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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

> Colleges are now awash in money

It is not possible for me to overstate how very much this is not true at the college where I work, and at all colleges with which I have a personal connection.

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Of course not. They ARE AWASH in income. They just figure out how to spend it fast. Fancy buildings, fancy retirement plans, outrageous administrative salaries.... For example the Chairman of UMASS Medical Center makes 2.3 million. The CEO of Harvard makes 9.25 million. How are these jobs an order of magnitude harder than the governor of Massachusetts. (salary 150K) Or harder than the US President (salary 400K). I cannot help but laugh when someone says that 'captains of industry take huge risks and therefore deserve handsome reimbursement". How is it risky when all you have to do is decide how much to raise tuition? Riskier than our soldiers who face AK47 rounds in the sandbox? (What does a marine make, again?) How can we afford to pay our teachers so little? People who literally hold the future of America in their hands?

And now with distance learning, tuitions have not decreased by an order of magnitude though the overhead should have.

FWIW, both of those examples are not only the executives of a university, but also of a hospital system. The vast majority of college presidents make well under that, with a median in 2015 of 300k (https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publication...).

To be clear, the presidents of those institutions’ have a major goal of bringing in charitable contributions to those institutions. They are paid well in part because they bring a TON of money in.

But also, there are clearly power law effects here. Your claim is a little bit like looking at Jeff Bezos’s and Zuckerberg’s billions and concluding that all startup CEOs — including those without VC funding — are overpaid.

I have never heard this argument ("captains of industry take huge risks and therefore deserve handsome reimbursement"). What I have heard is that these people are paid market rate for their management skills because they could easily get a similar salary in other endeavors.

Then let those administration be hired elsewhere by the market. A university should not pay such a huge salary to administrators, somebody who is paid a lot less can do the same job. If it takes millions of dollars to hire an administrator at a university, you probably don't need that person. You could just as well hire a person who is willing to accept a smaller salary for the same job. We are talking about administrators who get paid millions for hardly doing anything... let them be hired by industry where they get more salary and hire someone cheaper.

I cannot stop you from believing things that are false, but I can only assert that they are false.

I worked as tech support at a major university in the US in the mid-90s in the College of Business Administration as an internship. The way it works is you get a budget. If you don't spend all of your budget, you get less budget next year. No department wants a lesser budget. This resulted in all professors, most who only use Word and Excel, to get $4000 brand new, top of the line Dells every year. I know, I had to set them up and deliver them.

This probably isn't how it works everywhere, but it's certainly the case in some places. This was a large public/state school.

It's not that extreme around here but if there is some money left over... You can be sure that it will be spent. It's not like management gets a bonus for not spending money.

There were a number of CIOs at Australian Unis who were done for contract fraud.

You can be more specific or provide some corrected numbers if something is false.

Do you want to think the president of the US to be paid a fraction of GDP (like .1%)? Since technically he probably has at least that much impact. Comparing private and public salaries is silly. Hedge fund analysts make more than the governor of Mass, should they get a pay cut?

Haha, I had lunch with Dr. Collins a few times in grad school at Umass: he's not a bad guy, just a medical executive that could go make that money elsewhere. He is pretty talented as well :)

I guess the bottom line is, does he deliver the value of that salary?

It depends a lot on who you know and what department you're in. In 40 of 50 states the highest paid public employee is a sports coach...

https://fanbuzz.com/national/highest-paid-state-employees/

At many universities athletics is a major revenue driver. There is a very real financial incentive to have high performing athletic programs.

I think for most universities it's not a significant profit driver, but I bet it's great marketing for prospective students.

Is this revenue driven by athletics separate from tuition fees? Because if it isn't, that only confirms the hypothesis.

Yes, it comes from broadcast revenues, merchandise, ticket and concession sales, and donations brought in through the athletic department.

Is that true? When I researched this last time it turned out most athletic programs loose money.

It's true for football or basketball programs in the NCAA.

It’s probably similar to health care in that the amount of money entering the system may be increasing, but the growing costs of bureaucracy are consuming all of it and more.

Most departments don't see it, but you also need to compare colleges to colleges of the 1900s, where most professors made VERY small salaries and campuses were spartan at best. Funds have increased tremendously

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