Look at the salaries of college admins and board of trustees. Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous.
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 .
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.
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.