Day: December 6, 2011

If you want to make a million dollars, run a college nobody has ever heard of

Lisa Schweitzer

My lovely and brilliant friend, Dorothy Herriener, economist and professor over at Loyola in Palisades, forwarded this story to Fboo from The Chronicle of Higher Education, on the widening pay gap between university presidents and faculty. It appears that most presidents make somewhere between 3 to 4 times what the average faculty make, on up to 12 times what the faculty make.

It would be interesting to see what the relative ratios are for the staff at universities.

What’s got me scratching my head are the (mostly) dudes at the top: I get why Yale and Johns Hopkins dudes are getting paid a lot, but nobody has ever heard of half of these little liberal arts colleges/tiny universities on the list. Maybe the guy from Mountain State making $1.8 million a year has to do all the plumbing and janitorial work on campus in addition to fundraising. Drexel? Seriously? $5 million to run Drexel?

Hell, I’d do it for $3 million.

Something intelligent on American saving behavior

Lisa Schweitzer

Don’t know about the rest of the you, but I generally find that most pieces about American saving behavior full of empty assertions about how bad Americans are, like the writer is some Presbyterian minister rebuking sin using the same boring old tropes about American excess. This NPR story about Princeton’s Sheldon Garon strikes me–finally!–as something policy relevant. Go listen.