[Desron13]

“Even well-endowed institutions find themselves in a constant struggle to find enough money to do everything that they want to do.”

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.

[mc6809e]

Yet another reason to call Democrats' bluff on taxing wealth (instead of income).

[underbyte]

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

[Poseidon]

“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.

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.

[Mr. Jeeves]

“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.”

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.

[Carry_Okie]

Most academics and administrators are not compensated at the level that their education, skills, and experience would garner in business and industry.”

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.

[Verginius Rufus]

I've never heard of "UC Oakland" or "USCLA." Most of the universities mentioned are top-ranked flagship universities, which get the lion's share of what state money is available. The regional state universities which focus mostly on teaching don't get treated as generously.

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).

[monkeyshine]

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?