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Comment by passwordoops | Hacker News Reader

It's the dubious administrators raking in $250-400K a year that contribute to the increased tuition. See for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936

Thank you! All the anti-union comments here kind of baffle me given that grad students meaningfully contribute to the academic mission. If anything, the economics of tutoring as a side gig in grad school led me to realize how much I was getting ripped off as a TA. There is much better fat to trim in the UC system than grad student stipends.

Honestly, I’d much rather student tuitions be going to grad students working as TAs. It makes for better grad students (experience as teachers is invaluable in solidifying that undergrad knowledge which can fade) and encourages them to continue on their academic career path to PhD and beyond (which themselves are career tracks on life support).

The dubious administrators are a symptom, not a cause. The root cause is guaranteed loan money. About a decade ago, I remember seeing a study posted here that said that for every dollar of increased guaranteed loans, tuition went up 71 cents. There’s just no incentive for a university to charge much less than the maximum amount that the student can borrow.

The first step to addressing the college affordability crisis is to get the government out of student loans to attend private universities and colleges. If private lenders want to step in, that’s fine, but then they have to do an actual actuarial process to determine which students will be capable of repaying. Once the government is only involved in public education, they can start working on cost cutting, but that too has to start with cutting back on loans, because those just make tuition go up.

I get that guaranteed loans come from a place of wanting to make education more accessible and not just a part of the entrenched privilege of the wealthy, but guaranteed loans are one of those zombie policies that makes the situation worse rather than accomplishing its goal.

My department at Stanford has a diversity administrator, a fund raising admin, a sustainability admin, and some more I am probably not aware of. Only senior admins get six figures.

It would be interesting to see the full salary structure at Stanford compared to Berkeley. It's not freely available, but they have a link that requires an email (waiting for my burner account to be approved):

https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/benefits-rewards/compens...

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