Posted on 06/06/2006 10:19:01 AM PDT by JSedreporter
When children can support themselves, they generally leave their parents’ home. When state colleges and universities can do the same, they find it difficult to leave the nest of taxpayer-subsidized state and federal supports.
“Ours is an economy of scarcity,” Gary A. Olson writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Even well-endowed institutions find themselves in a constant struggle to find enough money to do everything that they want to do.”
“That economy of scarcity extends to salaries: Most academics and administrators are not compensated at the level that their education, skills, and experience would garner in business and industry.” Olson serves as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University.
Actually:
1.) Most colleges and universities, despite their employees’ aversion to capitalism, have substantial stock market portfolios far in excess of their most lavish expenses.
2.) Most college professors have more job security than the parents who entrust their children to the academics’ care.
“Dozens of academic institutions, even small colleges, have endowments of at least $1 billion, despite losses following the burst of the dot-com bubble,” Mark B. Schneider writes in The Chronicle. “Because colleges and universities see a generous endowment as a top priority, endowments have grown faster than budgets.” Schneider is an associate professor of physics at Grinnell College in Iowa.
As Dr. Schneider indicates, it is not just the Yales and Harvards that have enviable portfolios. So do some notable state universities, whose resident scholars perpetually warn of cuts in government funding whether such reductions are imminent or not.
At the same time, “State spending on student financial aid rose by more than 8 percent in the 2004-5 academic year, amid signs that efforts by states to expand financial assistance may be catching up with the growth in public college tuition,” Karin Fischer writes in The Chronicle. “The 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico awarded a total of $7.9 billion in grants and scholarships in 2004-5, up from $7.3 billion the previous year, according to a report to be released this week by the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, or NASSGAP.”
“The rate of increase picked up from 2003-4, when state spending on student aid rose by just 6 percent.” You can play an interesting mix-and-match-game by breaking out the individual states that the schools with the billion-dollar market portfolios are in to compare what is spent on student aid by taxpayers with what is hoarded by colleges and universities in futures.
California $757 million
Michigan $250 million
N.C. $242 million
Ohio $240 million
PA $403 million
Texas $458 million
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Not too surprisingly, with this level of support, college professors do not fare too badly, especially vis-a`-vis the parents and taxpayers who support them, although these academics may not see it that way. Controversial Ethnic Studies professor Ward Churchill, for example, still managed to pull down six figures a year even while he was being “disciplined” by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Think about what life was like for working-class people in American in the 1950s, of the kind of economic security that people had,” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart noted in a lecture at Harvard last year. “This is something that we may never be able to get back to.”
“Somebody quipped that the average blue-collar worker in a union, in the 1950s, had the kind of economic security that today we only associate with college professors.” Apparently, the passion for social justice that most professors profess 24-7 crowds out any guilt that they may have about living at the expense of people with more physically demanding, even dangerous, jobs—troops in Iraq, for example.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
How about just providing a good balanced college education for your students and forget about all the ridiculous fluff and useless courses you make your students take.
Yet another reason to call Democrats' bluff on taxing wealth (instead of income).
My friend's wife a teacher at a local college was able to send her kids to colleges out of state (Smith, Boston college) for Half price.
Nice little perk probably saved them $150,000.
Unbelievable medical and retirement benefits. A real Socialist wonderland
Prove it! Go get one of those great-paying jobs. Unfortunately -- for you -- it's a market-based economy which generally pays for quality and to a threshhold that the market can bear. This sounds like a classic case of the "...grass is greener..." mentality...
And as for experience...what experience? All you've been doing is sitting around thinking (one would hope...) and sharing your thinking with the virgin minds of America's youth. Other than your current occupation, I don't see many people getting paid to do that! In fact, I beleive that you're being overpaid.
It was an absolute historical anomaly based on the preeminent industrial position of the United States at the end of WWII. When you have the only working factories left in a war-wracked world, your working-class people are temporarily going to be able to achieve middle-class or even upper-middle-class lifestyles.
Unfortunately, the unions decided that the economicontinue to demand wages at a level to maintain those lifestyles in the the face of competition from a world that now operates its own better, faster, and cheaper factories.
What absolute nonsense! A PhD chemist is not nearly as marketable as a PhD in ethnic studies. These jerks expect us to buy this garbage?
Of course they do.
There is a wide range between the salaries of professors at the elite institutions and those at small regional state colleges or small church-related colleges...at the lower end you can find professors being paid about the same as public school teachers (perhaps less if you compare individuals of the same age, since it takes more years of education to qualify for a job teaching in college).
The endowments involved would seem to indicate:
1) UC Oakland = The University of California located in Berkeley, CA
2) USCLA = The University of Southern California located in Los Angeles, CA
This is no surprise and I'm bedazzled that the public barely acknowleges it. The UC system on whole is a state system, yet is allowed to maintain its own set of books. As you note, they have untold billions of dollars in cash endowments, plus billions more in property assets. Yet the state continues to subsidize them.
There is some sense to letting universities endow themselves, to ensure their academic freedom from the state. But at some point they become self-perpetuating, and at that point the subsidies should be withdrawn.
But then, they no longer become state schools.
I couldn't begin to say how to reform it, but it's clearly both an unnecessary drain on taxpayers and an untapped reserve of state funds that could be put to other uses. Why should Berkley sit on $8 billion in cash, and growing, while continuing to receive state subsidies?
UC Oakland probably refers to Berkley, USCLA probably means UCLA. Typo I guess.
USC (University of Southern California) has a large endowment but is a private university. My alma mater... fight on!
And these are miniscule compared to the Ivy League schools... I think Harvard has a $40 billion endowment fund.
The other institutions are all state institutions so "USCLA" can't be USC, but could be a typo for UCLA as you suggest. But are there separate endowments for the various UC campuses, or one large endowment for the whole UC system? There's no UC campus in Oakland, but there could be some office located there that controls the endowment.
From this article it looks like there are separate endowments for each UC campus. Probably the alumni from Berkeley and UCLA give specifically to their schools, and not to UC Irvine.
I don't know how it works, but if you look at football Berkeley and UCLA are in the PAC-10, and the PAC-10 shared their football revenues with each other (including USC, Washingtonx2, Arizonax2 & Stanford) but I don't think UCLA and Berkeley had to share with the other UC schools.
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