Oh pity the poor colleges... how will they fund their over-the-top, debt-financed facilities and football teams?
Some overhead is necessary of course, you need buildings and offices and the people who take care of them but it's likely more bloated than it needs to be.
I saw them take 60% as overhead at one of my institutions.
I know of some institutions with F&A rates at or above 70%!! I presume that an institution trying to negotiate a higher F&A rate than this would have some significant pushback!
And even with all that universities still have better a more altruistic profit alignment than most private firms.
People keep trotting this line but without any substantial proof. Harvard's highest paid employee is a faculty member, David Malan, of the popular CS50 course earning $1.6 million annually [1]. It's always been faculty members earning even more than the President.
I assume you're counting Harvard Management Company, the firm managing Harvard's endowment. Yeah, the CEO earns $9 million annually, which is quite high [2]. But there's a catch; were he in the private industry managing a $50 billion+ fund, he'll easily clear $50 million+ in annual compensation, if not $100 million depending on the performance.
The endowment managers operate differently from the institution, and salaries are actually much lower than in the private sector. Maybe you want to complain about inequality, sure, but that's another thing entirely. They're paying the least they can to get expert fund managers..
1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/421...
2- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237...
Now compare that with the profit of big tech… that is truly insane.
1) Private research doesn't benefit all
2) Private research precludes public research
3) A local Maximum would be a problem or trap
4) The underlying view that the public has a right to individual wealth and it is underutilized resource.
You still have to get grants and all for that area, and then "profit motive" of one form or another might sneak back in, but that would be true even without SV firms as well.
To me it doesn't matter if a CEO is working to get money for investors or to pad his own pockets. at the end of the day, the incentives are the same.
So, no, I don't think this matters at all. While true that universities do have space for non-commercial work (which is usually funded by outside parties like the NSF or corporations anyway), the university leadership have a huge profit-motive to get more students (via attracting to professors) to pad their own pockets.
In some ways, the non-profit sector is even more self-serving than the private one. At least private companies have to seek the best for their investors, while many non-profits simply seek the best for the CEO.
Managing an organization of any complexity is like herding cats. It's got a life of its own and you're at the top just leaning on the helm trying to steer the ship 2° starboard.
Any large group is going to form into a hierarchy naturally. The senior leadership at any large organization are ridiculously talented individuals at the tops of their classes. Half the reason the top jobs pays more is to signal the hierarchy.
A risk of proprietary research is that the company can hoard knowledge, exploitation thereof, etc. It's the suboptimal quadrants of the prisoners dilemma.
However you're absolutely right about insane amounts of wasted money on bureaucracy.
Well... "a few" is probably more accurate.
https://twitter.com/tjaltimore/status/1763571057703723344?s=...
That's the athletic department as a whole. At my alma mater, which is on that list as one where the athletics department costs 500-1000 per student, our football team (which is consistently mediocre) and basketball team were, as far as I know, profitable, and subsidized other D1 sports. I believe that cost also covers the funding for things like intramural sports, the student athletics complex (gym), and various other athletics adjacent things that are student-services shaped, and not D1-sports shaped.
They do it for "prestige".
Meanwhile these 3rd rate sports programs keep getting sanctioned for giving athletes under the table scholarships, which isn't allowed in lower tier schools.
That's the main issue. Nobody cares about some "cut" that a college administrator would get (how? how much?).
Any economy that prices out its labor is doomed.
No one is going to buy that mountain of shit. The labor had only a part to do with the cost.
Everything works that way.
I have heard this claimed a great deal, but has it ever happened in a major city (heard of it in some tiny rural towns)? The places with high housing costs are some of the most productive economies out there.
Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, etc. should be experiencing the worst possible labor shortages were this the case.
For example: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Police+...
But it might mean the workers your economy deems most worthy of reward can't afford to have children; and the workers who clean the offices and suchlike are sleeping in bunk beds four to a room.
As visions for the future of our society go, some might consider that somewhat unambitious.
Except it's the exact opposite, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have children, whereas the rich who can afford those homes are not.
> and the workers who clean the offices and suchlike are sleeping in bunk beds four to a room
There is nothing 'wrong' with that.
Is ejecting a person to a lower-cost and lower-income area from a higher-income area going to increase or decrease overall productivity? I would say decrease.