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Comment by grigjd3 | Hacker News Reader

I saw academic bloat run sky-high when I was a post-doc. Today, I think about saving for my daughter's college, which I am fortunate enough to be able to do. It's infuriating that the money is going to paying for self-preserving bureaucracy and campus beautification projects like replacing the flowers every month. From what I've read, it's even worse today.

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The highest paid public employee in my state is a college basketball coach.

I think it's less about the amount any one person is paid and more about the huge number of administrators moving paper from one desk to another.

I went to a private liberal arts college with a few thousand students. We had a Dean and four assistant Deans, all of whom made multiple six figures a year. Our president when I was there made $450k/yr and had next to no living expenses.

Private v. public has nothing to do with academic bloat.

Exactly this! I attended a major southern public university and the administrative overhead there was immense. Not only that, you had high placed administrators who "retired" only to immediately return as high dollar consultants. Whole thing stinks.

Closely followed by an army of "Deans of Diversity and Inclusion" and others like that, at around $400K/year.

I too live in Michigan. Dantonio's salary is ridiculous.

Jim Harbaugh makes even more.

But Big 10 football (and basketball) runs at a profit for the schools, it's the big salaries at smaller sports programs that don't make financial sense.

> self-preserving bureaucracy

When academia is run as a business and subsidies are drastically cut, you need to devote resources into acquiring new customers, which means competing with other universities who are doing the same thing. Hence the rapid increases in campus amenities and business administration positions that never existed 30 years ago.

> campus beautification projects like replacing the flowers every month

Out of all things to complain about, flowers on campus are on the low end of the totem pole. Let them plant flowers, I say! I enjoy them.

When a school with ~4000 students has a multimillion dollar flower replacement budget, it says a lot.

>It's infuriating that the money is going to paying for self-preserving bureaucracy and campus beautification projects like replacing the flowers every month.

You forgot paying for sports facilities...

Edit: Downvotes for wondering why universities are paying millions for sports facilities. Nice.

It gets worse, the army of governors, deans, vice chancellors and council of senates all making over $400k at a university here built luxury condos on endowment lands with tuition fees to speculate on.

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