Comment by throwawaysocks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysocks | Hacker News Reader

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> You can throw administrators into "professorial caste"

That makes about as much sense as throwing the C-suite of a manufacturing company into the "laborer caste". Administrators these days mostly aren't former professors and have very different jobs.

> Here are the salaries of professors at George Mason

First and most important, GMU falls into that "elite" class I mentioned earlier. It's atypical; as an R1 institutions, their professors are paid on average far better than professors at the huge majority of higher ed institutions in the US.

Outside of places like GMU, professors make closer to mid five figures. Again, we don't have to speculate. Use Google if you don't believe me.

Even then, you'll notice my point still stands -- the reporting you linked to just completely tops out around the typical base salary of top tech firms. If professors are benefiting, they aren't exactly getting rich.

> The payroll is dominated by professors

1. "Dominated" is a bit of a stretch. The page you link lists 4,043 employees, and other GMU data states there are 1,263 full-time instructors (which will include non-professors, BTW).

2. GMU has an atypically small student:teacher ratio.

3. It doesn't follow that professors benefiting the most from this growth.

4. At a place like GA, professors are also typically bringing in more money into the university in the form of grants.

> And how is the financial industry benefitting from the peddling of useless college degrees?

> Private student loans only account for 8% of student loan debt

So "only" 80,000,000,000. Not to mention handling endowments, etc.

How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...

> If professors are benefiting, they aren't exactly getting rich.

I didn't say they were rich. I said they were upper middle class. The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/aaup-survey-f.... Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k.

My point is that academic jobs are generally well-paying and secure, and they're paid-for by kids taking out huge debt to keep the whole show going. And the show keeps going because we tell fairy tales about the importance of a college education.

> How much do you want to bet there are 0.01%ers who made their wealth off of higher ed? Because those people almost surely exist, and sure as hell weren't professors...

First, a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll. The vast majority of the $500 billion spent on higher education each year isn't going to financiers. It's going to faculty, facilities, etc. Second, the financiers wouldn't be getting rich either if we went back to only sending 10% of the population to college.

> GMU is a commuter school ranked outside the top 100

GMU is R1.

R1 unis compensate faculty unusually well compared to other institutions, regardless of other social prestige indicators. R1-level compensation is not typical of US universities, period.

> The average salary for a full professor in the U.S. is $135,000

You've grossly mis-interpreted this data.

Notice that the data breaks down salaries by the type of institution (phd-granding, masters-granding, bachelor-only) .

The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.

Many professors never become full professors or become full professors very late in their career (55+).

According to your data, the average for an Associate Professor is $70,334 - 88,306, which is a better comparison because most professors are not full professors for most of their career (especially at non-R1 schools, where budgets often trump professional competence considerations in terms of full professorship appointments).

Also, many full-time instructional staff aren't professors. Instructors make average or below-average salaries (your data says $45-$57 average).

> Median personal income in that age bracket is about $40-50k

Unless we adjust for the fact that all professors have bachelors degrees, then we add 10-20k depending on your data source.

So typical professors 10-20k above average and typical instructors make maybe a few k extra or below average.

Oh, and note that this is all the upper tier of the tertiary education system. Instructors at community colleges are often doing so as a second job or scraping by on less than their students make in their first positions -- far more akin to high school teachers in terms of social status and earning power than anything else. Damn leeches...

Upper middle class indeed... eye roll

> a few people getting rich isn't as big of a concern as tens of thousands of moderately expensive people on payroll.

It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.

We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.

> Notice that the data breaks down salaries by the type of institution (phd-granding, masters-granding, bachelor-only) .

> The average for a full professor is far closer to $91,935 because the vast majority of faculty/instructors in the US work at non-Ph.D. granting institutions.

Okay, fair point. But schools that don't grant a doctoral degree are also the cheapest institutions (elite liberal arts colleges aside)--the ones where students aren't taking out huge student loan debt to attend. So those aren't really the target of my ire.

> It is a bigger concern because it's needless waste.

You're fixated on some people getting rich when the real problem is that we spend $500 billion a year on giving kids higher education that very few of them actually need. That's the big waste.

If we cut our higher-education spending by 1/3, we could cut a $10,000 check each year to every single kid in poverty. If we cut it by 2/3, we could additionally pay for health insurance for every uninsured American.

We're forgoing game changing improvements in quality of life so that a bunch of 18-22 year olds can waste time learning things they'll forget the minute they graduate.

> We could slash instructors/professor's wages if we want to re-create our shitty secondary education system at the college level. But other than that, professors/instructors are the singular necessary input for providing higher education. Loan servicing is not necessary for providing education.

My argument isn't that "professors are paid too much." It's that we have too much higher education. Higher education is intrinsically expensive: as you say, professors are necessary input, they get paid above average wages, and we're not automating them away anytime soon. Consequently, we shouldn't encourage millions of kids each year to take on huge amounts of debt to get an education that's worthless.

> My argument isn't that "professors are paid too much."

Well, okay.

> It's that we have too much higher education.

This seems well-covered in other threads. I'll just say two things:

1. A secondary education from a typical US high school is woefully insufficient for most well-paying jobs in the USA, and this is only likely to become more true over time.

2. Employers are on balance unwilling to invest in educating and training workers.

The argument about what to do is one we should perhaps have, and has been had in other threads, but it is most important to realize the need for something beyond high school.

You'll be hard pressed to find many of these "we have too much higher education" claimants who don't send their kids to college. rayiner himself is a lawyer.

No, it's always other people's kids who shouldn't go to college. Is that because there is 'too much higher education' or because they know that if everyone has that level of education, it's more difficult for their kid to succeed easily?

How many of these "there's too much higher education" folks can be heard calling Americans 'stupid' for not knowing x-y-z, 'foolish' for not investing in a/b/c or falling into this cultural or financial pitfall or another?

"Stupid people" are the only group in America that it's politically correct to make fun of, yet, rayiner wants people to be less educated. Why might that be?

Could it be that those who already have financial success due to their education -- much of which was bought and paid for by relatives and taxpayers -- don't want to lose their easy success and their cultural punching bags?

What other benefit is a population unexposed to the topics of higher education? That has never been made clear to me.

> My point is that academic jobs are generally well-paying and secure

That is a completely wrong assumption for the United States. 66% of faculty positions today are non-tenure track, also known as adjunct or contingent faculty (source: http://agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforc...). Median salary for adjunct faculty is $31k a year (source: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Adjunct_Professor/Sa...)

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