Salaries of public college chiefs rise, median tops $400,000

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<p>You are correct. The per student funding cut from the state is the largest contributor to tuition increases in recent years. </p>

<p>Charles Schwartz, professor emeritus at Berkeley has a blog, much of it focusing on the UC finance. He pegged the waste from management bloat of the entire UC system at about $1 billion/year (the total state funding for UC last years was less the $2.4 billion).</p>

<p>Public universities do not have constituents and lobbyists like the police, prison, and K-12 education. Calling for privatization of public universities and university administrators comparing themselves to CEOs of private companies will likely only further erode public support for the universities.</p>

<p>Maybe these salaries are in a bubble, but until the bubble bursts the colleges are in a competitive market. It seems that at many schools, the president isn’t coming from a tenured faculty position. They’re former governors, senators or ambassadors. What’s the going rate for people like that in the corporate CEO market? </p>

<p>Why couldn’t colleges cut the staff bloat (post #11) and shift to a simpler, faculty-run governance model? Stop competing with toothpaste companies for leadership. Find it internally.</p>

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<p>I didn’t use the term meritocracy, as meritocracy and cronyism is a separate matter. I said that talented people have options. </p>

<p>Let’s all assume for a moment that executive salaries are in a bubble. During financial bubbles, investors have the option of not investing. But public and private corporations don’t have the option of not having a President. Most qualified candidates for this job will expect competitive pay or otherwise they won’t apply. </p>

<p>There was an interesting case study about this many years ago. Ben & Jerry’s tried to find a CEO who was willing to work for $81000 a year. That completely failed, and I think that they eventually found someone who was willing to work for about $500K per year.</p>

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Hmm … it seems to me the complaint is with CEO compensation in the $10M-$20M range … hundreds of multiples of the wage workers. If CEO were getting paid $1M to $2M a year I doubt they would facing the same anger … and, tying it to this thread, their pay would be in line with college presidents.</p>

<p>There’s no “anger” being directed at university presidents. </p>

<p>Are you saying you believe that the there is no difference in the mission of a University and the mission of a privately held or publicly held for profit company? If there is no difference in the mission then there is no justification for their tax exempt status.</p>

<p>The problem is not president pay but administrative pay. The president has a lot to do with the fact that administrative systems at these places are redundant, unnecessary, and being funded by student borrowing.</p>

<p>It’s simply a government mindset being paid for by the students future earnings.</p>

<p>It won’t effect my kids. They will graduate debt free.</p>

<p>But I care about other kids.</p>

<p>carry on.</p>

<p>The studies cited in the report I mentioned have publication dates of 1991, 1998, 2007, 2008 and 2011. </p>

<p>The figure in the report about the relationship between tuition and state support starts at 90-92 and goes to 10-12.</p>

<p>Clearly not all ‘pre-2000’ as you mentioned, nor all ‘pre-recession’.</p>

<p>The trend of increasing tuition is not just a recent phenomenon. It is useful to look at this historically, in good and bad economic times, to sort out what is happening. </p>

<p>Loss of state support is clearly an important factor in the rise of tuition, and then also in the rise of student debt.</p>

<p>Well, I agree on the loss of state support. Also, in our state, almost all the support now goes to paying for pensions. We live in a particularly horrendous state for public university costs, though. It’s practically criminal, imho.</p>

<p>But the concurrent INCREASE in administrative pay and administrative jobs makes no sense in the current environment, and would never occur in the private sector, which is why I can’t figure out the comparisons to private CEOs.</p>

<p>I’m sure this situation is similar to football coaches, CEOs, and pro athletes - a few true stars justify a huge compensation package based on actual performance - funds raised, ticket revenue, profits generated, etc. Back when Michael Jordan was setting new pay records, few could argue that he wasn’t earning his keep in terms of incremental revenue to the club.</p>

<p>But, once these high levels are established, they inflate the expectation for everyone else in that position. A great example is baseball arbitration, where for years second-tier players could argue, “I may not be as good as the guy making $5 million, but I should still get at least $3 million…” So, you end up with competent players who are largely interchangeable and by themselves attract no incremental ticket sales or TV ratings, making millions.</p>

<p>A university president who spearheads a fund drive that raises $600 million, and personally closes many of the largest donations, is totally worth a million or two bucks a year. </p>

<p>But, the president who’s mainly an administrator will then point to “average compensation,” not to mention the high-paid outliers, when negotiating his/her own package.</p>

<p>I’d add that a small number of presidents achieve greatness by strategically focusing their university’s efforts - choosing which programs to fund, establishing partnerships, creating centers of excellence, etc. These effects of these efforts, though, may be visible only years after the decisions are made.</p>

<p>poet girl, the increase in administrative spending is partly a direct result of the decrease in state funding. Schools need to become more entrepreneurial - so they need more staff to carry out those entrepreneurial endeavors. Those endeavors usually require trained professionals who expect to be paid as such. Also, don’t forget, that schools today offer more services (mental health, for example) than they used to. That requires more staff. I know that at one university, an entire team (some of them temp/contract employees, other full-timers) had to be hired to deal with specialized safety issues – a direct fallout from the Virginia Tech mass shootings. This is also not something schools had to worry about a generation ago.</p>

<p>At my daughter’s Community College, they used to allow students to go online to sign up for courses. They now require an adviser to approve all courses. This means that every student has to meet with an adviser to discuss what they need and what they plan to take and then the student can sign up for courses. This obviously creates a crush on the department around enrollment time but it requires a lot of added employees to deal with the crush.</p>

<p>I’d guess that the change was to deal with students that were not graduating on time or that were unprepared for the courses that they signed up for.</p>

<p>I think that schools have had to increase their tutoring staffs to deal with more students with deficiencies from high-school where they may have done well-enough on standardized tests to avoid remedial courses but aren’t strong enough to deal with college courses without some additional help.</p>

<p>I think that you can find examples of college presidents where you strongly feel that they deserve their compensation packages and far more and where you’re happy to donate to their school because they are doing great work and serving the public. It seems that there’s a lot of animosity and some examples where many feel that college presidents are overpaid but we shouldn’t paint all with the same broad brush.</p>

<p>From the WSJ
[Cost</a> of College: Colleges’ Bureaucracy Expands Costs - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814.html]Cost”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814.html)

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<p>2010-11 data
column 1: Administrative spending per student
column 2: Administrative spending as percent of total
column 3: Total education-related spending per student </p>

<p>$8,493 17% $49,739 University of Connecticut
$6,426 10% $65,365 University of Alabama at Birmingham
$5,625 10% $56,921 University of Pittsburgh
$5,158 11% $44,861 The University of Texas
$4,961 13% $37,168 Stony Brook University
$4,948 09% $54,548 Pennsylvania State University
$4,355 10% $43,610 University of Virginia
$4,306 10% $44,257 SUNY at Albany
$4,215 12% $35,233 Ohio State University
$4,195 09% $48,179 University of Minnesota
$4,136 05% $75,776 University of California-Los Angeles
$4,031 08% $49,404 University of California-Berkeley
$4,026 14% $28,962 University at Buffalo
$3,826 08% $50,020 University of Utah
$3,803 12% $32,234 Purdue University</p>

<p>Please define an admin. Does that include advisers, counselors, placement office? Many of those have been expanded due to student demands for same.</p>

<p>No one is questioning growing administrative spending, but some of us are looking for solid reasons why. And there are many VALID reasons, including the ones listed in earlier posts.</p>

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<p>Math fail.</p>

<p>I suppose there’s nothing that can be done to bring post secondary costs into line with inflation. I suppose that there are VALID reasons for the middle management model that they don’t even teach in their OWN BSchools to be utilized in colleges.</p>

<p>But, we will see what happens.</p>

<p>If parents smarten up and students, too, prices will go down. But, of course, they will cut professor pay and further eliminate tenure and keep the diversity deans who earn over a quarter million a year. :rolleyes:</p>

<p>Quite a few (erroneous, btw) assumptions in your argument, poetgrl.</p>

<p>I’m sure there are.</p>

<p>Are you saying the administrative costs of the universities are a good thing? Really beneficial? How so?</p>

<p>Nothing? Okay.</p>

<p>Are you saying, maybe, that schools have not been getting rid of tenure and relying on part time teachers even as they ramp up administrative costs?</p>

<p>Are you saying that the diversity deans are not being paid a quarter of a million dollars even though there have been links provided to these salaries in this very thread?</p>

<p>Or, are you saying that the cost will never go down and that kids will continue to borrow away their futures?</p>

<p>I think that one of the missions of the president of a tax exempt or state university ought to be to keep the costs down for the students. You may disagree, which is also fine.</p>

<p>Some of the increase in administrative costs is consumer driven. Back in my day there were no writing centers, tutoring services, IT departments and technology help desks, or psychological counseling services. Career counseling and academic counseling were minimal. There were no high-tech classrooms, no campus-wide wireless internet. Athletic facilities consisted of a musty old gym and some fields, not a state-of-the-art fitness center. You ate in a cafeteria with a bland and unimaginative menu put together by a nutritionist whose highest ambitious was to get you three square meals a day—not catered dining halls and a suite of snazzy eateries to appeal to every taste. Colleges now provide these extra bells and whistles because students (and their families) demand them, and in many cases will decide where to apply based in part on which schools have the best frills and amenities.</p>

<p>Another part of the increase is due to a changing competitive and financial environment. Back in the day colleges didn’t have big marketing and p.r. departments; they now feel they need them to remain competitive. Public university budgets were once a fairly simple affair: the legislature made annual appropriations, and most of the rest came from tuition. Public universities didn’t have multi-billion dollar endowments to manage, or big development offices to raise the funds. Faculty did some externally funded research but it wasn’t the billion dollar enterprise it is today, with centers and institutes on every imaginable topic, each with a director and staff as well as affiliated faculty, aimed at maximizing the university’s haul of research dollars. They didn’t have big bureaucracies to supervise and audit all the externally funded research, either; truth is, supervision was minimal, and some got in trouble for it. </p>

<p>That said, some of the growth is just plain bloat. I’ve never been convinced our public flagship here in Minnesota needs 8 vice-presidents, each commanding a small army of underlings to justify the VP’s existence. Seems to me 4 or 5 would suffice. But then, no one ever asked me.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal survey found that at most public flagships, administrative costs amount to something less than 10% of educational costs, so maybe this isn’t quite the massive crisis some make it out to be.</p>

<p>[The</a> Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/NONCLASS1212/]The”>http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/NONCLASS1212/)</p>

<p>I wouldn’t label it a “crises,” but I don’t work in the media and don’t need to write a salable headline.</p>

<p>I think it is one puzzle piece of a few, and some I might not even have thought of, which are creating upward price pressure where there ought to, in my opinion, be downward price pressure. JMO</p>

<p>I also have an issue with the fact, and it is a fact, that it is the professors and professor pay, which seems to be seen as the most sacrificable expense. I don’t agree with that, at all. </p>

<p>At any rate, maybe someone else can figure it out. I can’t figure out why our universities are failing our kids, in terms of affordability. The two things I’d most like to see change would be a higher percentage of tax money going to the schools and a lower percentage of money going to administrators. </p>

<p>I will bow out now. I am becoming repetitive.</p>