<p>"Three dozen of the University of California's highest-paid executives are threatening to sue unless UC agrees to spend tens of millions of dollars to dramatically increase retirement benefits for employees earning more than $245,000." What's wrong with this picture?</p>
<p>Highest-paid</a> UC execs demand millions in benefits</p>
<p>This is the picture of California in general. High government/public employee salary and benefits make it a time bomb and present severe consequence in the state’s economy in the near future.</p>
<p>^Yes, it’s only going to get worse…and create generational conflict.</p>
<p>For once Yudof is right.</p>
<p>Oh, you got to feel sorry for them. Rather than jumping ship and finding one of the many public sector opportunities to double or triple dip, they thought that the “system” would allow them to use public funds as the old piggy-bank for the chosen ones. Poor guys, they also miss out on the bonanza at cities such as Vernon, Maywood, or Bell City. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I am not sure who deserves most of the blame … the people who expected the organized thievery to last forever and are now complaining, or the morons who allowed this and more egregious abuses of public finances to develop of the past decades. All those stories of high pensions, double dipping by people who served the armed forces, police forces, and other similar functions, are simply repulsive.</p>
<p>Those people should receive all the money they extracted from the system, but the state should ipropose a confiscatory income tax of 99% on anything above 60% of the last working wages. Let the people vote on this tax and see what citizens think about such schemes.</p>
<p>^ I know…in a little fairness, these deals were crafted in 1999…when everyone was getting rich on pets.com and they assumed a “conservative” 10% stock market growth rate. Well, when those returns ended up being essentially 0% through the next decade, there’s your $21 billion (and growing) unfunded mandate.</p>
<p>I think they should be allowed to walk. The UCs can recruit replacements. Those positions may become stepping stones for people on the way up rather than final resting spots.</p>
<p>When I think of the unbelievable gap between what someone who WORKS for the school earns & what someone who “runs” the school makes, I want to throw up. More & more is being asked of the workers every single day, and they are expected to accept less & less … by those who demand THEY get more & more. Yeah, Mom was right. Life’s not fair.</p>
<p>More and more student borrowing, labeled as “financial aid.”</p>
<p>“Financial Aid” for the UC executives, that is.</p>
<p>As a public high school student here, I just have to say… I love my state. ;)</p>
<p>Come on. Hardly any of those people have academic jobs. With a few exceptions (mainly business school deans, and a law school dean recruited from Harvard a few years ago) they are health care, IT, and investment professionals who could work in a wide variety of institutions. It hardly strains credulity to believe that they relied on an official policy of the Board of Regents adopted in 1999 promising them a more favorable pension formula once a ministerial IRS hurdle had been cleared. I would bet anything that all of these people have cash compensation that is below competitive industry levels, and that perks and pension benefits are what the UC relies on to recruit top people. </p>
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<p>Yeah, right. CEO of the UCSF medical center ought to be a training-wheels kind of job? What does the UCSF CEO do when he grows up? Berkeley CIO? I’m completely ready to trust computer security for Lawrence-Livermore to someone inexperienced who will work cheap. Of course, Boalt dean IS traditionally a stepping stone for people on the way up . . . to university president. (I wonder how many Boalt deans have actually retired in the UC system.)</p>
<p>Of course, California and the University of California are in crisis, and everyone should expect to share in the pain. Of course it’s unseemly for these people to be squealing that there should be more slop in their trough at a time when everyone else is on a diet. But the starting point for negotiations ought to be what they were told they were making, not some essentially random number lower than that.</p>
<p>This is the reason why I forbid by children to go to UC system.</p>
<p>We briefly considered California schools (my husband would love the excuse to visit) but decided with the way things appear to be going (economically) in California, versus in our home state of Texas, our DS would be better off closer to home. CA is a great place to visit.</p>
<p>We lived in Northern CA for 6 years. Loved it. That was over 5 years ago. Kids wanted to be back to CA. I guess they can try to do that by working for a CA company when they graduate.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about these sorts of stories. </p>
<p>On the one hand yes it looks a bit crazy that some of these leadership roles in academia earn as much as they do. </p>
<p>On the other hand it boils down to the free market and if you want a certain professional with certain skills and experience sometimes you have to pay the big bucks to recruit and retain them. Most of the people in these roles are not academics, or if they were at some point they often bring with them a breadth of other skills and experiences outside their pure academic discipline. The simple fact is that with rare exceptions you can’t just pluck some academic out of their department and have them try to run a whole university system. Most academics simply don’t have the skills and experience to best fill those roles–and to be honest most have little interest in filling those roles anyway. </p>
<p>What does seriously annoy me is the often lack of accountability in some of these high ranking posts. In the private sector one is, more often than not, expected to perform to justify their high salary from (and thus cost to) the company. (Yes there are examples to the contrary, but in general that’s what’s expected in the private sector). In the public sector all too often it seems like so long as you still have a pulse you stay in your high ranking role no matter how inefficient or incompetent you become.</p>
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<p>Aren’t we witnessing a new labor market where jobs in the public sector are more lucrative than the ones available in the private sector, in addition to the typical perks that elevate public functions to sinecures? </p>
<p>Nothing precluded those people to test the waters in the private market when the conditions “deteriorated” for them. And that is still true today. The real question for the UC system to answer should be if they really need to pay people such salaries in this economy, especially for administrative functions. </p>
<p>No matter how we look at it, it is yet another example of how our public system has been corrupted by policies of laissez faire that allowed insiders to sweeten the pot at the top of the food chain. When it comes to education, most will agree that our resources should be rebalanced towards compensating the people who actually educate. Isn’t it time to reevaluate the size and burden of the administrative parts, and start clearing the underbrush?</p>
<p>xiggi, that’s really nice rhetoric, and I would even agree with it if we were talking about administrators vs. teachers in your average urban public school system. But the CEO of the leading academic medical center in California (and probably top 5 in the world) isn’t some sort of middle-management pencil-pusher. Nor is the person in charge of investing UC-Berkeley’s endowment. </p>
<p>Modern universities are very complex institutions, and teaching students – while central to their mission, no doubt – is far from the only important thing that they do. And I doubt any modern university is much more complex than the University of California. Only a little more than 1/4 of its FTE employees are engaged in academic activities (including academic administrators and non-teaching researchers). Meanwhile, the hospitals employ over 1/3 of the employees. When you talk about “clearing away the underbrush,” do you mean cutting back on nurse coverage in the ICU?</p>
<p>The personnel affected by this issue represent less than 0.2% of UC employees.</p>
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<p>I completely agree. The UC system may need perks and benefits to recruit top Nobel-prize caliber faculty members, but it doesn’t need to spend a fortune on administrators. Open up some much-needed spaces for ambitious junior-level administrators. They’ll have no trouble finding candidates who would be quite happy to fill these slots.</p>
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<p>JHS, yes it is indeed a rhetoric exercise. And a futile one to boot, because our voices and opinions do no matter.</p>
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<p>I am sure that you have a pretty good idea of what I meant. To stay in the timber realm, feel free to replace underbrush with deadwood. </p>
<p>By the way, how many hours do you think will be logged by the non-medical and non-academic staff of the UC system between December 17 and January 4, 2011? Do you think many of the members of the complaining group were hard at work pushing a pencil to balance the budgets and maximize the return of the endowment?</p>
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Wouldn’t the lawsuit go forward whether they were currently employed with the system or not?</p>
<p>With the budget woes it does seem to be an inopportune time for them to be pursuing this but I suppose it comes down to contract law and they should be paid according to whatever the enforcable contracts state. The biggest problem is this idea that government workers should get these sweetheart deals with pensions. It’s simply broken (I can’t use the furure tense on this unfortunately) the bank. They’re not properly planned or funded and are completely out of line with private industry which has largely moved away from the idea of a pension plan. Many years ago IBM converted theirs to a ‘cash value’ plan and most of the high-tech sector as well as other industries followed suit. It’s just crazy how many public sector workers can retire at a young age and retain 100% of their health benefits along with a high percentage of their salaries for life. Europe is learning their lesson in this regard since they’re also going broke due to these ‘entitlements’ and are ending up with riots in the streets as a result.</p>
<p>JHS has a valid point though - these ‘administrators’ aren’t the typical administrators that come to mind who have little responsibility and who could be relatively easily replaced with much lower paid yet still highly competent people. I haven’t done a compensation comparison but for example, how is the head of the UCLA medical facility, one of the largest west of the Mississippi, compensated compared to a peer at an equivalent facility? Ditto with some of the other positions. I suspect the answer isn’t so simple - some of them are probably being compensated reasonably and others may be over compensated and yet some others might be under compensated.</p>
<p>I do wish they’d get rid of the ‘Wimpy’ (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for that hamburger today”) paradigm, get rid of the pension plans in the public sector which is just a huge liability on the backs of the taxpayers, and compensate them competetively with the private sector up front in a way where everyone can see what the budget is and the liabilities are as opposed to the almost ‘hidden’ costs of the pensions.</p>