Last week, the Institute for Policy Studies released a report on executive pay at Universities. They focused specifically on the 25 Universities with the highest compensation for the top executive at the main campus, ranging from $10.2 M at Ohio State to $3.7 M at Florida State.
First, they found that student debt has increased faster at the high-executive-pay schools than the national average, although the trend there is pretty horrific even if you’re talking about a school where the President makes a measly one million a year.
Second, they found that at these universities, administrative expenses increased twice as fast as scholarship expenses. The University of Minnesota received special attention for coupling a 44% increase in administrative costs with a 55% reduction in scholarship expenditures over the five years from 2007 to 2012.
When the report first came out, it was reported that these schools also had a faster-than-average increase in the use of low-wage, adjunct faculty. The report was quickly pulled, supposedly due to concerns about the quality of the data collected from the American Federation of Teachers site. The report and the data were quickly removed from the web, and an updated version of the report was published a few days later.
Well, obviously, what actually happened was that Big Adjunct got to them. (Wake up sheeple!) I assume that Liam Neeson’s daughter was kidnapped and forced to live on an adjunct salary until the report was modified to toe the party line.
But I guess some truths are just too big to hide. Even the whitewashed corrected report shows that the highest-executive-pay Universities are increasing their use of adjunct faculty at a rate 22% faster than the national average.
Their top five “most unequal” Universities are: Ohio State, Penn State, U. Michigan, U. Minnesota, and U. Delaware. So, if you live in one of these states, move before your kids go to college.
This post is a perspective of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Ronin Institute.
