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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jdlyga|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exhilaration|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: Comments below have corrected my recollection, previous discussions were mixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263
[+] [-] beamatronic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmcusick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|8 years ago|reply
And I don't imagine humans are that different between healthcare and education industries.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopamean|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasing|8 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] rasz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeecollins|8 years ago|reply
http://www.collegerank.net/best-college-pools/
[+] [-] Clubber|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcole2929|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ihsw2|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ataturk|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wildmusings|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Cd00d|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] fastball|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paultopia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrymyers|8 years ago|reply
http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/
Most of the these football programs finance all sports for these large universities.
College coaches are paid well because the programs they lead tend to be profit centers for the school.
[+] [-] geofft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DocSavage|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] distances|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wehadfun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neonhomer|8 years ago|reply
The real issue is what is the school spending money on that constantly increases tuition?
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kenjinp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimhefferon|8 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|8 years ago|reply
"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)
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7j755s/number_of_coll...
(2) https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/06/administrative-bloat...
(3) http://volokh.com/2010/08/24/administrative-bloat-at-univers...
(4) https://www.chronicle.com/article/Think-College-Costs-Too-Mu...
[+] [-] kharms|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradleyjg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EduardoBautista|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeeHwang|8 years ago|reply
We need a reformation for universities and their contract with society.
[+] [-] randomdata|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kevin_S|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] En_gr_Student|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmarreck|8 years ago|reply
All of these things are direct consequences of each other.