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Comment by Nutella4 | Hacker News Reader

Bigger, newer buildings. Lots more administrators paid much higher salaries. Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams. Gourmet food and single rooms for students (so they can attract the best and brightest!) rather than hash-slinging cafeterias and dormitories. Fancy gyms for the same reason.

Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.

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//Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams.//

I'm happy to say that at my alma mater (Purdue) the athletic programs are run as a separate business. They don't get one penny from the University general fund. I think they are one of 5 schools like that. Personally, I think every public school should be required to fund athletics separately.

The accounting for college athletics is weird. Do you only count tickets/TV/bowl $$ in? Or do you try and include alumni donations directly or indirectly linked/influenced by sports? How do you know whether or not the alumnus/a would have donated if not for the team? Do you count sports individually or as a whole? - under title IX you can't just cut the women's programs outright. You can manipulate these variable to claim almost anything you want about profitability in either direction.

Normally when athletics are profitable, the athletic dep't grows. When they are not, the college makes up the difference. I've never heard of an athletic department that contributed anything back to the college, at least not willingly.

Well, Purdue does take a big chunk of the Big 10 Network proceeds for the University, when that money is almost entirely the result of the athletic program. However, I wouldn't say the athletic programs are willingly sharing it.

I should have said that median faculty salaries are much lower. A few stars get big salaries and more than half get starvation wages.

We have been moving to the pro sports salary model, not just in pro sports, but obviously already happened in .edu and is more or less along that path everywhere else.

I'm sure there's startup opportunities and risks in this cultural and economic system change.

At my school, a lot of the instructors (at least the non-research instructors) are people who hold 9-5 jobs at a private company in their field of instruction as an adjunct professor. They're willing to work for a lot less pay, since it's a second job.

Yes, the schools are trying to make college teaching into a hobby rather than a profession.

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