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Comment by kingkongrevenge | Hacker News Reader

How about a $500K salary cap for presidents of universities that accept federal grants and loan subsidies? Heh heh.

Its actually football coaches at big universities that make all the money. Median salary is over a million dollars last I saw. The academic salaries are much more reasonable. Mostly in the 100-200K range for upper level profs and administrators.

If you want to win at football, you most definitely need a good football coach, and the markets for pro football coaches and college football coaches are hardly separate. So you have to pay college football coaches somewhere in the ballpark of pro football coaches.

What has never been properly explained to me is the utility of winning football teams to universities. I really would like to hear about that.

Top football programs basically fund entire athletic departments. So in order to maintain a top brand, paying an excellent coach 10% of your budget doesn't seem to be a bad investment.

See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122853304793584959.html?mod=...

The football teams at most major universities are profitable, and the coaches' salary come out of the teams earnings. At my university, the football team ended up funding most of the athletic teams in unprofitable sports.

If you want to be successful in business, you most definitely need a good CEO...etc.

We aren't bailing out failing universities that have destroyed trillions of dollars in wealth by virtue of martingale mismanagement. We provide state support to universities because they aren't supposed to try to internalize their positive externalities.

Very few make much more than that. Here's an article about university president pay from 2006: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515933

Apparently the Harvard president has made ~$500-600k for the last many years.

Cripe, more than the US president less all the attendant duties. A functionary making that much...obligatory greenspun (nsfw) http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html

If you factor in the cost of transportation and protection (not to mention the rent on a swanky, DC-area mansion), the President is pretty high:

http://dealbreaker.com/2009/01/no-more-than-the-president-of...

The edit button is gone, so I feel bad about this. The President is pretty highly paid. According to his book, he hasn't be getting high since his 20's.

I wish people would lay off him. Look, for the last time, Bush is not President anymore. Next we'll be going over his alchoholism and business failings in his 30s.

Leave him be, please.

I meant this book, actually:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01...

Uh, guess you didn't get it (no, not the book).

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