Never mind, too slow to edit.

I made a few mistake, but it's nowhere near a 3:1 ratio.

I disagree on many levels; first, this assumes that the absolute best people are going into academia now, instead of medicine or law or finance or management.

You're conflating two distinct populations; the existing talent pool that we have today, and some hypothetical future talent pool. It's a fact that Universities today have their pick of the very best qualified candidates from the existing pool when it comes to tenure track hiring. It's a possibility that the existing pool is actually pretty crappy, and would become much better if the Universities paid more, but where's the evidence? The fact that the cream of the existing pool can be hired so cheaply is prima facie evidence that the pool is already too large, so you've got some work to do.

Second, a person's quality of work (even a desperate one!) is not independent of compensation, far from it. That PhD. that you hire at rock-bottom wages (or, what amounts to the same thing, who is given a greater work load) is simply not going to be as effective.

Effective at what? What's the measuring stick? The Universities themselves seem pretty pleased with their ROI. Especially considering they have most of their teaching done by adjuncts and grad students who are paid MUCH less than young tenure track hires. I mean, I suppose if you paid McDonalds fry cooks a lot more money, you could have some sort of burger artisan prepare your Big Mac, but what's the point? Enough people are obviously quite pleased with the current status of the Big Mac such that it doesn't warrant that kind of change. The biggest gripes about US Universities right now center around costs, not teaching quality. The gripes I DO see about teaching quality typically come from the right and revolve around ideological conformity/ideological indoctrination. How would paying professors more address either of those concerns?

Third, your argument fails to explain why CEOs get the salaries they do, since if anything the glut of potential CEO candidates is even greater than the glut of PhDs.

Your problem here is an apples to oranges comparison. A tenure track hire is essentially an entry level job; the supply of those jobs is limited which drives up competition for them, but it's still an entry level job. If you don't take it, you can pretty much forget about progressing in your academic career; there are virtually no other options. A CEO position is a terminal level role, reserved for people who have risen to the top of their field. The most in-demand CEO candidates are ALREADY making very good money in a job they're currently succeeding in. If you try to shortchange such a candidate, they'll tell you to get lost because they have other options.

People see some CEO on the news leading a company to failville while getting paid 8 or even 9 figures and they snark about how they'd be happy to ruin the company for a fraction of that. But the snark misses the point that as a big a ###### as that CEO might have been, he was still (usually) qualified for that job in a way that the snarker is not. Just like people snark about how they'd be happy to do what some tenured professors do for less money; roll into campus twice a week hungover (or still drunk), read from a sheaf of yellowing notes, dole out As to everybody, and go home for more drinking while collecting a 6 figure salary with complete job security. I know plenty of people who would jump at that job, but THEY don't have Ph.Ds from Yale. Oh well.

B. Lopez

?

Brook and Robin Lopez - cuban father, american mother, raised in the US, (male) twins.

The second part is half true; administrative bloat is real and is sucking up a ton of resources. The professors themselves aren't really seeing much of all that money going to the universities. The assistant supervisor working for the Associate VP of the Department of Diversity Compliance is probably making more than most tenure track professors; they're certainly making much, much, more than the adjuncts and graduate students who are actually doing most of the teaching work.

This 100 times.

Another 100 from me. I suspect that I attended the same school that Jim teaches at, and 'administrative bloat' couldn't be more accurate. I was there around roughly 2008-2010, which was a bad time to be anywhere near public education. Every term class size went up, fewer courses were offered, those that were were offered less frequently, instructor positions were reduced or eliminated entirely, guidance/assistance for students went from gapingly insufficient to nearly non-existent, academic programs were cut, tuition and all fees went way up... while massive capital improvements continued to be erected all around campus, high-profile administrators were brought in at outrageous salaries and existing administrators received huge raises at least once a year if not more. It was sickening.

This article says US-born whites make up 12% of rosters, non-American (doesn't differentiate between non-whites and whites) is 20%. So assuming some of those foreign born players are non-white, it sounds fairly even.

This much older article (2004?) says that among white NBA players, 55% are US-born, 45% are foreign born.

Every term class size went up, fewer courses were offered, those that were were offered less frequently, instructor positions were reduced or eliminated entirely, guidance/assistance for students went from gapingly insufficient to nearly non-existent, academic programs were cut, tuition and all fees went way up... while massive capital improvements continued to be erected all around campus, high-profile administrators were brought in at outrageous salaries and existing administrators received huge raises at least once a year if not more. It was sickening.

Why does this happen? Is it an effort to attract more students capable of paying full freight? Does it work?

depending on the school it could be funding sources. Many public unis get year-to-year money from state government but can pay for buildings on muni or state bonds, so you can be in a position where you can't afford to run classes but can afford to build dorms. Weird but logical.

Is it an effort to attract more students

Students are increasingly beside the point. Universities are run more and more like businesses, and their chief business advantages are tax breaks and real estate, which they put to work building development empires. They have the tax breaks and the real estate in the first place because they were (and nominally still are) schools, but the actual teaching of students is a "cost center," something to be controlled, not cultivated.

Edit: GregD makes an excellent point about funding mechanisms. The Texas state systems, for instance, have massive endowments that must be used for buildings and grounds, not salaries. The UT and A&M schools will typically all have at least one major building going up at all times.

Why does this happen? Is it an effort to attract more students capable of paying full freight? Does it work?

Administrators, like most people, prefer having more money to having less.

When there is no P&L requirement, the surest way to get paid more is to have more people working for you.

If you have 2 people working for you making $75K, you look like you're worth $125K. If you have 10 people working for you making $75-150K, you look like you're worth $225K.

A couple of points to throw in about higher ed (I currently work at a university):

1) The total compensation of tenured personnel is meaningful: While most tenured faculty are hardly getting rich of their salary, the benefits are very generous compared to most private-sector jobs (at our university, the standards benefits percentage is about 43% of base salary). Also, retirement costs for those faculty members whose careers pre-dated the defined contribution era are significant. In those cases, you're paying a lot of dollars today for people who aren't even on campus anymore.

2) That said, the money is not going to tenured faculty, in the big picture. The big salaries are definitely going to administration - and the 43% benefit multiplier really adds to the total compensation figure. It is a highly bureaucratic structure, far more than I understood prior to working in higher education.

3) Amen about the capital spending. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is real, financing instruments are currently at historically-cheap levels, and higher ed is (in my opinion) slow to use technology to enjoy efficiencies which could be gained.

BTW, Columbia Journalism School today announced their tuition for the 2013-2014 year...tuition, room and board? $84K. At least you'll get a degree in a growth field...

Many public unis get year-to-year money from state government but can pay for buildings on muni or state bonds, so you can be in a position where you can't afford to run classes but can afford to build dorms.

In the five years I've been slowly working on my Masters, I've seen classes cut that have directly affected my degree progress while at the same time millions are being poured into "campus beautification" efforts. If you've ever had the misfortune of seeing the UT-Dallas campus, you'd know spending millions on campus beautification is just a drop in the proverbial bucket.

I don't think I understand that link in #61. It goes to a "50 Ugliest College Campuses" piece, and almost all of the pictures they show of "ugly" stuff looks perfectly fine, and occasionally beautiful, to me. I will grant that I do not have an eye for this kind of stuff, but I don't even understand the complaints they raise in the little blurb about each place.

My conclusion: The people at that website are assho|es.

I don't think I understand that link in #61. It goes to a "50 Ugliest College Campuses" piece, and almost all of the pictures they show of "ugly" stuff looks perfectly fine, and occasionally beautiful, to me. I will grant that I do not have an eye for this kind of stuff, but I don't even understand the complaints they raise in the little blurb about each place.

My conclusion: The people at that website are assho|es.

Agree. I looked through. I admit I've never been to the university of Maryland, but when all they showed was a small corner of one building with half a fountain, I got suspicions. There's nothing wrong with this.

A couple of points to throw in about higher ed (I currently work at a university):

1) The total compensation of tenured personnel is meaningful: While most tenured faculty are hardly getting rich of their salary, the benefits are very generous compared to most private-sector jobs (at our university, the standards benefits percentage is about 43% of base salary). Also, retirement costs for those faculty members whose careers pre-dated the defined contribution era are significant. In those cases, you're paying a lot of dollars today for people who aren't even on campus anymore.

2) That said, the money is not going to tenured faculty, in the big picture. The big salaries are definitely going to administration - and the 43% benefit multiplier really adds to the total compensation figure. It is a highly bureaucratic structure, far more than I understood prior to working in higher education.

3) Amen about the capital spending. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is real, financing instruments are currently at historically-cheap levels, and higher ed is (in my opinion) slow to use technology to enjoy efficiencies which could be gained.

BTW, Columbia Journalism School today announced their tuition for the 2013-2014 year...tuition, room and board? $84K. At least you'll get a degree in a growth field...

It's interesting reading the perceptions about what's going on in the university system. As someone who has worked at several large research universities in the biomedical field, my perception is wildly different than what people describe here. First, "tenure-track" stuff is very much on the way out if basically gone altogether. It doesn't really exist at the major universities in my discipline, except for the most super of superstar scientists in their mid-career. Most professors are paid only a small amount by the university - the vast majority of professor salaries are paid through the grants professors must write to bring money in to the university. Professors are more like independent contractors who fund the university infrastructure through grants from various government and charity organizations. Universities take a cut off the top for various expenses, and the prof carries forward the research delivering the various promised research products to the funding entity. There is very little administration at the department level - a couple low-paid admins, but that's really about it. The department chair and others are usually researchers in their own right and their admin responsibilities have to come second to their research. Teaching is certainly one aspect of what goes on, and the teaching is excellent (particularly at the PhD level), but it's only one part of what research universities do, and it's not really the biggest part. Mostly it's the establishment of various "shops" of expertise, which can be contracted out by various funding agencies to conduct whatever high-level research they choose to fund. Deans of schools are usually well-compensated, but their jobs are usually about bringing in more projects and donations to the schools, so often a dean who is good at his job is worth many, many times what they're actually paid and help fund the structural improvements that can't be done by individual professors.

the biomedical field

I'm guessing there's a divide between the world of professors that actually do useful work and the world of professors that study, you know, Flaubert, or the middle ages, or post-structuralism, or whatever.

You'd be surprised at how ugly the world would get without those professors.

I'm guessing there's a divide between the world of professors that actually do useful work and the world of professors that study, you know, Flaubert, or the middle ages, or post-structuralism, or whatever.

Why is it not useful to study Flaubert or the middle ages or post-structuralism?

Didn't think that would be inflammatory. I'm a happy liberal arts grad, English major. I think those things are great. I didn't mean that they were purposeless, just that they aren't as, I dunno, productive as biomedical research.

Didn't think that would be inflammatory. I'm a happy liberal arts grad, English major. I think those things are great. I didn't mean that they were purposeless, just that they aren't as, I dunno, productive as biomedical research.

It's hard to say. I was talking with a faculty who has had a very distinguished career and won several prestigious awards and done tons of good research, and she said she wasn't sure if she had ever actually prevented any deaths from colon cancer through her work. I think she was being absurdly hard on herself, but that's the kind of thing that can happen in even the best research career. At least if you're teaching Flaubert, you know you've in some way enriched the lives of those who you forced to read it.

Well, if we can't get African-Americans to play baseball, how about African Africans?

It's interesting reading the perceptions about what's going on in the university system. As someone who has worked at several large research universities in the biomedical field, my perception is wildly different than what people describe here. First, "tenure-track" stuff is very much on the way out if basically gone altogether. It doesn't really exist at the major universities in my discipline, except for the most super of superstar scientists in their mid-career. Most professors are paid only a small amount by the university - the vast majority of professor salaries are paid through the grants professors must write to bring money in to the university. Professors are more like independent contractors who fund the university infrastructure through grants from various government and charity organizations. Universities take a cut off the top for various expenses, and the prof carries forward the research delivering the various promised research products to the funding entity. There is very little administration at the department level - a couple low-paid admins, but that's really about it. The department chair and others are usually researchers in their own right and their admin responsibilities have to come second to their research. Teaching is certainly one aspect of what goes on, and the teaching is excellent (particularly at the PhD level), but it's only one part of what research universities do, and it's not really the biggest part. Mostly it's the establishment of various "shops" of expertise, which can be contracted out by various funding agencies to conduct whatever high-level research they choose to fund. Deans of schools are usually well-compensated, but their jobs are usually about bringing in more projects and donations to the schools, so often a dean who is good at his job is worth many, many times what they're actually paid and help fund the structural improvements that can't be done by individual professors.

And what the f*^k does all this have to do with Larry Herndon being pissed off that he has yet to be mentioned?

Does the headline suffer from extremely narrow views of "black" and "America"?

re: Frank Robinson. Although he's obviously not as central to Giants history as Mays, McCovey, or Dusty Baker, he was the 1st African-American manager in the National League. Which makes a certain bit of ironic sense: just as the Giants' first black player (Hank Thompson) was a retread (previously with the Browns), so was the Giants' first black manager.

I didn't mean that they were purposeless, just that they aren't as, I dunno, productive as biomedical research

I'm inclined to agree (having just taught a class on the middle ages this morning :) But taking ellsbury's point into account, sure, biomedical research institutes and the like would pay for themselves if public universities didn't exist. Public universities are becoming more and more the shell for privately-funded biomedical research institutes, in fact. This is all a super business model.

My lecture on The Song of Roland does not have to be funded by anybody, and I can't imagine the market will ever fund it (unless some ultra-right-wing French nationalists want to, which has problems of its own. But if you privatize the university system by funding only productive stuff, then soon nobody will know anything about The Song of Roland. That might be fine with everybody, but it should be clear that that's what's fixing to happen if one stays on the current plan of running universities like businesses. The whole original point of many universities was that they'd fund stuff that doesn't find its own funding in ROI terms (though it has sometimes found it in other ways, via patronage, for instance).

Just like people snark about how they'd be happy to do what some tenured professors do for less money; roll into campus twice a week hungover (or still drunk), read from a sheaf of yellowing notes, dole out As to everybody, and go home for more drinking while collecting a 6 figure salary with complete job security. I know plenty of people who would jump at that job, but THEY don't have Ph.Ds from Yale. Oh well.

Substitute "nudging your career along writing crappy articles for pointless journals", and "spending only as little time as you can get away with on those necessary inconveniences called students" for some of that "drinking", and this describes my experiences at universities. It's appalling.

Is it an effort to attract more students

Students are increasingly beside the point. Universities are run more and more like businesses, and their chief business advantages are tax breaks and real estate, which they put to work building development empires. They have the tax breaks and the real estate in the first place because they were (and nominally still are) schools, but the actual teaching of students is a "cost center," something to be controlled, not cultivated.

This is disgustingly true. I did a little research at one college I attended and noted over the years that students were increasingly marginalized and literally pushed to the perimeter of campus, into cheap, cinderblock and paint buildings, while the core administration moved into the most attractive buildings on campus. Some of the old, beautiful dorms were also turned into faculty offices while students were pushed into those dreadful concrete hi-rises a twenty minute bus ride from the original, still beautiful dorms. I don't doubt this is true for most colleges.

Students in most colleges are treated as a necessary evil, the rationale for the continued operation of institutions of which they are no longer anything more than tertiary beneficiaries.

One of my best friends just completed his PhD in something biomedical after around 8-9 years of post-graduate labor working half on his area of study and half on whatever the lab he was working for was working on. Immediately after getting the degree, he transitioned to a paid position running a lab in the same building where his new job description basically consists of what seems like 90% grant-writing to get money to buy equipment, learning how to use the equipment and then leasing out the lab and the equipment to make the lab money and 10% research on whatever. This is also at a UC.

Substitute "nudging your career along writing crappy articles for pointless journals", and "spending only as little time as you can get away with on those necessary inconveniences called students" for some of that "drinking", and this describes my experiences at universities.

Pity, wasn't my experience at all. Of course I was in the hard sciences, lots of enthusiasm to go around there.

Emmanuel Burriss?

Pity, wasn't my experience at all. Of course I was in the hard sciences, lots of enthusiasm to go around there.

Yeah, that's my experience as well. Most of the people I know could be making way more money in industry if they wanted to, so the people who stay in academia tend to really believe in what they're doing.

Teaching is certainly one aspect of what goes on, and the teaching is excellent (particularly at the PhD level), but it's only one part of what research universities do

I've been at a number of research universities (a different scientific field though), and this is not what I've observed. I've encountered a few good teachers, but most have been quite bad (especially at the PhD level, in my experience).

And this should be expected. The faculty are hired primarily for research-related activities, and spend most of their time on research-related activities because their advancement is based primarily on research-related activities. Research/grants have be the focus of their time.

The grad students' and postdocs' advancement towards their degree/next job is based primarily on research-related activities (with a little bit of course work thrown in, in the case of grad students). In many cases that I've seen, they do not receive any preparation or training in pedagogy, their teaching receives little to no constructive evaluation, and there is little to no reward, apart from personal satisfaction, for teaching well. Research activities have to be the focus of their time, too.

In these circumstances it is difficult even for talented, motivated people to teach well. (And for less talented, less motivated people ... yikes.)

Again, this is only my experience, from grad student-ing and postdoc-ing at various research universities, so take it for whatever that's worth...

Substitute "nudging your career along writing crappy articles for pointless journals", and "spending only as little time as you can get away with on those necessary inconveniences called students" for some of that "drinking", and this describes my experiences at universities.

Pity, wasn't my experience at all. Of course I was in the hard sciences, lots of enthusiasm to go around there.

Not surprised. Genuine progress in the hard sciences is harder to fake. That's one of the problem areas in the humanities, where accomplishment (pretty much only the number of articles in specific journals) is measured in ways that have nothing to do with anything inherently meaningful. It's the problem that comes with attempting to quantify things that are largely unquantifiable, and relying only on the simplest, easiest measure.

When you assemble a faculty in the humanities largely by publication success, it's a lot like putting together a team based on batting average.