back
16 comments
It's not just the pay of a few top level officials: the number of employees in the university bureaucracy has exploded over the past few decades. What's interesting is that this growth tracks quite well with the increase in tuition costs.

Forget the president's salary, does a small university really need six separate deans of residential life for undergrads alone, plus a support staff of three for each?

...this growth tracks quite well with the increase in tuition costs.

Which tracks, perhaps slightly less well, the simultaneous increase in student loans.

EDIT: Sure the effects of "the crisis" might be a recent contributor, but the trend in both tuition and loan volume is longer-term than that.

increase in student loans.

Following the decline in the viability of sub-prime mortgages as an "investment."

Well this is a private institution so I am little less concerned about its spending habits. For some college students might decide not to fork over the money. But for U of Chicago probably not as their "..undergraduate admission rate of 8.4% is among the country's most selective universities" (wikipedia) They will get people to pay for a while to come.

That being said the board of regents for state U. seem to be a chummy affair with those who sit on them appointed by the governor (at least in my state). I don't have a great deal of faith in individual board members to rock the boat and risk giving up the prestige of sitting on the board of a large university.

While I can't say I'm concerned about the University of Chicago (not a direct impact on my life), I am concerned about the overall trend that it represents. The fact that students are willing to pay for it doesn't mean too much (IMO) as the economics and incentives of higher education (2008 downturn, skimpy state budgets, tuition grants, non-dischargeable loan debt, graduate research funding) have driven most schools to a challenging place where students are mostly choosing between institutions that are kind of mercenary, and ones that are blatantly mercenary.

This story comments on the University of Chicago mostly because its one of the extremes. However, the issue is really the trend - The move to run schools like big business.

To gauge success by non-student oriented metrics like year-over-year recruitment growth or annual profit. To compete for, and try to hire big shot administrators / executives (cause that $1M (Example) Harvard guy is worth 10x more than some $100k random dude). To vote large administrative / executive pay raises or parachutes (not general faculty) while the main public story is the rapidly rising cost of tuition. To tailor the school towards showing good metrics, rather than educating students and letting metrics flow from that. To focus primarily on research output because its more profitable / efficient than educating a bunch of undergrads.

IMO, its all the problems that we're vaguely aware exist in higher education, but the University of Chicago is just particularly egregious about it and could make Obama look bad if he puts his library in it while talking about how important educating all our students (not just the wealthy ones) is.

>To gauge success by non-student oriented metrics like year-over-year recruitment growth or annual profit. To compete for, and try to hire big shot administrators / executives (cause that $1M (Example) Harvard guy is worth 10x more than some $100k random dude). To vote large administrative / executive pay raises or parachutes (not general faculty) while the main public story is the rapidly rising cost of tuition. To tailor the school towards showing good metrics, rather than educating students and letting metrics flow from that. To focus primarily on research output because its more profitable / efficient than educating a bunch of undergrads.

All while squeezing graduate-student stipends and replacing tenured faculty with poverty-wage adjuncts.

While I wouldn't try to argue that there is no distinction between public and private, a huge amount of government money does flow into both. Private really just mean that it is not operated by the government, and probably means that it doesn't receive direct operational funding from the government.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/27/universities-govern...

Private universities do receive a huge amount of government funding, particularly where it comes to research grants. They are also tax exempt where it comes to endowment growth. These two elements do amount to considerable government support for research universities.

Some very high profile public research universities (such as UC Berkeley and UCSF) actually receive a small enough percentage of their budget from the state that they are tempted, now and then, to withdraw and privatize. This temptation is particularly strong at UCSF, which doesn't have undergraduates to support and might very well come out ahead if it gave up state support, already a minimal part of the budget, in exchange for the right to behave like a private institution.

> They are also tax exempt where it comes to endowment growth.

And they're often exempt from property taxes too, which is why many elite universities now own substantial portions of whole towns or cities and charge rent to the actual tax-payers for use of the space. MIT and Harvard own much of Cambridge, and Columbia has been on a buying spree in Manhattan. According to the facts I've managed to find, they do pay some property tax, but they also seem to cut deals with their home cities to give reduced "payments in lieu of taxes" rather than pay their full property tax burdens -- depending on where.

It ought be asked why tax-exempt nonprofit institutions receiving public funding for educational purposes can now act as landlords.

The top 50 highest salaries in Massachusetts are all at UMass: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/16/once-again-state...

Here's the top 5 (from 2012)

     Collins, Michael F   Chancellor & SVP Hlth Sciences    $784,468
     Flotte, Terence R    Exec Dep Chanc Provost & Dean     $712,041
     Lovley, Derek R      Associate Dean CNS                $664,636
     Kellogg, Derek W     Head Basketball Coach             $628,624
     Murphy, Joyce A      Exec VC, Commonwealth Medicine    $590,320
Collins also got a $700k+ home to live in free. Meanwhile the governor of the state was making about $140k.

I assume a $400k/yr professor must be bringing in some serious grant bucks, but wow, I had no idea you could make that much as a prof.

UChicago’s current situation seems to constitute a worst-case example of the “failure of governing boards to ensure that institutions adhere to their stated purpose,” as an August 2014 American Council of Trustees and Alumni report put it. The ACTA correctly lays partial blame for a decline in educational quality and an increase in costs on trustees, but ultimately identifies the problem as a “strategy of passive governance” and recommends greater voluntary engagement and scrupulosity within a system where trustees “are beholden to none.”

The article makes the situation sound like a vile cesspit but "a decline in educational quality", really? U.Chicago is a super-elite university, like HYPS. Undergraduates are at no risk of having instructors of as low a standard as at say, Berkeley.

Perhaps. It's mostly the business school and the law school that are well-renowned. For most other fields, it is a rather generous step down from the Harvards, Yales, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins (and yes, Berkeley), etc. in terms of quality of faculty, students, and research.

HYPS and quality doesn't necessarily translate to good classroom teaching. Most learning at HYPS-grade schools happens outside of the classroom, and indeed, the classrooms are often not very good. It translates to good peer group and professors to learn from, good opportunities (e.g. to do research, internships, and have access to labs and equipment for engineering students), and good reputation and network after graduating.

Chicago is aggressive in terms of targeting US News and World Report, but a lot of the indicators are non-indicators of quality. For example, 99% of Chicago freshman continue there, and the 6-year graduation rate is 93%. Many other schools are a bit more selective about pruning students who really ought not have gotten in, and have somewhat more rigorous academic requirements. Chicago has good student:faculty in classrooms, since that's in the ratings, but as a result of faculty spending time there, perhaps a bit less faculty contact outside of classrooms (in research and similar settings). Etc. A lot of that might collapse if they run into financial troubles.

Well, it seems to rank competitively with Harvard and MIT with respect to Math and Physics if you go by recent Nobel and Fields medals. Granted those are problematic measures along with US News, but publication rates will probably bear that out. And in terms of completion rate, it tends to be a "by nerds, for nerds" institution, that is highly self-selecting -- the kind of place you only know about because you've researched it. The flames aside, the financial straights are quite troubling. Shold a school that many econ Nobel's really be in such straits? Maybe Levitt [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levitt] should take a crack at this one?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#Fields_Medals_by_A...

Affiliation upon appointment of Field's Medal:

Harvard: 3 MIT: 2 Chicago: 0

Chicago does list a lot of medalists of different sorts on their page, but their affiliation is questionable at best.

I think U Chicago is a top tier school but I don't understand what you mean about Berkeley. UC Berkeley has a low standard of instructors? It is usually in the top 5 for math, physics, and computer science. Were you talking about departments aside from these?
I'm a little bewildered by this as well... it didn't sound like a joke, but I may be missing it. Perhaps this is a reference to the higher undergraduate student/faculty ratio, and the greater difficulty in getting access to faculty at the undergrad level?

I'm not sure what departments would be considered weak at Berkeley - according to the National Research Council, Berkeley has the most graduate departments in the top 10 of any university. Then again… Berkeley and elite private research universities tend to have similar numbers of grad students, and of course access to professors is much higher for PhD students than undergrads.

Berkeley has a lot of problems, largely stemming from having a very large number of undergraduates (and a higher percentage of low income students) than most private elite research institutions (there are substantial social benefits to this as well), but quality of faculty is probably Berkeley's strongest suit.

Not sure. Maybe parent was making a joke?