The reason why?
I wanted to show the students that even though spending from the government had gone up on higher education in the past several years (thereby presumably subsidizing their tuition) salaries paid to university employees increased at a much higher rate and was the primary cause of their tuition rates going up.
Of course now with the economy in recession, revenues down, and the average private sector Joe taking around a 20% hair cut, you would think the public sector, especially the university, with all of its understanding and kindness and charity would agree to take a cut themselves. Say like 14%.
Not a chance.
President Bruininks is "furious" at the (enter democrat-talking point here) "draconian" cuts of 14%.
So I thought it time now to share with you the same chart and data I shared with youthful students at the University of Minnesota.
Here's the U of MN's presidential salaries compared to the increase in tuition costs vs. the CPI;
Tuition is in blue, CPI in red and the U of MN's presidential salary in yellow.
Gee, I wonder why your tuition is going up all the time, kids?
And on a side note, yeah, Bruininks, you poor baby. How will you ever survive on that $650,000?
The larger point is simply this;
Bruininks is nothing more than a self-serving lying shill. And a bad liar at that. Like most employees and professors at the University of Minnesota, they are not there first and foremost for the kids' education. They are there for themselves. And they have NO problems or moral qualms about hypocritically hiding behind the "noble cause" of "educating the children" if it means they get an extra 14% the taxpayers of Minnesota can't afford.
I could go on, but frankly the chart says it all. Your tuition is not going up because of "evil" republicans who want to kick puppies and shave kittens and cut funding. It's going up because the public sector employees at the University of Minnesota are fleecing you and you have been too damn ignorant for too damn long to spend the hour I did researching the damn data to find out the simple truth. And that simple truth is that the University of Minnesota has become (primarily) nothing more than an elaborate scam of career academians and public sector workers to milk taxpayers and tuition-paying students of as much money as possible all while guilt tripping you into paying perpetually more by claiming it's "for educating the children."
The only question is whether you're going to continue to remain ignorant to this fact and naively continue to "vote for kids" and vote for "education."
20 comments:
I work at a community college in California and our president makes close to 350k a year. She also gets 2 leased cars, 5 cell phones, lots and lots of travel expenses to jet around talking to conferences and lobbying about how awesome she is, and a f-ing condo so she does not have to drive too far from the college. All this while we raise fee after fee on our students and cut basic classes that students need because we are over our class cap. Oh and we just spent 300k on a fucking water fountain while we cut classes to the students.
The entire system is disgusting. If I was given control of the community college system of CA and I would cut operating costs in by 85% by centralizing the administration and switching to 90% online classes.
Ah, but there's the catch: much like the "last-in, first-out" rule that ensures the hardest-working teachers are the first ones fired, if you cut the funding, the last place it comes from is the admin salaries. It will come out of the students first, either from whatever they spend it on that actually makes learning happen, or through increased tuition, room & board, and other fees.
I just wish I'd been smart enough to set up a racket like that for myself.
Your speech on worthless degrees is so true. Im finishing my liberal arts degree. In the end of my second year i kinda understood what was going on. Almost everybody who got their degree ended up teaching back at the school. It all seemed like a giant circle. I do ok, since before art school i went to vocational school, i do industrial automation.
It was really hard to see what was going on at first. Since they praise you, and you get the fuzzy warm feeling of being special.
Oh and im from Europe. When you get a degree in humanities its really hard to support yourself. On the other hand, theres shortage of techical skills.
I am one of the students being fleeced as I attend Ohio State University (btw our President makes a salary of over $800,000/year not counting the $1 million in bonuses he gives himself)
Once I graduate with my degree in Economics.. (simply because I don't have the grades to get into Business school to get a Finance or Accounting degree, thanks to OSU hiring students to teach rather than professors)... I will never attend college again. It's one giant scam. I hope I can start my own business so I'm not dependent upon anyone other than myself.
It would be a nice improvement if they actually had "education" in our zools and zooniversities.
How much is th coach of the U of Minn Basketball and Football teams getting paid???
That is the unspoken part of the debate as well, the 6 and 7 digit salaries for college coaches in high profile sports.
I love college sports but just wondering where all the money is going if not to educate the children.
@Anthony Thomas:
The thing about high-profile sports (basketball, football) is that they generate a HUGE amount of revenue for the university, hence the reason why the coaches get paid luxuriously.
So I see no qualms to paying coaches 6 and 7 figures (as the market price) as without a quality team, there is no quality alumni support, and then an even larger budget hole.
My guess is that the cuts will be mostly in staff numbers/salaries while the faculty will remain untouched, if not receive raises.
University presidents tend to coddle faculties, especially in the departments that bring in federal money from NIH/NSF/NASA grants. There is a lot of waste in these departments/labs where research occurs--many faculty are lazy and depend too much on cheap grad student for labor and ideas. Also, when faculty stop getting grants, they become deadwood that the university supports with 5-6 figure salaries supported from tuition and your tax dollars. Six figs to sit in your office and answer emails and teach one class a semester.
Academic faculty and major research institutions have the best jobs on the planet.
Good article about deadwood faculty:
http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2008/01/deadwood-end-of-era.html
with fed grant money getting more competitive for expanding research faculty, most science depts have a ton of 6-fig a year deadwood.
@ Captain Capitalism
From the simple chart you made above, it looks like presidential salary rose after the funding rate started increasing. This implies that either the president was rather patient, the position changed hands, or the president just figured out he could divert the extra money to his own pocket rather than allow it to be used for the students.
It's absolutely ridiculous for any government employee at ANY level to make more money than the president of the united states.
I don't know about Bruininks but I have heard about perks for other university presidents, and some indication of outright graft. Some universities are big builders, and the presidents of those universities must be exposed to a lot of temptation. Sometimes one wonders if the construction isn't undertaken solely to provide opportunities for graft.
Whatever you think about ordinary university faculty, the senior administration are often a lot worse.
A point about worthless degrees: one reason that degrees which should be useful aren't are the low failure rates. These low failure rates aren't just because of the warm fuzzies; it means we can extract more money from the suckers oops students. My institution used to have calculus classes for students who had already failed calculus six times. We had students failing the course eight, nine times. "Soft" marking is not kindness but a lack of principle.
I agree with you Captain - the University of Minnesota would not know what a budget cut is because they've NEVER had to face one.
Furthermore, both Bruininks and his predecessor Mark Yudof insisted that the U of MN be in the top 5 programs in EVERY field of study and demanded the U be a world-class research institution in every field.
What the hell happened to the (real) mission of a land-grant university - e.g. educating the state's citizens to meet the needs of the state? Apparently, there is not enough money or glory doing that mission, so you co-opt a utopian mission of being world-class in everything.
It's f**k the taxpayers and those who pay the tuition to pursue the elitist wet-dreams of the university administration and Board of Regents - that's far more important than serving the state and its students.
I just went through your Youtube 'Worthless Degrees' videos. 'What matters is what society wants you to do, not what you want to do' - great tag.
BTW I think Episode 6 has been wrongly labelled as 7.
Back before the earliest date on your graph I went to what is at the moment called the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the U of M and got my MA there. I got a fellowship for the first year and had saved enough to get through the second year (after managing to obtain in-state tuition). Back then it was about $2-3K all together.
Today I think the Humphrey School charged about $25K per year. Imagine that--for a degree that will get you a government paper shuffler job with no advancement potential and a salary of $60K.
I would NEVER do it again, and since I'm a straight white male (and a Republican to boot) they wouldn't let me in anyway.
Not sure how it goes in Min but up here in the frozen North we shovel train loads of cash into our universities only to graduate people who can quote the text book and vote Liberal on command but when it comes to actually being useful they are sorely lacking.
@Achilles Heels:
Paying the sports department that much ensures that the school becomes nothing more than a glorified football fan club. Then the millions of football fans who either went there for a couple years until they got so drunk they couldn't find their way back to class or who never went there at all but still wear the blue-and-white t-shirt to the job interview end up $!@%ing over all the people who went to real schools and thereby don't have the words "Penn State" at the top of our resumes. So while their salaries may be market-justified as coaches, as part of the educational system they're just as much to blame for the state of things as the administrators.
On the salaries. The Universities of Otago and Auckland are in the top 120 in the world. The salary for the vice chancellor (top job) is around 550K NZ for one and 620 K for the other.
The NZ dollar is around 75 to 80 cents US, so take around 100K off to get US costs.
Both Universities are around 20 000 students each, have law and medical schools.
Fees for courses range from 21K -- 60K pa (the last figure is for medical school in NZ dollars). Link is
http://www.otago.ac.nz/prodcons/groups/public/@otagointernational/documents/webcontent/otago010079.pdf
Your Australian, English and Scots readers would be able to produce similar figures.
My advice to any young American is:
1. Don't go to college unless you absolutely have to (you have to be that doctor, lawyer, engineer etc).
2. If you have to, go overseas. It's cheaper, and you will go to higher quality institutions.
@Mark Adams
"Paying the sports department that much ensures that the school becomes nothing more than a glorified football fan club."
I disagree that a high-paying coach causes sports fetish, rather, it is certainly an effect of it.
But you're right that in most Podunk and "provincial" areas with universities, the sports team is really the only thing to worship, and hence a giant money milkshake for the university to drink.
Irrespective of the professional reverberations of athletic pageantry, unless you want all universities to become 2,000 student "institutes" in the absence of government subsidized higher education and sports-driven revenue, I see nothing wrong in promoting a university brand through the NCAA as a function of collegiate sustainability.
the university of minnesota's administration is doing what any self-respecting capitalist would do in that situation. it may be a "public" institution but it is still
"for-profit."
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