America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal
economist.com
economist.com
The money is in selling sports and status. The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. An efficiently run university doesn't reflect well. It's the glitz and glamour that gets people's attention (especially employer attention).
You're misrepresenting why people attend university. Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping. Not all of us are gifted. And not all upper class jobs can be filled by gifted people. Some of us just want a way to enter a class that they would otherwise have no way of entering.
At least it's like this in my part of the world, then again most of my countries universities aren't for profit.
Yes, exactly. The gatekeeping and networking are facilitated by it being absurdly expensive hobby. Nobody wants to network with some random nobody from the slums. They want to connect with people who come from wealth. The bloat works to keep the risk high, pushing away those who aren't in the right class.
The solution is to pull out gov funding and ban education loans across the board as predatory practices. New things can only begin when the old dies, and we are continually trying to life support a system that is so obviously dead.
edit: I didn't even mention that they also must maintain enormous research operations, some of them performing research that is literally the bleeding edge of human knowledge. Like imagine trying to helm a corporation that is simultaneously invested in multi-billion dollar government grants for deep-tech R&D, alongside a portfolio of ~15 hotels, a minor-league football team, an urgent care, a landscaping company, and something like 10-20 high schools of students. Not to mention libraries, museums, gyms, food, etc. And god help you if your campus is more than 50 years old, because the cost of maintaining all those buildings are going to be insane. If you were able to do this all without bloat or graft honestly I think you'd a generational genius in management.
No, they are not. They just have access to unlimited taxpayer money in the form of unlimited student loans. Admin gets a cut of this, so obviously the more student loan money flowing through the school, the bigger the cut.
Even 20 years ago, my college required people living in the dorms to buy a certain minimum number of meals at $20 per shitty defrosted Aramark/Sodexo meal or more. And this was in NYC, I could have walked 2min in any direction out and gotten a much more nutritious and better tasting meal for $5 to $10 back in those days.
The root cause of the problem always has and will be the tap of unlimited taxpayer money. But with the benefit of tying it to a young person’s credit, so they keep their heads down and be good little worker bees.
This is an all-too-valid point, especially for "young people" who really are not ready to be independent adults.
If Chris graduates from high school, gets a 3/4-time job working at Pete's Pizza Parlor, rents a little apartment to live in, and starts taking old-fashioned correspondence courses from Snail Mail University - then there is near-zero social or legal expectation that Chris' landlord, or his boss Pete, or SMU will provide Chris with much anything in the way of baby-sitting, peer advisors, medical coverage, mental health services, recreational facilities, parallel justice systems, etc., etc.
Vs. if Chris' twin sibling Pat graduates from high school and goes to Big State University...and then has a major mental health crisis? There might be an ultra-luxury resort, somewhere on this planet, which actually provides the level of mental health service which seems to be expected of any university. Might.
Yes. The point is they shouldn't be.
And the ever-more-expensive-and-prestigious-and-diamond-encrusted competition between the "top" universities looks very much like the history of the House of Bourbon.
Which proved unsustainable - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
For example
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less 1.txtLook at the salaries of college admins and board of trustees. Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous.
Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater.
With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.
But a young, potentially productive and educated student who would ostensibly be looking to start a family and make more productive and more patriotic Americans, who has sunk a couple hundred thousand dollars into our higher education institutions still has to go through the gauntlet to earn the right to live in the US.
This is simply the free market though. Consider that, for its top executive roles, Harvard is recruiting people who are coming from or comparing the offer to C-suite positions. Harvard's endowment is $36 billion USD, and it takes in like $6 billion annually. It is the scale of a Fortune 500, where executive salaries are in the tens of millions. Like it or not, if you want to pull these top-tier executives to manage your Fortune 500-scale operation, this is what you need to compete against. You may think that's an oversized valuation given what they actually do (and I don't disagree), but from the perspective of the institution this is simply doing business. The only other option is admitting that all executives everywhere are massively overpaid, but good luck getting the US leadership class to acknowledge that one.
Maybe if they came from industry their skills can be argued but the majority of those administrators don't have any experience outside of academia.
So you're annoyed that the highly paid professionals have lots of experience in doing the thing they are paid to do? I suppose if one starts from the premise that all higher ed admin are incompetent by nature, or that managing a unit within a university requires no skill, then I can understand your conclusion, but to be honest I think you're kind of begging the question. The simple fact is that these are massive institutions, and running them is complicated and expensive. Again, if you compare the salary of the president of Harvard to a private organization of similar scale and wealth it's like a 10x difference. It's not clear to me why a university being a non-profit suddenly downgrades the skill required to keep it running.
Would those same over paid administrators manage to right their ships if the fat disappeared?
This happened at my alma mater which is a private college in New York during the pandemic. They had a massive hole in revenue and their over paid president was essentially kicked out. The diversity hire they brought in struggled just as much and the school is still hemorrhaging money. The presidents salary was $350k for BFE new York.
We're a few years from the pandemic and now they're dealing with reduced enrollment thanks to excessive tuition costs and declining alumni donations.
Harvard and other big institutions have intertia and status to float by. A lot of these other schools? Not so much.
Trim the fat and higher Ed corrects itself by flushing the grifters out .
Not really. There are software developers in Cambridge, MA making $300-$400K a year.
The problem is not the salary of individual administrators, but the bloated number of them.
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