[greeneggs]

> Does the UC system need 500 administrators making >$500k year each?

This statistic is incorrect. In 2014, there were 445 UC employees making >$500K/year each. This includes everybody, not just administrators.

You can get a list of them all here [1]. I didn't go through the whole list, but from sampling a few random pages, I'd guess that there are <20 administrators making >$500K. They are mostly medical school professors, some athletic coaches, and, e.g., the Chief Investment Officer. There are also some CFOs and Executive Deans, and maybe I missed something, so feel free to correct me.

[1] https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/

[paganel]

> This statistic is incorrect. In 2014, there were 445 UC employees making >$500K/year each. This includes everybody, not everybody, not just administrators.

Not the OP, but what you're saying just proves him/her right. You're basically saying that he/she had provided a number with only 10% margin of error (which on the Internets is not bad) and then went all semantics on him/her, I'm talking about the part with the people not being "administrators". For better or for worse you can call a person earning >$500k a janitor on her/his employment papers, but I'm still 99.99% sure that person is still doing highly administrative tasks (like setting up golf matches in his/her google calendar) and not mopping the floors.

And the part where you say that artificially subsidizing a finite product (in this case houses) does not cause its price to go up makes me wish that you're not in any way related to the economics discipline. Because if you were then I'd say that the future does not look bright for students of economics.

[saturdaysaint]

There is a vast, non-semantic difference between having 500 rich administrators/functionaries and having 445 employees. How exactly do you hire someone capable of instructing surgeons without paying them like a surgeon? Once you take out the highly skilled/specialist doctors, it's not a very damning list for a vast school system.

[paganel]

I stand corrected. I actually visited https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ and played with the search settings a little and found out that out of the 445 employees with earnings >$500k about 380 or so have "prof" in their title, so I guess you're right.

Fact is that the cost of university is still too damn high. If it's not the teachers' salaries then what might the reason be?

Mind you, I'm not directly involved in this as I live half a globe away from the States and I'm a former college dropout now in my mid-30s, I'm just thinking that there are huge opportunity costs that we might pay, as a species, for not letting the brightest people attend University based on intellectual merits alone. I know that there are countless "help-the-poor-attend-university" programs, but, as far as I can tell, in order to be part of one you need make no mistakes, as in you need to pass all the exams in order for the financial help to keep coming (I might be wrong on this). Plus, there's all the bright lower-middle-class people whose parents are "too rich" for their kids to receive any financial help but too poor to afford to pay their kids' university. You risk losing these people's minds big time.

As a solution I would impose only having access to University if you pass an entry exam, and everything to be subsidized by the State. It doesn't matter if your dad is the President of America or the CIA chief, it doesn't matter if your dad has paid $100 million to the University, it doesn't matter if you're white, black, yellow or purple-colored. Only your intellectual ability should count.

[KKKKkkkk1]

The UC system should be paying exactly $0 to football coaches and investment officers. It's an education system. The NFL and Wall Street are perfectly capable of taking care of football and investments without the UC's help.

[dpark]

I don't know about UC, but it's my understanding that in many universities, the football programs pay for themselves and then some.

As for the investment officers, someone has to manage the universities' endowments. Certainly, they could just liquidate their endowments and spend it immediately on, say, urgent needs and tuition reduction. But then when they need to, e.g., renovate a dorm, they will lack the money to do so.

[dmoy]

At any decent team this is the case (that football pays for itself, plus the other sports programs). Shit even at my alma mater which was awful (at football), this was still the case, and the head coach brought in like $1m/yr. Lot of money there.

Not enough to pay for that fancy new stadium though...

[dpark]

The fancy new stadium was likely paid for almost entirely with donations, though. Those don't tend to be paid for by the universities.

[newjersey]

I think UC would still do well to publicly announce a pay cap. Maybe $1M and say nobody makes above that amount.

Once the superstars are limited to $1M, I think others will fall in line as well. Don't like it? Quit.

[thesimpsons1022]

just stay in new jersey. we don't want our schools losing more professors to USC and Stanford.

[newjersey]

I'm sorry but there's no other way. The cost of education has to come down and that means professors, coaches, and administrators have to pay themselves less.

We're already cutting cost at the lower end of the spectrum with adjuncts. Why not do the same at the top? On second thought $1M is actually too high. It should be lower. Probably a cap of $750k is fairer.

DJ

[dpark]

Professors already make less in academia than they would typically make in the industry. I don't think the best of them would stick around if they were handed a 20% pay cut.

Similarly for administrators and coaches, meaningful pay cuts would just push many of them out the door to greener pastures.

The cure for high tuition is unlikely to come just from cutting salaries.

[newjersey]

Not just from cutting salaries but cutting salaries shows they are serious about it. I stand by it.

I've hinted at this elsewhere. There is no reason that anyone should be making more than 100x the minimum a full time worker should be making. I'd propose increasing the marginal rate to something obscene like 90% on income above that point. I stand by it as well.

If we are to make college education free of cost, we have to make them cheaper. I draw parallels here between higher education and healthcare. Yes, customer service will become worse in the process. However, I think if we manage expectations, we can do some serious cost-cutting while maintaining a certain minimum standard. This is true in both education and health care. Anyone who aevocates single payer without conceding that the list of options patient/student shrinks is probably not being honest. But this shrinking is OK.

First thing that should shrink is the obnoxious attachment to collegiate athletics. Even if it were true that college athletics is a net positive for a university's balance sheets, I don't think it is a university's place. This is a part of the overall "remove bling" from education. Other efforts could be trying to find ways to make housing less expensive and not as fancy.

Second thing that should shrink is the myriad of regulations from dozens of sources imposed on universities. I didn't know how many things they have to comply to. This is insane.

But coming to point, professors won't quit if wages go down. If they do, that's fine. There are other professors.

[dpark]

I think you're focused on really superficial stuff that isn't going to do much. "Remove bling"? This isn't a fiscal policy. You just don't like athletics, which I guess is fine, but also not very relevant. I personally am not athletic and so those programs did not appeal to me when I was a student, but collegiate athletics have a long history and serve useful purposes.

For the dorms, I don't know where you went to school, but my dorms were pretty basic. When I visited friends at other universities, their dorms were also pretty basic. When I studied abroad in Germany, the student housing was actually nicer than what we have in the US. Could we spend less on dorms? Probably. Would it make a meaningful change in cost? Probably not.

And again, coming back to the idea of cutting salaries, I don't know why you think there is an endless line of potential professors waiting to take jobs for no money. Good professors are valuable and would command high salaries in industry. If the end result of cutting tuition is that education quality declines proportionally, it's probably not worth it.

I also don't know why you're so hung up on the few people who are extremely highly paid. Bloated salaries or not, that group is not large and it's not a major factor in overall cost. Additionally, very few if any professors are in that group.

[Shivetya]

Not true. This assumption only works when one decides that all professors are equally employable both in colleges and private industry. It also assumes an unlimited number of jobs.

Worse for college professors they have no choice in having their salaries come down because it won't be a decade before college education done online becomes the main alternative. With the pay scales differences across the world being what they are the fact is you will likely have may opportunities for professors in India and elsewhere teach course with the same expertise.

People are quick to bitch and bemoan medical costs from pills to services and pointing overseas "SEE SEE SEE" about how their costs are lower.

Well guess what, education will be even cheaper because the student doesn't have to travel to get the world class education. All that needs to change is regulations which will prevent it.

[dpark]

> Not true. This assumption only works when one decides that all professors are equally employable both in colleges and private industry. It also assumes an unlimited number of jobs.

For highly-paid professors, it's generally true that they are equally employable in private industry. Similarly, for highly-paid professors, there are plenty of available jobs in industry, hence the high pay.

If you disagree, I'd be interested in hearing what professors you believe are simultaneously overpaid in academia and would face difficultly finding industry work with equivalent pay.

> Worse for college professors they have no choice in having their salaries come down because it won't be a decade before college education done online becomes the main alternative. With the pay scales differences across the world being what they are the fact is you will likely have may opportunities for professors in India and elsewhere teach course with the same expertise.

I seriously doubt this is actually going to happen. There are plenty of accredited online universities already and enrollment in traditional universities has not dropped. Online courses mostly provide an option for people who would otherwise be unable to attend. Sure, some people will choose online studies even if they would be able to attend a traditional university, but I expect them to be in the minority.

Also, I don't expect lower professor pay to be a significant cost reduction for online courses. Employing Indian professors instead of American ones will probably not drop the cost to produce an online course significantly, because the costs can be spread across so many students. If anything, I think online courses might strongly favor native speakers because the language barrier is reduced at such a low cost.