<p>A great leader is worth FAR more than they get paid. Gee earns his money in a day. So do several others. Show me the $100 million.</p>
<p>MODERATOR’S NOTE:</p>
<p>Please keep the discussion relevant to education. Purely political posts will be deleted. Thanks!</p>
<p>-vonlost</p>
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<p>First of all, I am not lecturing you, or anyone else for that matter. I am expressing an opinion based on my personal perception of the escalation of expenses at colleges. </p>
<p>I also wrote an opinion about the public education sector; hardly one that focused on the finances of community colleges. </p>
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<p>Great, in the “We Land” you have no academic sinecures. Are you ready to pretend that none exists in the world of academia? Your “we” is one datapoint. One among several thousands schools at which cuts have only become part of the narrative in the past years.</p>
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<p>While the last four years are relevant, it’s hardly reflective of the the past decades. How does your last year compare to the funding twenty years ago. How does the increase of expenses and funding compare to the increase in average income in the area served by your community college?</p>
<p>You might want to read a few histories of public colleges. Cuts are nothing new nor are recessions and depressions. During the Great Depression most took cuts of around 33% or more and faculty likewise in their pay. Many of the schools in the midwest have had funding cuts regularly since the recessions of the late 60’s and 70’s. Remember the Rust Belt of 1980?? Maybe you are too young. The actual history is more often one step forward and two back. That’s why they got into research before many other schools. It was a way to supplement and smooth the up and down state funding.</p>
<p>aLF, spare me the “no sabbaticals have been granted” stuff. The real world doesn’t grant sabbaticals – and why should they?</p>
<p>Sure they do…they are called ‘special projects’. Both companies that I have worked for had people on this duty. No one really knew what they did. My 400 person deprtment at a billion dollar company had at least 2 people doing this. The small company had 1. If they were older, they worked on the projects until they retired.</p>
<p>“The real world doesn’t grant sabbaticals – and why should they?”</p>
<p>So that this form of independent research continues.</p>
<p>My wife’s non-profit is getting one of these “sabbatical” donations from Intel.</p>
<p>Actually companies do have sabbaticals. I had a nice 9 month one.</p>
<p>Forget it. Clearly too many folks intend to cling to their belief that higher ed is just a bloated boondoggle of fat cats sucking off tax dollars and tuition, and no facts are going to dissuade them from that.</p>
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<p>Do you have any evidence for that statement (as in specific, verifiable examples), or are you just blowing smoke?</p>
<p>More like hot air.</p>
<p>I think they should stop raising tuition and make more expensive options to students, like the gym, and maybe certain foods. Also, cut funding to sports, especially to coaches. Students are going to learn, not to games that won’t matter in two years. Also, make some cuts to administration, and some of their salaries, since they don’t teach, and aren’t that important, either. There’s a problem when for a decent amount of students, private universities are cheaper.</p>
<p>Where are there private universities with lower tuition than public universities? This might be the case for students applying to an out-of-state public university, but certainly not in-state.</p>
<p>Not in sticker price, but in net cost. One of my D’s friends was val of our local HS class three years ago and would have dearly loved to go to our state flagship. His net cost would have been about $9K. His family couldn’t afford it. He wound up at a good private (that most people on CC have probably never heard of) for a net of about a third that.</p>
<p>One can’t just look at benefit or pay of a job to determine if it’s too much. An university could afford to pay a professor 10K less because of benefits like sabbtical, pension, free tuition for kids…People get upset with some administrator’s high salaries, but president of a college is like a ceo of a company, good one could run it more efficiently, and bad one could break a college. Frankly, if they don’t get the money they want from a public college, they could go to the private sector. By cutting back on pay on those key administrators, public schools are going to be left with subpar people. </p>
<p>I work in the kind of industry where we don’t get any perks, except money. It is the way most people in my business like to have it. We don’t want tuition reimbursement, extra vacation days, good pension, or even job security sometimes, we would rather have the money to do what we want with it.</p>
<p>I don’t begrudge people in academia getting all of those perks. Without a lot of those perks, I don’t know why they would want to be in the profession. A very smart person may opt to become a professor because of the hours (to have time with family), potential discount in tuition, time to do research, good pension. Without those perks, schools wouldn’t be able to attract good instructors, and I would rather if my kids weren’t taught by idiots.</p>