) the average person gets being an adult pushed back by about four years and whether society is better for it depends on who you ask.
The people taking on this debt are typically 17 to 18 years old and have had people telling them their entire lives that they must go to college to get ahead. What would you do? Maybe the institutions should share some of the responsibility and risk.
The irrationality here lies in the completely misguided idea that education should be a good you pay for individually. The benefit to society of having an educated populace far outweighs the costs of education for the individuals.
In other words, it makes sense for government to heavily subsidize it. If, that is, government were interested in the welfare of its populace instead of the welfare of its donors.
People apply and pick colleges when they're teenagers, because their school system and parents and our entire culture demands it of them. They're hardly "rational actors" and they won't fix this system alone.
This is true, they are also free to change schools when they are of adult age. They can also gain additional credits from that state's community colleges, the local ones have more likely transferrable credits.
An internship helped me, I was enrolled in a state school yet was pushing pencils the same as a Princeton student, this made realized the school name wasn't going to change anything in this path, just whatever technicality lets me get the degree.
For business, capital and investment banking, Ivy League puts you very far ahead, but outside of that, especially if your life involves working for someone else, the trade and the school are largely irrelevant compared to just having a degree, which also has limited relevance in many fields.
What exactly is going to inform them within the 4 years they spend at a college that they should not go to that college? Will one of their professors politely inform them they're getting scammed?
And when will they be adult age? Even if they somehow became aware 2 years after attending that it's a waste of money, then they've already lost the ability to leverage community college for general courses with automatic acceptance into state (one of the less expensive paths) and racked up a ton of debt. Why not just finish it at that point?
We need regulation at the federal level to fix this.
"For business, capital and investment banking, Ivy League puts you very far ahead, but outside of that, especially if your life involves working for someone else, the trade and the school are largely irrelevant compared to just having a degree, which also has limited relevance in many fields."
Law firms websites put where their attorneys went to law school (always) and where they were undergraduates (usually); take a look at where they went sometime.
Lots of countries (Canada,for one) have tuition that isn't free, but is reasonable priced, and gives subsidies to lower income individuals. Might be a better option than fully free tuition.
I think that going to school should still be seen as an investment, just a more reasonable one. If getting a degree won't help you get a job, I don't think the government should be fully paying for it - you should have to make financial sacrifices too. I guess mostly I just don't want to be the one paying (through taxes) for useless degrees that don't help the economy/employment, maybe that makes me selfish but it's my opinion.
I guess americans have the same stance against social healthcare: "Why should I pay for the sickness of other people ?"
I think it is indeed selfish, but the US culture has been nurtured like this since it's inception.
This is a little like saying "As long as people do bad stuff, they will go to prison".
Yeah, but that doesn't mean "people" will stop doing bad stuff.
I remember post-2008 financial crisis a lot of people were blaming consumers for going into debt to buy crap, like new TVs, cars, and whatnot on credit. And it was "their fault" doing it. I don't disagree that everyone has a personal responsibility for stuff like this, but I always think of issues like these in terms of "systems" and environments that set up the conditions for people to do that.
Central banks everywhere made interests dirt cheap, which led to banks offering credit for everything and easy credit to obtain, too. It's like they couldn't loan money fast enough. And yeah, a lot of people did fall for it, but the conditions were already created for them to do that.
It's no different than tobacco ads brainwashing people into thinking that smoking is cool and you will be a better version of yourself if you smoke, you will feel good, and all that.
So where I'm getting at is that in this case it's mainly the government guaranteeing loans and making it "easy" for students to pay for college with loans is what's really the problem here.
Make public college free (with what money? I don't know, maybe the $70 billion a year the military just received for no good reason, even before an audit was done of their expenses?), and then ban banks from offering college loans. You'll quickly see this problem solve itself.
Including finance in a basic math education for every high-school student would IMO make a significant difference. Listing interest paid as both a percentage and a total over the lifetime of a loan might also discourage people.
That said, I took a few very low interest loans, but I at least had the tools to do some basic cost benefit analysis. I watched many people spend way to much money for a sub par education.
I think a lazy river is a sign that a school is trying too hard to attract students for the wrong reasons. I was looking at the schools with the best pools, and only some of the really big ones (UCLA UT) seem like good choices for education.
If I didn't know any better I'd imagine this would be an article from the Onion. But it makes sense -- parents and students shop for fun activities and extra-curricular clubs and luxury dorms and if one university doesn't have it, they'll just go to another.
And it's a shift more towards colleges treating students as pure customers, pool and luxury dorms are not the worst, grade inflation and rising price tags are what's scary.
Aside from online colleges and such, wonder if any state schools could move in the opposite direction - cut costs and tuition then aggressively advertise that. Say turn "Luxury Dorm State University" to "Spartan State University" - come here to study and do research only. Not extra-curriculars, no fancy clubs, intro lectures are slightly bigger. Not much admin staff, no 10 different fancy coffee shops or athletic facilities, just a main cafeteria and so on. But you graduate with a $30k debt instead of a $100k one. I guess that becomes a community college almost, and the problem is attracting faculty and research as the perception is the school is not top-tier...
My wife recently finished her college degree at an inexpensive, in-state university a few years ago. Half the tuition was dumb shit the student council voted on, probably without considering the cost / benefit.
I filled in at a student org council meeting at my school the other day, and they were presenting our plan for a new gym, at the mandatory low cost of $200 added to every student's semester tuition. ($40/month gym fee for everybody! Where's the gym again?)
Apparently the 14 million dollars in annual revenue would still never pay for the renovations.
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.
At private colleges I really could care less what they pay administrators. I do take offense at high salaries at state schools to include their athletic departments.
These salaries are on top of their guaranteed retirements and related provisions let alone all the ancillary benefits they receive while in office.
Their endowments should be taxed. Any school accepting government money for student educations, whether loans or grants, should be subject to increased scrutiny. We are holding medical providers to high standards of scrutiny because of their costs to the public, education should face the same.
Again, I could care less what a private school pays provided they are not receiving government money in the form of grants or assistance to students.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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/mic...
This is a big misconception. In reality, only a small percentage of football programs are profitable [0]. Even from your link, you can see that many of the programs break even or lose money.
The sports finance landscape changes too dramatically for you to link 3 or 4 year old articles as present-day fact. Even GPs link is two years old and there have been big revenue jumps since then. I wish we had clearer numbers for college football programs alone for present day revenue numbers with current TV deals. Is there a recent link with just football program revenue vs expenditures? I can't find one.
To be fair, the programs that are more profitable also have more money pumped into them, and those that are less profitable have less money put into them. So yes, many of them are unprofitable, but it also seems like the less profitable ones have much smaller costs. Of course, the school's budgets at those schools might be smaller too, but...
You make a very good point, but these students also generally get scholarships to college, which is not an insignificant form of compensation at all - especially given how much having a college degree matters for future lifetime earnings.
256 players get drafted every year. There are 124 DI football teams with a max of 85 scholarships per year. If every player made it to their senior year, and the draft only took seniors, and every class was the same size, a player would have < 10% chance of getting drafted. That's a lot of "ifs" just make it to the pro level, and that does NOT get you paid!
That says nothing of the odds of actually making a roster in year one, and says even less of sticking around the league long enough for those big paydays to set you up after retirement.
Basically, if you're playing the odds, the expected value of a college football scholarship isn't bolstered much by the professional payday. Nearly all the value is in that college degree (paid for by scholarship). So graduating with a degree that you can turn into a career is the best play BY FAR.
That takes us to graduation rates. These seem to be fudged a bit since, well, it's in the programs' interests to hide poor performance. You can do your own digging. Lots of articles about this, and it's not terribly great. The NCAA has their bookeeping, the football programs have theirs, and most expert agree that neither counts accurately. Best case, graduation rates are in line with general student graduation rates. Worst case, not even close.
But the parent point was that the coaches/programs paid for themselves, but if you have to figure in 100 scholarships at $10-50k/yr that's $10-50M ignoring the cost of the stadium. I don't see most (>50%) Div1 teams making back that kind of money from their Alumni.
The best argument I can see is that this is an outreach program for minority and under-privileged youth. The problem with that is the brain-damage that football causes.
Not when these athletes are tied to their performance and can lose their scholarships, also not when they are forced to study easy classes to keep playing instead of studying.
Separate (and valid) issue from the core issue the parent pointed out.
College football programs are often very big profit centers. They typically pay for the other sports programs as well. That's why football coaches are paid the way they are.
College players should obviously be compensated in some manner as well. All that will do is reduce the profitability (or increase ticket prices a lot higher to offset, which may not be possible); it's unlikely to eliminate the business being quite profitable given the scale & ticket prices.
I've always thought that the "profit center"/"cost center" distinction doesn't make a lot of sense.
The instant example is a pretty good illustration---a crappy university president can do a lot more damage to a university than a crappy football coach (e.g. by making decisions that cause the failure of big chunks of the institution and massive financial losses), so judging the impact of hiring a better president vs a better football coach by whether they're responsible primarily for things with a plus sign or a minus sign on them in the accounting books seems... pointless?
(Plus, since the president is the football coach's boss, why would we account football revenue to the coach and not the president?)
realistically, they are profit centers for the football programs. Little if any of that money makes it back to the school.
For their math to work you have to assume that NONE of the donors who donate to sports would donate to anything else...I find that to be a fairly unlikely assumption.
> Little if any of that money makes it back to the school.
That's incorrect. Most major football programs transfer a large percentage of their revenue above operating expenses, back to the university. Texas for example, which is typically one of the top five college football businesses (and nearly a pro level business), transfers about half of its revenue after expenses (ie profit) back to the university.
The top teams do a whole lot better than smaller schools though. For considering policy the aggregate is more interesting than the schools with the best numbers.
Look at the spending that the schools other than UM and MSU put towards athletics:
... why do presidents have more of a "real job" than football coaches? Having been neither a college administrator nor a football player, I can explain to you exactly what a football coach does and what their work involves and how to evaluate them and how to figure out if they're running a program that's net profitable for the university. I certainly can't tell you what a college president does or how to evaluate them, given how highly abstracted their work is.
Colleges exist in order to educate the populous, per their own mission statements. Take a look at The University of Texas' "Mission and Values" page, note how they don't use the words sports or athletics.
Mission:
The mission of The University of Texas at Austin is to achieve excellence in the interrelated areas of undergraduate education, graduate education, research and public service. The university provides superior and comprehensive educational opportunities at the baccalaureate through doctoral and special professional educational levels.
The university contributes to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development and dissemination of new knowledge, including the commercialization of University discoveries. The university preserves and promotes the arts, benefits the state’s economy, serves the citizens through public programs and provides other public service.
They're responsible for the success or failure of a whole lot of stuff that matters, even though that success or failure is difficult to measure. By contrast, the football coach is responsible for the success or failure of something that is easy to measure, but does not matter at all---at best, and at worst is harmful (at least to the bodies and minds of the players being exploited). That seems like a pretty good standard for "real job" to me.
I think it's important to keep in mind that at these high pay levels, the president is more of a figurehead whose primary role is to fundraise. In light of this, their job does seem similar in that both the president and the coach are there to help the college raise money.
The responsibility you mention is delegated down to the next level.
I'm not convinced that's true---although I'm not sure how much my perception is reliable given that I've never been inside a president's office. That being said, at least the perception within universities is that presidents are often responsible for some very consequential decisions.
The most obvious example is internal budget allocation, which can make or break entire programs.
This article from Bloomberg has lots of good quotes in it, here's one:
"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.
Right, no question that fundraising is an important, perhaps the most important, part of the job. I'm just saying that making mission-critical decisions about the whole institution is also in there.
Coach salaries are rising due to competition among schools for winning (or desirable) coaches as well as increasing profit, particularly among the Power-5 football schools. Football programs at big schools make enough profit to fund other sports with some left over: http://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-revenue-college-...
A WSJ analysis analyzed football programs as if they were sports franchises to be sold on the open market. Ohio State topped the list at a value of $1.5 billion.
The article talks about possible tax revisions to the top endowed schools, but I doubt they will revoke the ability to deduct exorbitant football seat sales from taxes. Yes, big donors to football programs can buy really expensive season tickets and deduct it from their taxes since its related to non-profit schools. That deduction as well as the huge kickbacks from TV (ESPN) to televise games are driving the money grab.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
