| The UC system has a budget of ~$35 billion, an endowment of ~$21 billion, ~225k staff, and ~300k students. I'll also remind that the UC system isn't just "education", so it's difficult to draw direct comparisons from top-line numbers in terms of staff and finances with most other universities. They run Los Alamos (with Texas A&M + Battelle), Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which cumulatively have a budget in the billions. They also run 5 major medical centers, which represents ~$13bn of their revenue and a large portion of their staff as well. ---------------------- It's a massive enterprise, and if you were drawing the private-sector comparison I've seen elsewhere, it would be in the Fortune 100 in terms of revenue. I'm not sure what the "right" number is for that job, but it does seem reasonable to think the top couple roles in that enterprise ought to command some sort of high 6-figure salary if you want to get executives of an appropriate caliber to do that job. ---------------------- Some of the lines in that article, like: > University of California’s executive vice president and chief financial officer is paid $412,000, while an executive doing a comparable job with the California State University system makes $341,000. Seem ridiculous, given that CSU has a budget 1/6th the size to manage. If anything, one would think the difference in salaries ought to be far larger given the vastly different scope and complexity of the two entities. ----------------- I'm sure there's plenty of waste and plenty of reform that could be needed, but I'm not exactly convinced on the basis of these claims. |
Why? I can't imagine the UC executive needs to, as an individual, do anywhere near six times the work just because they're managing a budget that's six times larger. I want both executives to do their jobs as well as they can, and that means they should be working about as hard as each other.