[asdff]

And what do you know, the rents are still high. At what point do we realize that an administrator making 600k a year off the backs of people toiling long hours in labs to bring in grant money for the school and coming home to live in tenement conditions isn't the fault of the students, but the administrators making half a million dollars a year? Quite a hill to die on.

[cycrutchfield]

An administrator is paid that much because that is how much value they provide to the university system. A graduate student provides minimal value, in fact barely above replacement level. That’s why they are a student.

Are you a grad student? And you never took an economics course? This is pretty basic material.

[charleslmunger]

That's a truism. It depends on the administrator, and in general executives and administrators aren't paid on the value they bring, but based on a sort of signalling game with the oversight board that determines their compensation. If pay was really based on value to the system, Chancellors that are fired or denoted under scandal wouldn't keep their pay.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/ar...

[asdff]

I've seen graduate students bring in millions of dollars of federal grant money from the NIH, NSF, and the DOE that would have been awarded to other institutions had that grant student not written their proposal. I've seen schools take half of this grant money for overhead and use it to pay for administrative bloat under the pretext of 'keeping the lights on.'