[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.