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Both are well-grounded in reality.

Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students, that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.

But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries.

And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need money. It seems like a win-win-win all around.

But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings, faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal financial controls of grants and donations.

>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.

Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades.

Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow.

It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.

Australia is quite different, but there's tax payer funded unis here paying their Deans over 1 million a year who claim they can't afford to pay people more than $40/hour casually to record video lectures for first year business statistic classes to be delivered to over 600 students/year across multiple countries. They've also spent millions upon millions moving their campus in to the city when they already own a really good campus 10 minutes drive from the city with lots of decent free parking around even for undergrads. They also announced this year that they're so poor they're going to cut 75% of either the classes or courses next year (not sure which). People who run tax payer funded institutions like that should be thrown in jail.

> This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.

That's exactly what is happening, and the mechanism is simple. It's the original bundle and upsell model. It doesn't take terribly much imagination to consider why this might be the case:

- second largest purchase (maybe single largest purchase) most Americans now make in their life

- purchased when prefrontal cortices haven't fully developed (~18yo in most cases)

- sold as an "investment" to parents (you "need a bachelor's degree to get a good job")

- purchased as an investment by students (I want a career after college) but also as an "experience" (I need to party, mingle, socialize with the opposite sex for the only 4 year span of your life where I will ever experience actual freedom)

- financed with debt products guaranteed by the government

- .. but which often cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (!!)

Why wouldn't such a "product" balloon in breadth, depth and average cost given that it's an enormous industry? The US student debt market alone is ~$1.6T. To give a benchmark for comparison, the US mortgage market is $11T, and those consists of bonds securitized by assets.

> There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?

Your argument boils down to "I can't haven't researched any of the details here and I can't come up with any off the top of my head so it must be the result of ideological astroturfing." In doing so, you completely ignore one of most insidious modern forms of legalized debt slavery. Don't reduce and flatten arguments you don't agree with. It's not just wrong, but it conditions you into ignorance and against engaging in a basic investigation of the details.

> - financed with debt products guaranteed by the government

Provided by the government, not guaranteed.

You wrote a lot of text, but I think you are speaking from a position of ignorance or emotion, to be honest, on the topic of high salaries.

You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.

But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality.

As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.

> You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.

That's sort of the definition of a salary subject to market forces, yes. But, as an alternative, I even suggested comparing administrators' salaries with education-matched employees in IT startups.

You're not offering any specific alternative, but OP's comment and yours seem to basically amount to "I know what people should earn, and 'administration' is useless anyway."

> If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system.

Many countries produce many things cheaper than the US, often at the same quality. Foodstuffs are an obvious example, but there are many more: a pilot in China or South Africa earns far less than an American, even though they are trained to the same standard. Does this mean US pilots are overpaid? Taxi drivers the world over provide pretty much equal service, but does that mean US taxi drivers should earn $1.20/day (average Iraqi daily income for taxis)?

But even assuming US universities are too expensive, which I would tend to agree with, I was specifically challenging the idea that high salaries are as dominant a part of the explanation as the relative number of comments here focussing on it suggests. And because "administrators" was and remains ill-defined, I offered specific reasons why that is unlikely for a number of groups that people might be referring to.

While you've devoted a paragraph to reading the emotional subtext of my comment, you neglected my rather plain request to be a bit more specific: by "administrator", are you referring to the Dean of the Law School, the Quinnipiac Polling Call Center Temp, the Executive Assistant to the Greenkeeper, the Physics Postdoc,...?

Anyway, here's four alternative explanations that make more sense, IMO:

- US universities spend more on research, and use tuition money to (partially) fund these activities.

- US undergrad programs spent far more on student life, such as luxurious dormitories or sports centres

- US tuition includes medical care, doesn't it? US medical care is famously inefficient.

- US universities, even public ones, rely far more on tuition than universities in other countries, that get comparably higher government subsidies

You try to wrongly compare to Iraq of all places instead of other first-world, high income places.

I think you missed his point, which is that both the Iraqi and US taxi driver provide about the same amount of value, yet while one gets paid more than the other (despite provide equal value). He implies that people don't see this as a problem, and suggests that maybe the salaries of the administrators are something similar.

That would be sources like https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

More broadly, there seems to be a lot of money coming in as student fees, and very little going out in academics' salaries. If things in-classroom are so profitable, there must be a heck of a lot of out-of-classroom expenses going on.

I feel like that Forbes article is concentrating on the wrong things because it makes for better copy. I calculated estimates based on the numbers they gave.

For the 1980-81 school year, $20.7B at 41% for instruction and $13.0B at 26% for administration yields $16.6B at 33% for other than instruction/administration.

For the 2014-15 school year, $148.0B at 24% for instruction and $122.3B at 29% for administration yields $239.7BB at 47% for other than instruction/administration.

That means, for approximate multiples, instruction increased 7.15x, administration increased 9.41x, and other than instruction/administration increased 14.44x. When I recalculate what the 2014-15 expenses would have been had they all increased at the same rate as instruction, I get $29.35B excess for administration and $121.02B excess for other than instruction/administration.

It seems to me, based on those estimates, that the elephant in costs is somewhere in that "other than instruction/administration" category. Overpaid administrators are certainly a problem, but they appear to be a relatively minor problem.

>> stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector.

Even if you aren't making the salary you could elsewhere, universities usually have pretty good working environments and benefits.

Free tuition, great retirement plans, good health insurance, lots of holidays, relaxed work schedules and dress codes.