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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble.

My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million.

Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off.

The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing.

It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can.

Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.

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It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat condensing out of the ether who needed to be appeased. No meant no, but a yes was never enough.

To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action.

It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.

> Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.

Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value.

When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount.

All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people.

It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.

I agree, but quantifying value add is very hard. If we were just comparing small companies against each other then it would be straightforward to just look at each companies profit. But when you look at a team within a company, how can we say what that teams value add is?

Say we considered a simplified case and focused on a single engineering team that is solely responsible for a single product. Just looking at the revenue generated by that product is insufficient since it excludes the contributions of sales, marketing, business development, etc. in driving that revenue. And practice most engineering teams are dependent on other engineering teams for providing shared services and infrastructure.

Its also insufficient to just consider current revenue of a product. We also need to consider the potential future gains from a product, which is unknown.

And quantifying value add gets even harder when we start looking at individual people. Considering individual contributor engineers, there are numerous ways that one can contribute, ranging from developing new features, diagnosing and fixing bugs, writing and updating documentation, mentoring, interviewing candidates, etc.

> Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.

And there's a second-order casualty of that: the people who are assigned to report to such an engineer-become-manager.

This happened to me on my previous job. The most brilliant programmer I've ever worked with got promoted to a manager, for the dumb reason that the company's programmer salary bands didn't go high enough for what he was (way more than) worth. As a manager he had to have headcount reporting to him, and I got assigned to be one of that headcount. He had no interest in people-managing. I didn't begrudge him for that at all - but it was clear my own career would go nowhere reporting to someone with no interest in managing, so I left that job shortly after.

Padding certainly happens. The 'tech innovation incubator' at my college has a professional administrator. I worked in the same building. He had an office at the end of the hall, door open all the time. He came in (late) every morning with a pile of newspapers. Sat at his desk all day, reading all of them. Went home (early) having done precisely nothing. Got paid many times what faculty got paid.

> To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.

If this were the only reason, the invisible hand of the market would address this problem most of the time. Add too many administrators that add no value and you end up with a higher cost structure than your competitors and are not able to provide the same value.

Most of the time people demand more headcount because (1) they actually need more headcount to get the work done or (2) regulatory burdens force you to hire more headcount to deal with the regulations.

We're increasingly moving to a world where (2) happens more and more.

A good example on college campuses are things like campus police and kangaroo courts that deal with issues that should have been referred directly to city/state/federal law enforcement and the justice system.

Regular market forces don't hold for college tuition for a number of reasons. Chief among these being that many students are paying with loans. Secondly, some students and their families view education as a veblen good, whereby higher price implies even higher value.

I know that. I wasn't addressing college. The OP was talking about in his profession, which I think was safe to assume was a different industry/profession.

That's why companies grow to a certain point, and then start failing.

Fortunately, in the United States we have figured out how to avoid failure by continuously bailing out companies that get too large. So we fixed that.

The bankruptcy laws changed to allow bankrupt companies to continue operating and "emerge" from bankruptcy. I don't think this is an improvement.

> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.

This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US.

Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.

I agree with the thrust of your argument but my flagship state university is still affordable for anyone. It's not cheap, but in state tuition even if you pay sticker isn't so high you can't pay it off in a reasonable amount of time (in state tuition is ~$9k). It's a great university too (UNC) so part of the way they keep tuition for in state cheap is out of state students pay almost as much as private school tuition and there's a ton of OOS willing to pay it.

Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment.

Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't

Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)

As a non-American I've never really understood this "oh, in state is still cheap" argument. Does every state have a top university? What if your state doesn't have a good university for what you want to study? UNC sounds nice for people lucky enough to have been born in NC but why should out of state people pay more? Or do people move to a state specifically for the universities?

States pay for higher education systems as a part of their budget.

From https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article239..., $800 million from North Carolina tax payers to universities it sounds like.

Meanwhile, Germany is re-introducing fees for non EU residents: https://www.studying-in-germany.org/germany-will-reintroduce....

> Meanwhile, Germany is re-introducing fees for non EU residents:

€1500 per semester. Nothing compared to zzz USA or even UK fees.

That's how the UK fees started under Blair. Then Cameron came in, the principle of free education had already been abandoned, so all he had to do was tweak the price.

Remember that many US states are the size of European countries. This is the same deal that many countries in Europe have: subsidized tuition for residents.

Also, a lot of state systems have good schools: UC Berkeley, UMass Amherst, UIUC, UT Austin, and UW Madison come to mind.

Education is considered a state responsibility, not federal. Every state generally has a "flagship" university. And they usually have the important stuff covered, such as professional schools, so that their state's population has these needed skills.

If you are a smart enough student that you would gain admission to one of the highly-ranked flagship universities of another state, you are going to win scholarships to private schools too. The lower the rankings you are willing to go, the better scholarships you can get.

You can relocate to get in-state benefits but it may take awhile as states put conditions (e.g. living there for a year first, having a a job, etc) specifically to prevent people doing this.

In-state tuition for public schools has been rising to unjustifiable levels, too, just not at the rate of private schools.

I have relatives that were able to pay for their tuition with part-time jobs in college. Today, I'd have to take out a small mortgage just for a liberal arts degree.

I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere.

The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.

Yeah, hope this is clear that this is not happening everywhere. However, where it’s happening it should be exposed.

Thank you for your comment. That really fixed my perspective and calmed be down a bit. I'm a sucker for ragebait lol.

That makes your school an outlier.

You have to go down 502 schools on this list before you run into a leader that makes less than 200k/year.

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...

You seem to be looking at private schools which are going to pay higher, I’m talking about public.

Also that dataset is not at all representative. In fact, it seems to skew high. Of the 9 big schools in my state, only 2 are listed and they are the 2 biggest. The biggest, wealthiest schools have higher paid executives. Of all the public schools in the country mine is probably a little below the median.

Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!

I learned (when MIT shut down my former dorm) that they track the six year graduation rate (doubt anyone is attending all of the six years). That seems more sensible.

When I was in college, there was one (only 1) student who took 6 years to graduate. Students passing by him would often mumble "7 years of college, down the drain!"

(I won't spoil the joke, google it!)

As I recall, only a small handful took 5 years. This drifting along failing to graduate seems to be a modern phenomenon.

I was class of 1986, graduated 1988 (though TBF I had a full time job in another part of the country for my last two years so taking classes was...complicated).

This is undergrads, I know of a grad student who took 13 years (and three theses he refused to submit) until they handed him a PhD and showed him the door. Obviously in his case he didn't lack brains, just had a longstanding psychological issue.

Even for those who get doctorates, outside a small number of fields (e.g. CS) there's a long, soul-killing gantlet of post docs and RAs before either a position is obtained or you give up.

If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators.

I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.

In the telecom industry we had an adage, “Always cut staff before line.” Staff were overhead but line produced revenue. The same applies to teaching but it is not in the self-interest of administrators to cut staff.

They will soon find out the truth.

The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers.

To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.

To a large extent, anyone can already get access to the top university lectures in the world for a range of subjects already. Since top universities, chiefly MIT, have been recording and publicly sharing full-course classroom lectures for years. I think this shows that students care about more than just the lectures.

Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off.

The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.

Yea we really need to buck this trend, if anything we should be using city resources to prop up people affected by COVID so the cities economics don't collapse.

There was a post a day or two ago about how remote work makes it harder for people to value employees except as utilities, whereas if they work closely they value them more.

Top administrators are in charge of who gets cut, and they probably interact with other admins the most or rely on them personally for some task, so they are most sensitive to laying them off versus park staff (or faculty) who they don't interact with often, if at all. They aren't visible.

This alienation is what will cause more and more problems for society. It used to be nobility that had no idea of the lives of regular people. Now it’s the managerial and investor class who are losing touch with the rest of society by contracting out things, offshoring and reducing everything to simple numbers.

Those who want to learn more about the alumni complaints can go to this web site:

https://renewrensselaer.org/

It's really sad the plunder.

I attended RPI and recently had to recommend to a friend that they not send their child there. It made me sad. But the way the administration, and Shirley in particular, have been treating the students and the school has been so horrible.

Can someone explain to me the economics driving salaries for presidents of public/nonprofit universities up to $500k-$1M?

Are the people in these positions in possession of a skill that non of the people who would gladly hold the post for $150k have? What is it?

They're hired by a board of regents, right? What is the BOR looking for that they value so highly?

College presidents/chancellors don't do as much administrating as they do fundraising from alumni and donors. This is more true the higher up in university prestige you go. The amount of value they bring in from donor contributions far outweighs their salaried cost.

Exactly. University presidents easily pay for their salary many times over just through their fundraising activities. Presidents aren't chosen for their administrative prowess, but instead for their professional network and informal connections. Further, most people that could serve as president could easily draw a much larger salary in the private sector and many were formally C-level executives at larger companies where were paid such a salary. For them, becoming a university president is more about prestigious and service to an institute they value than it is about maximizing compensation.

I think the problem to focus on is the large and ever growing number of administrators and staffers throughout universities. One stat that always makes my eyes bulge is that while student enrollment and professors have both grown by about 50% between 1970 and 2010, yet the number of administrators have grown by 85% and administrative staffers grew by 240%! [0] If anything, administrators and staff should've decreased due to productivity improvements from technology.

There is so much fat to be cut from administrative ranks.

[0] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administ...

No one works in a vaccuum. If students and alumni are paying for prestige, then you need staff to ensure the prestige is maintained and grown. However if students and alumni are paying/investing in education you may need significantly less staff and more professors/teachers.

If you add the staff that a university president brings in to the payroll is the 5 million dollar/year president actually worth more than the 500k/year president?

Let's say you can increase your own salary, and no one is going to stop you from doing so. While some may not want to because it's a non-profit, others will happily nudge their pay upwards.

Eventually the universities that hesitated to raise their pay will be well below the pay of the others, and feel forced to raise their pay to something comparable to attract decent talent.

Same sort of trend occurring with CEO pay, just with a lot less hesitation because no one feels like they're robbing a charity.

Same thing happened to hospitals.

Name the school, no need to defend the guilty.

We can have a discussion without the pitchforks I this forum.

which college is this, if you don't mind me asking? I mean the dean of HR is making 1million ...

This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.

It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was:

  $945,000 in salary
  $276,474 in bonuses
  $31,874 in nontaxable benefits
  $5.8 million in deferred compensation

plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :|

p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)

Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer...

A 2015 Time Magazine article cited Jackson as the highest-paid college president ... for a stunning $7.1 million in total. That works out to more than $1,000 per student at her school".

That's pretty ridiculous considering that RPI's endowment isn't that big, so it's not like she could justify from fundraising.

Bingo.. I wrote the original post, I went to RPI. Dr. Jackson started the spring of my senior year.

BTW for California state employees including the public universities, the information is public so you can actually look it up.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/agencies/salaries/#univers...

I think most states publish this information as well, at least for employees making over a certain amount.

Possible Lesson Learned: Skip Leetcode and CTCI, study for the Berkeley Police Department exam!

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/berkeley/?&s...

That's actually very valid. I know somebody who works at a crime lab with >100k salary, lives in a cheap area of CA and can retire at 50 with full pension. Pretty sweet gig and if they want more money after retirement they can do some government contracting and consulting which is very well paid.

From personal experience in the industry right now, this is not the case at all institutions. I certainly haven't done a survey, but I know of a few that have been very equitable in their refund policy.

Maybe international students have begun to replace donations from alumni, so the university sees its alumni as more of a product than a relationship

If you haven't watched "Yes Minister", give it a try. It is a very good satire on beaurecracy.

If only it was a satire.

It is as an accurate depiction as you might wish for.

EDIT: the reality is worse.

The Thick of It is far more accurate.

Is it private or public

It's probably public since he knows their salaries. you can get a hold of most college employee salaries through state ran databases.

You can also pull salaries of key personnel for non-profits from their tax forms which covers manu(most) private universities.

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