Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds

[Ichingcarpenter]

At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.

The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.

The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/education/study-links-growth-in-student-debt-to-pay-for-university-presidents.html

[xchrom]

1. du rec.

[Helen Borg]

2. That's because they have to pay higher fees to support the higher salaries?

[Adrahil]

3. K&R. NT

[n2doc]

4. Those are the ones who have fully embraced the corporate model of education

Lots of rewards for the CEO and upper management, workers get crap, customers get screwed. The Walmart vision.

[bemildred]

5. Great. Winner take all education. nt

[reformist2]

6. It's bad enough tuitions are soaring, but it's sickening that it's not even going to the instructors

Once again, in our idiotic system of king-of-the-mountain capitalism, it's the 1% sitting on top that reap all the profits, everyone else just scrambles for the privilege of surviving.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

8. Um. These are public universities.

[BeyondGeography]

7. 670 new administrators for Ohio St. from 2010-12

while they were paying their doddering President $6 miilion a year.

But the football team rawwwwks.

Fucking pile of shite.

[exboyfil]

9. My father in law explained to me

one of the most important jobs of a university President is fund raising. In the case of his university the president at the time was bringing in a multiple of his salary in external funds. Most of the universities on this list are in the 50,000 to 60,000 range in enrollment, and some of the presidents also have responsibilities for regional campuses. Take the Ohio State president if you divide his salary by all students, it comes out to be about $25/student/yr. The Business building at the university I got my MBA from was built using mostly external funds and that is why it now has the name of the President who worked to get those funds.

I do agree that universities have too many administrators, but go through the org chart sometime for these universities and identify which administrator job would you eliminate. Here is a link to a typical regional university.

http://www.ir.uni.edu/dbweb/orgchart/?empID=0D1AF9CA2B

As much as I hate big dollar college sports, for these larger universities the sports programs receive only a portion of their funds from general revenue, and the coaches who make the most actually run programs that support most of the budget of the rest of the athletic department.

[QC]

10. The president of my small college likes to call himself our CEO.

His speeches and emails are peppered with corporate jargon from the pop business books that seem to constitute his only reading.

We have about 400 people on the full-time payroll, but only about 80 of them teach. The rest are bureaucrats of various sorts. (Imagine if only 20% of the payroll at GM were involved in making cars!)

In one recent year we were told that we were under an absolute faculty hiring freeze, but came back in the fall to discover that the administration had hired, among other bureaucrats, two event planners.

Only one of our top administrators has solid academic credentials and meaningful teaching experience. The rest are Ed.D.'s who started out in the bureaucracy and never left it.

This is the reality of corporate higher education. Nothing in this article surprises me.

[Octafish]

11. Racketdemia

Priorities and all that. Education. Yeah.