Hacker News Reader

Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs.

Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs.

I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority.

I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.

View on HN

Remove the administrators.

"Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...

The administrators aren't really the problem per se, though. They're there to address mandates from various levels of government. Colleges won't reduce the number of administrators because they can't under the current bureaucratic regime.

I have a really hard time believing they had to triple the number of administrators due to government regulations.

How do we know that you are correct? Maybe universities do have bloated staffs. Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center.

People are offering solutions without following the money.

>Salaries, benefits, retirement are going to be a lot more costly than nicer dorms and a fitness center.

no doubt. Just look at these salaries :) http://ucpay.globl.org/

Wow, you were not kidding at all. 148 people with pay over a million dollars. We need a much lower ceiling on pay when it comes to public institutions that are supposed to be not for profit.

My thought is a cap on the multiplier on the minimum wage (for example, a 50 times multiplier at a minimum wage of $15 per hour would mean an annual cap of $15 * 2000 * 50 or $1.5M). Similarly, a private corporation could declare that it will cap its pay at 100 times multiplier of the minimum wage.

I think this is something the Regents of the University of California system could easily impose if they had the will to do so. Would a pay policy like that be illegal? Would it be considered conspiring or "fixing" if it applies to everyone at the organization?

You misread the page. The table of top salaries contains separate rows for each year between 2004 and 2014. I can't figure out how to show only a single year, but it would be about 25 people making over $1M/yr (since most of those rows are since 2010).

I don't see what being not-for-profit has to do with salary caps. But the whole reason that the head coach is paid so much is that the football team is being run as a for-profit enterprise, which is a seemingly rational thing for the university to do, yet I think it makes sense to restrict universities from distracting themselves with that sort of enterprise related to their purpose.

http://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/Regulations_Task_Force_...

"The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates—approximately 2,000 pages of text—and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day. As a result, colleges and universities find themselves enmeshed in a jungle of red tape, facing rules that are often confusing and difficult to comply with."

You don't think colleges would rather have the money than all these extra paper pushers?

That depends on how the people at the top see themselves

- "We want all responsibilities, Minister, if they mean extra staff and bigger budgets. It's the breadth of our responsibilities that makes us important, makes YOU important, Minister. When you see vast buildings, huge staff and massive budgets, what do you conclude?"

- "Bureaucracy?"

- "No, Minister, you conclude that at the summit there are men of great stature and dignity who hold the world in their hands and tread the earth like princes."

Your offered explanation seems too sweeping and unrealistically generalized to approximate reality in any meaningful fashion.

Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers.

You know the dorms and dining halls at these schools were pretty much the same 20 years ago (before tuition costs started mushrooming as insanely as they have) as they are now, right? So perhaps one should look elsewhere as to where the rising costs have been coming from.

(Fitness centers being an optional expense at many schools, and something from a different animal than the subject of basic operational + living expense costs).

This is certainly not true at some universities. For instance, at the University of Michigan dorms have been renovated on an annual cycle (around one building a year) at an expense of millions of dollars for small renovations and tens of millions of dollars for larger ones. These larger upgrades often include fancy dining halls with lots of options, along with well-appointed interiors. Furthermore, the number of new buildings and construction projects (about 10-12 currently) at any given time is insane in my opinion, though some are funded by donors for specific uses so can't be reallocated.

Ok -- we can tone them down a bit.

But "remove" them?

>My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college

Woah, this is the logic that is getting us in trouble!

66% of people already go to college. Of those who go, only 50% graduate. So...

1) Does "college" matter or does learning a marketable skill mater? If we had 100% college enrollment and completion but everyone was getting a degree in native American studies, would we somehow be better off?

2) At what level of enrollment does it become more cost effective to simply extend high school 2-4 more years and just consolidate it?

College in its present form is in trouble because the lions share of college attendees are; white women, taking non STEM degrees, taking on federal loans, and having a lower workforce participation rate at the end of it.

College is about learning, not about what a huge chunk of it has become; safe spaces, community outreach, nice dorms, cafeterias, dating, fitness centers and generally taking a hiatus from life. We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.

> white women

> safe spaces

haha political correctness is so stupid right!?

> We really need to redefine college in its present form, it is no longer what it was 50 or 100 years ago.

The norm in Australia is to "take a break from life" for 2 years, living on campus, and then to live like an adult, buying groceries and cooking food for the final two years.

Most things are stupid when taken to extremes. Political correctness has jumped the shark at many schools.

Why don't you start by cutting the football program.

Apparently these are a huge net (monetary) gain for most schools.

Is that true? I remember hearing that the University of Kentucky's basketball program ran a net profit, but also that it was pretty unusual in that respect.

Yes, this is also true for the University of Michigan athletics department, which in a recent year spent around $145 million and earned $158 million in revenue.

And -- surprise! -- the University of Kansas.

Of course, it's not enough for something to return a profit; it needs to return more profit than an alternative use of the funds. Perhaps it could have made more money investing in postgrad startups?

My understanding is that the UK basketball program is self-sustaining, and additionally turns a profit for the university. It's not taking university funding to begin with.

(Also, much as I'm disdainful of university athletics, declaring that only the most profitable programs have a place on campus seems like a really amazingly horrible idea.)

I don't see why you can't have other extra-curricular profit centers in school. Why don't universities run application development, art, design, & business management together? Make some products to sell.

The vast majority of colleges lose money on college sports. And when I say "money", I mean millions of dollars that come directly out of students' pockets in higher fees. Here are the numbers: http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2014/08/ncaa_study_finds_...

WaPo writeup: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...

"The frantic spending race is playing out differently across the country. Higher coaches salaries, while common, are just part of an array of expenses soaring at athletic departments that fail to profit.

At the University of California Berkeley, the mortgage on athletics buildings went from $0 to $23.4 million in a decade. At the University of Wisconsin, annual maintenance and spending on facilities went from $10.5 million to $38.2 million. At Florida State, pay for athletics staffers — not including coaches — went from $7.7 million to $15.7 million. At other schools, rising costs for travel, severance pay, recruiting and other items combine to keep athletics in the red."

This is important. Most probably, the sports is proving a big factor that is killing the education in USA [1]. Excessive indulgence of US educational institutes (schools, colleges and universities) in sports has been a very big mistake made by the US society.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com