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'Administrative bloat' and the cost of higher education

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by LongTimeListener, Nov 16, 2012.

  1. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

    Pretty great story here about the rise of administrative positions on college campuses and the incredible salaries people make for jobs that don't seem all too central to the mission. A study shows that the number of administrators grew 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, a growth rate 10 times that of tenured faculty. At Purdue, the sample around which the article is built, they have a chief diversity officer ($198,000) and a marketing officer ($253,000).

    The colleges say they need people raising funds and administering the grants. But then there are places like UConn, which is reviewing salaries after the discovery that the campus police chief makes $256,000 a year, more than New York City's police commissioner.
     
  2. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Admittedly not having read the article yet, my first impulse seems to be that this is like when people complain that ticket prices to sporting events are high because Prince Fielder makes "too much money."

    Isn't tuition price a matter of simple supply and demand?
     
  3. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Seeing stories like this makes me wonder why I don't go into administration sometime. Then I remember ... the meetings, good God, the meetings.

    Plus, there's the fact that I'd suck at it.
     
  4. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    That's mentioned in the article, but at a public university it's also a taxpayer problem. That's discussed in the Purdue example; we're living it out here with the UC system. (Depending on perspective, it could be seen as a universal problem too because of federal loans and grants and such at private schools.)

    Faculty are going after this problem. And they're not a group that's going to let it drop.
     
  5. poindexter

    poindexter Well-Known Member

    Times are tough in the UC system in California, but not tough enough that UC San Diego needed a new diversity officer.

    Now UCSD has filled the position and announced the new vice chancellor’s salary. Linda Greene, a diversity bureaucrat and law professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will pull in $250,000 a year in regular salary, but that’s just the beginning: she’ll receive both a relocation allowance of $60,000 and 100 percent reimbursement of all moving expenses, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, two fully paid house-hunting trips for two to the San Diego area, and reimbursement for all business visits to the campus before her start date in January 2013. (By comparison, an internationally known expert in opto-electronics in UCSD’s engineering school, whose recent work has focused on cancer nanotechnology, received a little over $150,000 in salary from UCSD in 2011, according to state databases.) The UCSD press office did not respond to a request for the amount the university paid the “women-owned executive search firm with a diverse consulting team” it used to find Greene.

    Last week, the UC Regents, the university’s lay overseers, approved the new vice chancellorship and its compensation package, as first reported in the San Diego Reader. Since this summer, the regents have been shilling for Governor Jerry Brown’s $8 billion November tax initiative, arguing that the only way to save the university from financial and academic ruin is to jack up the state’s upper-bracket income and sales taxes. Their rubber-stamp approval of UCSD’s senseless new appointment, with its sky-high salary, shreds whatever remaining budgetary credibility they may have had. And of course the diversity machine is operating at fully funded throttle throughout the rest of the University of California; among the diversity initiatives that continue to cascade out of the president's office and the individual campuses is an imminent $662,000, system-wide “campus climate survey” to track down the racism of UC's faculty, staff, and students that is allegedly putting UC’s “most marginalized and vulnerable populations . . . at risk,” in the words of UC President Mark Yudof. If there are reasons to support the Brown tax initiative, rescuing an allegedly financially strapped UC that has made hard choices to survive is not one of them.


    http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0920hm.html
     
  6. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    What exactly does a diversity officer do?

    "STOP! You don't look diverse enough!"
     
  7. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    It's mostly to keep Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred off campus, I think.
     
  8. When has tuition dropped when enrollment drops?
     
  9. poindexter

    poindexter Well-Known Member

    Cal State Long Beach president makes $320k plus free housing plus an undisclosed private foundation amount. Higher $ than the governor of California.

    http://www.lbreport.com/news/nov12/csucomp.htm

    Thank god Prop 30 passed in California so we wouldn't have to cut admin salaries cut classes and teachers and high school sports.
     
  10. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    And good thing the CSU system has a unionized faculty keeping those admins in line, otherwise this would be even worse ... [/ducking]
     
  11. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    Not when the demand is being artificially inflated by the government pumping cheap or free money into the system. This is one of those "unintended consequences" of market-intervention that liberals like to ignore until after the fact.
     
  12. poindexter

    poindexter Well-Known Member

    Its just like the housing market of a decade ago. As high as tuition is today, you can find a loan to cover it.
     
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