In a world in which E. Gordon Gee can pull in the astounding sum of $6,057,615 while being shown the door at Ohio State, combined with this…
In the study by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ohio State was No. 1 on the list of what it called the most unequal public universities. The report found that from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012, Ohio State paid Mr. Gee a total of $5.9 million. During the same period, it said, the university hired 670 new administrators, 498 contingent and part-time faculty — and 45 permanent faculty members. Student debt at Ohio State grew 23 percent faster than the national average during that time, the report found.
… well, it’s not so hard to see why athletic departments operate the way they do, is it?
Get The Picture 
Gee whiz … )sorry, but it had to be said).
While far from an Adams apologist, I do question his inclusion on that list. More then 75% of his last year’s income was deferred compensation. He wouldn’t have made the list otherwise.
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But Adams ranks at the top of my “worst person ever” poll, nonetheless.
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The continued skyrocketing cost of college education indeed can be mostly attributed to the salaries and benefits paid out to administrators and faculty. They are living in a fantasy world that almost anyone in the private sector could only dream of. We’re talking salaries 150k+ a year, tenure, close to 100% or full medical coverage, pension, and a relative easy and stress free lifestyle on top of all of that.
Yet every time there is talk of (yet again) increasing tuition, the students take to the streets and protest against the politicians, when ironically its their own professors they should be upset with (the same ones who in many cases are actually encouraging them to protest).
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I’d say the easy access to student loans have more to do with the rising tuition than anything else. If your customers have the money to afford it, why wouldn’t you raise prices?
I’m not saying it’s ethical, but it does make perfect sense.
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yep easy money flooding a market has has a tendency to do that. In both the university and the athletic department money has been flooding in and the guys controlling the money did the only thing they could, spent it.
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No doubt about it, and I completely agree with you that this is certainly a factor. On top of this, the interest % on such loans are ridiculously low as well (at least for the short term). Not trying to spark a political debate, but many (including those on the left) have questioned whether Obama’s mandate to provide college access to pretty much anyone has backfired in many ways because of the rapid rise in education costs.
Students coming out of school these days often are saddled with several hundred thousand in student loan debt that will take ages to pay off.
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I have a feeling that it started before Obama, but I wholeheartedly agree that college isn’t for everyone. There are just so many degrees, even from good universities, that aren’t significantly more valuable than a high school diploma. I had a neighbor in college who got his undergrad and masters in recreational sports studies. Fortunately he was on HOPE, but can you imagine someone taking out loans for that degree? Mind boggling. What’s the point?
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The easy money certainly started well before Obama came into office, but it has really ramped up in recent years in regard to increased federal aid and the like. And as you mentioned, there are a host of majors out there that simply aren’t transferable or applicable to the real world.
In our increasingly tech dominated society coupled with an increase in small business start-ups and the like, an argument can be made the the importance of a college degree isn’t what it once was. Stanford actively tells its students that if they think of the next great idea or are recruited for a promising position is their desired area, they should drop out and go pursue that instead.
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Use the data, friends.
Less than 1% have $100+ of debt, average ~$26k, growing very fast. One of the biggest things not mentioned above is the effects of not being able to extinguish debt from student loans. Forget government encouragement, banks don’t really need that when they’re guaranteed their money back.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/
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Well, word on the street is that student loan debt can’t be extinguished because some savvy med school and law school students would file for bankruptcy after graduating but before starting their job. They would have $100K+ of debt but no current income at the time.
The gov’t response was far too extreme, for sure, but at the end of the day the onus is on the debtor to ensure that he/she is being responsible with the debt taken on. Attempting to shift the blame to the gov’t, banks, or anyone else besides the person signing on the dotted line is lame.
For the record, I’m not saying you in particular were doing that, I just had to get on my soap box about it 🙂
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HOPE covers about 4 thousand a year. Tuition is close to 11 thousand for a full time Georgia student. My sons lived at home for their first year and then moved out and it worked out well. Both had jobs working 15 hours a week that paid close to 10/12 bucks an hour. They worked up to 60 hours a week during the summers. Parents made up the difference. They went on spring breaks, games and such. Both enjoyed their college experience. Both graduated and are pursuing advanced degrees. My brother in law complains about the bill he’s racking up all the time. His son really didn’t work hard in HS so no HOPE. He wants the government to pay all the student loans off. ” To help them all out.” I agreed if the government would reimburse the parents and kids for all their contributions. I got no response.
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Yeah, the gov’t paying everyone’s loans off would be BS. If you take out a loan, pay it back. Period. Hopefully once you posed the rhetorical question of reimbursing parents and kids he realized how stupid his position is/was. (Sorry, I’m venting now. Another soap box of mine is people advocating for equal outcomes without regard to unequal efforts.)
On another note, $11k/year for tuition? I went to UGA and never paid a dime of tuition, although I had to pay several hundred per year for “fees” and such. I’m not sure I understand where you’re coming from. I graduated undergrad in 2010 so maybe they’ve changed it…?
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Congrats! On your graduation. Yeah I probably should have referred to our bank statements before posting
. Depending on the credit hours there was a shortfall of 1000 or 1400 bucks a semester. A big hit was the books. Those book sellers think a whole lot of their books. Sons graduated in 2012 and 2014. They were both born in Athens and we were able to help them locate jobs. Housing ran about 350 a month each. I couldn’t tell you what groceries cost. Half the time they would swing by with friends pull stuff out of the frig or freezer or fire up the grill. I think we fed a lot of kids that weren’t ours.
HOPE Scholarship and the Flat Rate Tuition Model
Student Enrolled in 15 hours
Tuition Assessed: $4,295.00
HOPE Payment: – $3,390.00
Out of Pocket: = $905.00
Student Enrolled in 13 hours
Tuition Assessed: $4,295.00
HOPE Payment: – $2,938.00
Out of Pocket: = $1,357.00
Out of pocket difference between 15 and 13 hours: $452.00
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Woah, thanks for the breakdown. Thanks for the congrats as well, and congrats to your sons too, both for graduating and for landing jobs!
It appears that HOPE no longer covers 100% of tuition. I heard rumblings about that change coming down the pipeline when I was still in school.
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Hope covered both of my daughters full tuition plus $150.00 book money. My oldest daughter had scholarships above that so she had a full ride. My youngest has some student loan debt. The youngest graduated in 2010. It was more than $4000.00 a year.
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This was going on 35,years ago when I was in school. I knew people (some of whom are now elected officials) that took out student loans not because they needed the money for school, but so they could put it into a CD paying 10% and pay back the loan at 4%.
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Uglydawg + all of the above, with the caveat that access to cheap money for tuition started long before Obama.
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I blame BOB*
*(Bush Obama Bobo)
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One of the more glaring abuses in higher ed these days is in the part-time and adjunct faculty category. This is where universities are couching much of their “cost cutting”. Not by cutting costs, mind you, but simply hiring more and more people to work for minuscule sums on a semester-to-semester basis, with no benefits.
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“adjunct faculty category”
#winningwithausterity
“I AM A POET AND I HAVE one of the jobs that poets are supposed to want at our moment in history. I work at a park-like sharecropper estate called a university. I am not myself a sharecropper; I am an associate professor of creative writing. I make $62,500 a year, wildly more than I made when I was a sharecropper (I was one for thirteen years)….
I work in one of the heavily used mansion-like buildings that dot the estate. Every weekday I walk down the hall past many doors. Behind some doors work my peers (tenure-line teacher-scholar-writers). Behind other doors work the sharecroppers (adjunct teachers, graduate teaching assistants).
The sharecroppers are inferior to me under the terms of the hierarchy on which the institution insists, and which it requires in order to continue to support itself (and me) as it did formerly. The support to which the university and I have become accustomed is collapsing. There is a terrible drought and a weevil. The drought we call a recession (although recession implies recovery and the recession as it affects sharecroppers is not going to end). The weevil is an infestation called student loans. It affects the robustness of the plants grown on the sharecropper estate. When everyone has cottoned on to the weevil infestation, they may begin growing their plants elsewhere without the help of the sharecropper estate. Then the estate will transform into I don’t know what.”
http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2012/07/catherine-wagner.html
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A plea from a professor: Please don’t blame us, like 3rd and Grantham did. See that comment about administrators? The rising cost of education has NOTHING to do with the number or compensation for professors. Pay for tenured and tenure-track professors has barely tracked inflation the past 15 years. The number of tenure track professors has not even kept steady, in spite of the explosion in the number of college students. In short, the cost of the instructional personnel at most colleges has actually DROPPED, significantly, in the last 15 years. Professors are really, really far from being the problem. And yet everyone blames the professors. There are now almost as many associate deans and assistant vp’s and so on added each year across the country as there are assistant professors, and the former on average make 3 times what the latter make. And they hire recently-minted PHDs at Walmart greeter wages with zero job security to teach overflowing classes as adjuncts. The cost of education in this country is an enormous problem. But to have any chance at fixing it we’ve got to at least figure out what the problem is: cheap money and the cancer of bureaucracy.
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In defense of CitadelDawg there was a decline in state funding to Georgia universities (I’m not talking about the Hope) beginning with the Perdue Administration. That seems to be a nationwide phenomenon, but I do not know that personally. That, and ridiculous Presidents’ and other administrators’ salaries, have at least something to do with the problem.
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It’s like kudzu everywhere
“That is because the biggest bucks are currently earned not through the delivery of care, but from overseeing the business of medicine.”
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It is here in Indiana. I spoke with the president of IUPUI several years ago and asked how much state funding as a percent of university funding had dropped over the previous few years. I can’t remember the exact numbers, and the email he sent me has long since been deleted but I believe it dropped from about 55% to about 28%. No small potatoes. Administrative salaries, and the lack of accountability for many administrators, seems to be a big cost driver right now. Mitch Daniels at Purdue said he was making an effort to cut back on those administrative positions and get more money back to the classroom. I don’t know how successful he’s been, but given the number of VPs Purdue had (I believe it was 10+), it wouldn’t be hard.
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ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©said…
“Mitch Daniels: smaller than he appears.”
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2013/07/little-man.html
Little Man
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What your saying is that the colleges are following the national public education model. The reason the United States gets so little educational bang for it’s big bucks per student is that the school systems are top heavy with non-teaching administrators. All the high price administrators are a cost with no direct teaching effect. Example form an old Dawg. Iwent to high school in the Fulton County GA school system in the 60’s. We had 1 principal, 1 assistant principal, 1 counselor, and 1 school secretary. The student body was around 1,500 baby boomers. My kids attended the Fayette County Ga school system in the 90’s. They had 1 principal, 5 assistant principals, 5 counselors and god only knows how many secretaries. The school had around 1,500 students. This my friends is why our education system is screwed and why the cost is out of sight.
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FYI, all State of Georgia employee’s salaries can be found at this website. http://www.open.georgia.gov/
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So let’s see…blamed students, admin, faculty, Obama, Bush x 2, public education, someone’s brother, the government, and I would like to blame the invasive vine kudzu.
Also learning that Bulldawg165 graduated in 2010 and doesnt remember paying a dime for tuition was very interesting reading.
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Gotta love HOPE 🙂
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Not to b nit picky…but ” brother IN LAW”…k? Tech fan. Not blood relative. Ok. I hope I didn’t come across as petty. My bride doesn’t like it when I’m petty about that. I’m working on it. 😉
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Not petty at all, that is a distinction you should make. I can also understand why she is sensitive about it. For all the UGA-GT rivalry supporters on this site, I saw very, very few GT supporters when I lived in other states. Since moving back to Georgia, I still encounter very few…less than 5%. In all areas I have lived, the GT supporters are dwarfed by dozens of other programs, and that is true in Georgia.
I don’t like them much but they are really insignificant when compared to major programs around the entire country. I mean if they aren’t much of a factor in north Georgia, what is the point/threat?
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The reason for so few new faculty and so many administrators is that the number of laws regulating higher education has exploded with increased federal involvement. The administrators are necessary for compliance and paperwork to keep the federal money flowing in and to satisfy the endless demands of state and federal regulators. If you want more teachers tell congress and the legislatures to stop passing stupid laws and repeal most of the current ones. Then reduce the number of regulators and regulations. Once they do that then the administrators can be replaced with teaching faculty.
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