I guess the CSUs have gone to shit since I graduated. On the other hand, I’ve had a bitch of a time finding steady work until just recently, seeing as how I graduated with a Computer Science degree shortly before the nadir of the dot-bomb era.
True but that viewpoint is self-serving and irrational. Odds are that professors have a greater impact, long-term, on the school’s reputation and preformance. Administrators are, IMHO, largely a wash. As a said, all effective ones tend to leave for brighter prospects, leaving second-raters. The fact that they waste resources bringing other second-raters onboard does not make them more valuable second-raters.
brewha
It’s worse: assuming a 20% increase at each year, you’re paying something like $2.07 for every $1 from your first year.
Year 1,Year2,Year3,Year4,Year5
$1,$1.2,$1.44,$1.728,$2.0736
This brings up a problem unique to academia:
You can get a group of people who make the decisions on running the college. Since they make the decisions, they decide that their fellow administrators and the like are important…ergo…they are important and get good salaries. Combine this with the ease that profs can be replaced and the limited downside of hiring a ‘bad’ prof…and you have a system out of whack.
In the private sector, there is a check on this. I’ve actually seen it happen:
In a nutshell, I work as a statistician in a market research environment (I love it 
). When interviewing, I sometimes run into a situation in which they seem interested and I seem interested…we get to salary…and my jaw drops at how little they offer. I mean…EXTREMELY LOW salary. I then know that they are the type of office that values ‘interpersonal’ and devalues ‘mathematical’ skills (like a person can’t be both).
The problem is…that the mathematical skills are important…and if you try to grow a company without them, you are limiting a large area of growth and profitability. Sure, you can hire second-raters, but they will get eaten alive by companies that take it seriously.
Back to the story – A company literally offered my $25K a year. When I was done choking, I asked them to guess what I currently made…when they found out…THEY choked. There was no way, from their perspective, that I was worth it. They actually hired me as a consultant for one week where I went in, saw what they did and make suggestions as to how they could compete. One of the things I told them was that, at a minimum, the math people have to be treated equally pay-wise as the non-math and most likely will have to be paid more. I provided stats to show that was true in the industry.
They took my report, said they liked it and proceeded to try to implement all the suggestion except anything dealing with compensation. I knew someone at the company and so had updates…3 years later they downsized…2 years later closed the door.
This is what happens in the private sector when you have the powers-that-be in a company with ideas out of whack with reality…they suffer and/or die.
Colleges? There is no real check on them.
UC it is, then. Better get my grades up before I transfer.
That’s because you can’t get fired from a government job without seriously trying to. I worked like a dog to get kicked out of the Air Force, personally. And my parents have often told me the story of the federal employee at a major DC office who just stopped working: he showed up every day and sat in his chair staring at the wall for 8 hours. Didn’t do a damn thing all day: didn’t work, didn’t talk, didn’t eat at his desk, and since he didn’t actively do anything “objectionable”, there was nothing they could do about it except to (a) promote him out of the office or (b) let him keep on doing it until retirement. They chose B, but I hear a lot of federal offices choose A. I imagine state governments aren’t much different, particularly this one, even though the city government here likes to do a lot of scapegoat firing.
I can’t tell you the names of any of the MIT administrators from the 60s, but I sure can tell you which professor put their linguistics department on the map.
Oh, aye. Cold brutal reality dictates that are cmpanies are constantly hungry for each toher. Nice juicy corporate cannibalism. If you try and break with reality, well, it’s quite as definite as engineering (good management requires too much personal interaction and too many variables) but it WILL come back to haunt you just as engineers can’t get away with ignoring the laws of physics and materials science.
Universities, not so much.
Personally, I have no idea who though it was a good idea to let colleges set their own salaries and so forth. Maybe back in the day when they were smaller and more focused, it worked. These days? Legislatures need to step into state colleges and put some controllers in, appointed by them, and not beholden to anyone else.
Oh my gosh, this is ME! I came to my small liberal arts college (at $18K+ a year originally) with a promise of roughly 1 semester a year free. Now, tuition is $24K a year. My “scholarship” for maintaining a 3.93? still almost $9K. The piece of human waste and a drag on the entire university because in 3 years on the bench and 3 games into a 0-3 season, he still hasn’t managed to figure out that you don’t throw where the other team is? He gets a full ride. Oh, that also includes a stipend. And, he gets to help recruit NEW football players by taking them to the most expensive restaurants (no small feat in Red Bank) and only can manage a B+ as the highest grade EVER. WTF am I doing wrong?
Back to the tuition stuff. The new president of the college had the old historic house the presidents gets to live in torn down because the rooms were too small to host big parties (which get held in the gigantic mansion on campus that serves also as the admin building anyway) to get an enormous replics built in its place. Unfortunately, the replica doesn’t look like a victorian home at all. It looks like a McReplica. And, they got the demolition started about a month early, so there wasn’t enough time to go in and take all the architectural gems. There were sinks and bathtubs still in there. The formet president decided to take almost everything else when she left. Can’t wait to get out. 27 weeks.
Wasn’t there a report (Forbes maybe?) a couple years ago showing that, not only aren’t the best paid CEOs those who work best, but often they work worse than not-so-ultrapaid counterparts? Some of the guys with the most-impressive resumes had them because they basically hadn’t lasted 6 months in any job, but their golden parachute kept getting bigger and bigger… and their resume more impressive.
Sounds like the same applies to university presidents.