At my wife's university (she is a tenured professor), the faculty has increased by 5% over the last 20 years. Administrators? 200%. That's a big contributor to costs. The other is cuts in state funding. In real dollars, the support from the state has declined over 50% in the same period.

The goal should be to give every child the most efficient path to a suitable career but instead we have an empty mantra that stops with kids entering college ("mission accomplished&quot .

Colleges and trade schools could be set up so that they are paid a percentage of what their graduates make during the first 10 years after graduation. THAT would be more fair and would trigger a lot of changes.

College football should end and be replaced by a private pre-NFL league. Get all that Penn State / Big Red / hazing / raping / discrimination / fund-siphoning away from businesses which should be focusing their revenue on producing well-employed graduates.

with ticket sales, TV income and merchandizing.

From where I sit, Professors make quite a bit of money too. Especially compared to graduate students and adjuncts who sometimes do quite a bit of teaching.

Admin, of course, gets to set the rules, and they have representatives at the board meetings.

When I was on the waterboard we always discussed raises for every year. It seemed to me that with a 2% or 3% raise, that the people at the top were making out much better than the average worker. Duh, 3% of $100,000 is more than 3% of $20,000. I suggested equalizing it a little bit - instead of 3% to make it $200 + 1.5%.

The rest of the board would not hear of it, and even I felt kinda odd with five members of the admin right there as I talk about giving them less money. The top guy was of the opinion that he should be getting more money, compared to top guys at other water districts. After I left the board, one of the members forced him to resign, and I wonder how he fared on the job market.

Most athletics programs these days are self-funding. You want a good team, you give them amenities, they bring in money and they get amenities.

This often doesn't count alumni giving, which can be a decent chunk of cash. You want to give that up? Abolish the athletics programs and see a portion of your budget above and beyond athletics vanish. There: You have no athletics programs and you're deeper in the hole. But nerds have struck a blow against jocks. (Next up: activists against frats, round 3.)

It's like going to a restaurant where there's a cover charge for entertainment. Then you hear that the entertainer got $800 for that evening and complain about the high food prices. Never mind that the entertainer was separately funded and, because of higher foot traffic, probably netted economy of scale and more drink sales that kept down food prices. We see one thing, assume we know all, and make the appropriate infallible judgment.

I've stopped fighting college athletic budgets. They're fairly frequently not horrible, even though they look bad on the surface and you have to take some of the numbers with a grain of salt. My fight is now with academic standards for athletes and the way athletics often corrupts the academic mission of the school.


I watched administration grow over 8 years at my grad school. Some was excess, to be sure, and many were overpaid. At the same time, new regulations and policies shoved on the university by the government (state or federal) or demanded by the press/popular will also required some additional administrators. With more accounting for race/gender/ethnicity/SES, less mindless obeisance to aff. action quotas and the need for more outreach, more requirements to find energy savings and be "green," with smaller budgets and the need for more active fundraising, with more press scrutiny and the need for a press officer to be higher profile ... You get my point. All those government regulations that we so like because it keeps "them" honest, all that transparency, all the reporting requirements and lawsuits to force others to tow the line--they need people able to do the job and take the heat. There are cuts to be made there, many are overpaid; there are not as many excess as the Doctrine of Maximum Outrage would have us believe, where there is no back-of-house and anybody can do any of *those* jobs. It's like being upset that a restaurant has managers, chefs, has to pay for inspections (one way or another) and has to replace depreciated equipment even as it tries to upgrade service in the face of competition and keep its chef(s) from finding better jobs. You see waiters bring plates of food to the table, you're paying for the waiters and plates of food. What's with all the other crap? Why, anybody can be a manager or a chef.


Medical folk and the top dogs at some "special" schools are also special. Not only is there the problem of attracting those PhDs away from private practice--"altruism" is nice, but the level of altruism even in hotbeds of self-proclaimed altruism tends to be relatively insubstantial as everybody finds excuses for why others should be altruistic--but there's also the Big Name problem. A Big Name who's also good at administering a school is rare. But a Big Name brings in other Big Names, helps facilitate siting of conferences, helps to net grants, and provides a lot of publicity. When UCLA's school of public policy got Carnevale as head, it launched the new school with a big name and got good faculty immediately--and when he was interviewed, he wasn't just Carnevale, he was "Carnevale with UCLA's School of Public Policy." National media attention, unpaid for except through his salary and start-up funds.

Most non-faculty, non-grad students have never heard of the word "overhead." At my grad school when a teacher needed $100k in grant money he applied for nearly $200k because after "overhead" for the department, for the division, for the school, for the university, and for the state-level layer of the university he'd be left with $100k. That $200k went to help fund the department and those who didn't have grants, facilities maintained by the division and for grant-poor departments, for financial aid, for administrators, for advertising, as well as for the financial services provided by the university. It's like hiring somebody for $50k. You then have to have workspace, pay the employer's portion of payroll tax, unemployment tax, training, any insurance, vacation, or retirement benefits. But the employee may only see the $40k he gets after taxes and assumes that he's costing $40k/year. Good faculty bring in overhead. My mentor was paid $20k/year more than many others in his department; he routinely brought in at least $100k overhead a year. People saw he cost more; they didn't see that he provided $80k for the rest of the school, or was as productive a faculty member as you could possibly wish for, with articles, monographs, conferences that he helped host or spoke at.

You bring in $100 million a year in grant money, that's a heck of a lot of overhead. Big Names in some schools--not all, to be sure--pay for themselves.


Eliminating programs is a sore point with me. Sometimes they just make cuts because they need to make cuts. They look over the numbers, they look over enrollment, and they make their decisions on a purely financial basis. Sometimes. I guess. Well, I guess "sometimes" is possible.

My experience is relatively limited. We're talking two grad programs at public universities, an overseas study program, a domestic post-doc program and a tenure-track position each at private universities. Some of those were just me, some were because I was a tag-along spouse to a faculty member. In every case, they had the Rahm doctrine: Never let a crisis go unwasted. Claim financial need to implement the administration's strategic "vision". Get rid of a small, inefficient, low-prestige but possibly expensive program to allocate money to strong programs, large but needy programs, forward-thinking programs. It's the business model: You want your corporation, for profit or not-for-profit, to be mean and lean. Tops at what it does, and only doing what it does well. I understand this; it's just that I'm always right and administrators' goals and strategic plans usually diverge from my awesome ideas (added in the interest of complete honesty).

Calif. State Universities suffered under budget cuts because their mission had drifted. Budget problems were a chance to refocus them. At UCLA and at Berkeley budget cuts let them get rid of "dead wood"--departments where the average class size was less than 10, while others had average class size over 60 or 70. Dispose of "old fashioned" social work programs where each grad was a caseworker and helped a thousand people a year and transform them to policy departments where each graduate would helpe hundreds of thousands. Don't train mere nurses, train nurse-practitioners, nurse-policy wonks, and doctoral-level nurses who would go out and train nurses. Stand-alone schools focus on what they do well; schools in a system reduce redundancy, have one great medical and one great law program instead of two mediocre medical and law programs.

In each case those students whose programs were being cut squealed (even if they'd be shepherded to degree completion, they didn't want to see their program dead--who wants to be the last graduate out of a program that vanishes as you shake the hand of the diploma-giver?).

as long as billionaires like Richard C. Blum (husband of Diane Feinstein) is sitting on the Board of Regents:
http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/about/members-and-advisors/bios/richard-blum.html

Blum has been there since 2002 and got reappointed through 2026, and he has overseen the conversion of the University of California from a public university system that was once virtually tuition-free for in-state students despite its world class status as an institution to its "privatization" to charging hefty tuition and paying *administrators* world-class salaries - mainly funded by marketing to overseas students and squeezing out students in California. There have been repeated efforts to get the U.C. system "in on" basically scammy online education systems as well, since Blum himself invests in these. As tenured positions are shed and the University relies on slave adjunct labor (except for the celebrity faculty positions which keeps the University marketable as "world-class", the mission to educate students is slowly forgotten in favor of the chase after the next thing that can be monetized. The latest plan is how to rent out buildings and facilities at the expense of academic uses (including much-needed student housing).

It is a separate entity, receives no funding from the school, and every year for as long as I can remember, the athletic department has given the school between 6-10 million dollars per year out of its profits. Plus, the school uses football games as a tremendous academic fundraising mechanism.

However, I must admit that the University of Florida is one of a small number of athletic departments that are self-funding, and one of an even smaller number of athletic departments that gives a good portion of its profits to the school.