Ok, so if Congress voted itself a million dollar salary, that’s okay because they worked hard.
And Bernie Madoff earned every penny.
And those Enron guys were entitled to as much money as they could take, right up until their company crashed.
It could well be that the university is getting hosed. I have no idea about this specific case.
The issue is I thought a more general one: can huge salaries to university presidents be justified at all?
To which my answer is - yes, if it can be shown that the guy has real skills in bringing in the donation cash.
The issue is not whether he’s the only person on the planet who can do it, but rather what the going rate is for people who have a proven track record of being able to do it. My assuption is that pretty well any person given the prestige of a major university president can pull in X$, but that there is a rather more limited subset who can maximize the X + Y$ amount; the Y being the extra money a really skilled fundraiser can pull in.
If “Y” is significantly more than the difference between the salary of the guy who can pull in X$ in funding and the salary of the guy who can pull in X + Y, then how can it be said that the university is getting hosed? They are making money on the deal.
Fine but paying to attend a university is not the same as paying for a widget. Presumably a student could choose another university and shop around for the best deal. Unfortunately you lose a lot of time in your education doing that (generally having to repeat some classes and so on). So, while you may find a university with lower tuition you will spend more time getting your degree which probably balances out or trumps the savings you might realize. Add in state residents get a substantial break in tuition at their state schools so there may be nowhere else to go at all that will be a better deal.
So, the students are semi-stuck and have to take what the university charges them. At UW tuition is rising 14% this year and 14% next year. Well past inflation.
I do think that at some point, money doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to the rest of us. Where that number is, I don’t know- but, well…
I think long and hard about spending twenty bucks on a dinner. Anything more expensive than that is a Big Deal. But do you think, say, Paris Hilton (to pick a particularly obvious example) cares when she drops a cool thousand bucks on dinner? Past a certain point, money isn’t a necessity- it’s a tool.
And that’s the problem, I think. Maybe people to whom money is a tool shouldn’t be making financial decisions for people to whom money is a necessity. There’s no common point of reference.
Don’t get me wrong- I’m not saying there’s anything necessarily wrong with bringing in the megabucks. But I am saying that money means something different to the people who bring in the megabucks.
Personally I think people are ‘entitled’ to make as much as they can. I HATE people who spend all their time grousing about the salaries of others, or attempting to figure out what others make and then being all hurt and upset when they find out that others make more than they do. Personally, I don’t give a shit what someone else makes…if they are able to parlay what they have into a pile of money a year, well, more power too em. Myself, I know I always try and get top dollar for my own services.
-XT
Sad but true. At the same time, given my current financial circumstances, odds are good I’ll still be making student loan payments from my social security retirement checks. I have no problems with students protesting tuition increases–but do have a problem with their logic in linking that to the salaries of “Authority Figures”. Some guy on this board even started a thread about capping lawyers incomes–I kinda figured if I wandered in to that thread, I’d likely pick up my first official warning and/or get banned when I cut a promo on him that melted the internet–so I vented in this thread instead.
The nice thing about the outrage and public display of dissaproval, is that something may be done about it to curb these excessive salarys. I guess in your world, nothing should have been done when women and african americans were 'whining" about the inequality’s involved in regards to the civil rights movement and womens lib.
Universities pay too damn much for football coaches and presidents. They also have a bunch of deans making a lot of money too. They are top heavy.
Doesn’t football bring in a lot of funds and advertising and such about a school? Doesn’t it increase the probability that students will want to attend a school that has a notable sports team? Frankly, I don’t really like sports like football much, but I think there is a good case to be made that schools like USC or UCLA (or my own U of A) tend to attract students to a certain extent because of their sports teams…and that means tuition and funding.
Regardless, if schools want to pay high salaries for their administrators and coaches and the like then that is THEIR business. You can always choose not to go to school if you really don’t want too, or choose to go to a cheaper school…a community college or the like. Here in New Mexico, if you are a resident, you can go to the NM community college for practically nothing. Or, you can go to UNM for a much higher tuition rate and enjoy watching the Lobo’s get their asses kicked regularly, from what I understand. Choice is yours.
-XT
I can see the unfairness involved in paying a woman less than a man (or a Black person less than a White person) to do the same or comperable work.
What is the unfairness involved in paying a lot of money for a university president - assuming, as I posted above, that s/he’s bringing in even more money?
Seems to me that the outrage and disapproval is only warranted if these people do not perform in a manner worthy of their huge salaries.
Oh bullshit. Everybody that disagrees with you is not a woman-hating racist. You embarrass yourself by posting that drivel.
See the link in post #26. It seems in most cases (not all) the athletic departments at universities are a net loss. I suppose you might say people will come and pay higher tuition if there is a good sports team but not sure how you would quantify that. The university I went to had downright awful sports teams and they had no problem filling the school and charging through the nose.
I could go with this for a private university/college. Not sure the consideration is the same for a public school which everyone in the state helps pay for.
Supply and demand. Law professors make more than English Lit guys. I suspect medical faculty make more than liberal arts faculty as well. As the son of two liberal arts faculty, I saw it first hand. I once asked my dad why the football coach made so much more than he did, when my dad was obviously smarter, better educated, and actually teaching students. He replied that more people were willing to pay to watch the football team than to hear one of his lectures on history. To a certain extent, I suppose that says something unpleasant about modern society, but it is what is.
Indeed, apparently Oakminster lives in a world where no one ever got more than they deserved. In his world, no one ever got where they are because of their family connections or their frat brother’s networks. Every one is totally honest and hard working and got everything they have on their merits.
:rolleyes:
:dubious:
The issue isn’t how much people make. It’s about conflicts of interest. No one cares about Derek Jeter or Angelina Jolie earning $20 million because they aren’t setting their own salaries from either taxpayers money or at the expense of shareholders. The Yankees or movie studios pay them based on what they think they are worth in terms of generating revenue.
If the CEO of a failing company takes home $20 million, people should rightfully be outraged. Well, maybe if you aren’t a shareholder it’s probably no business of yours unless the government decides to bail them out. But it does clearly indicate that their compensation is not tied to performance.
But as for regular lawyers or bankers “making a comfortable $500,000 a year and flying first class”*, who cares? It’s not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things. If you want to make that kind of money so bad, study your ass off, go to MBA or law school and then spend the next 20 years working 100+ hours a week at someplace like Goldman Sachs or Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
- Gordon Gekko quote
Congress can’t actually do that anymore.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Bernie Madoff is facing 150 years in prison for his crimes.
Jeff Skilling is currently appealing his Enron conviction to SCOTUS.
cite
Comparing successful people to unconstitutional or criminal activity isn’t a fair argument. Or an effective one.
I’m not sure that the problem is with high salaries, but with too high salaries. $900K for shmoozing the legislature and donors to get money to keep tuition reasonable, fine. $900 K for losing and pissing of donors and rolling over when the legislature wants to screw the students (like in California now) not so fine. And the students should get more pissed off at the state legislatures who are destroying the educated base of the state, but they are usually far away from campus, so the president who gives in is an easier target.
I think some of this might be fallout from the hate of the jackoffs in business who destroyed the economy but still think they deserve high salaries. There is more entitlement there for less reason than any 100 students.
The idea that supply and demand applies to government office in the same way it does in the free market.
Not the least of which is that these are public service positions and they have control of taxpayer funds. The more they allocate for their own salaries and benefits the less they can allocate to the rest of the system. $ 50,000 off of the salary of every member of Congress would amount to millions that could be spent on other programs. A drop in the bucket you say? Yeah, that’s what every department that wants just a little more from the budget says.
That article is misleading, because it conflates two very, very different entities: the football/men’s basketball programs (which make money) and the “Athletics departments” in general (which usually lose it). This is a very common rhetorical bait-and switch used by critics of college sports. If you look at the actual report (pdf) the article was based on, you’ll find in table 3.6 that the majority of 1-A football and men’s basketball programs make money, including most of them that have million-dollar coaches.
Athletic departments lose money because nobody is gonna pay much to see college tennis or cross-country, etc. And yet hundreds of those athletes get scholarships, practice facilities, coaches, and fly cross-country for tournaments.
The especially big money-losers are women’s sports – if you look at table 3.32, you’ll see that the average 1-A school loses well over a million dollars on women’s basketball every year. But whereas 1-A schools can argue, with some merit, that losing money on football is OK because they’re trying to become one of those revenue-generating schools, unless you are Tennessee or UConn nobody make money on women’s basketball, and likely never will. However, under Title IX, schools are required to spend money on women’s sports, even though they are a drain on the budget.
The reality on the ground is that what one is worth is not based on the free market as it is in the US, but globally. Jobs have been leaving this country in droves when companys can outsource them for cheaper labor and skills.
It is only fitting and a matter of time before the wages of CEO’s and the like have thier wages reduced to that of other countries.
What comes around, goes around.