Live data from Hacker News

Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

npr.org

81–90 of 238 posts

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#81

Anecdata from my little corner. My 'non-profit' university's president is at 800k, his VP is 500k and multiple other admin officials in similar range. It is hard not to have a bitter taste as they just offered the students $500 grant application for their COVID19 trouble. If there is one good thing about this pandemic, it is shining a light on all this.

And from the other end of the spectrum, at my University of California campus, the top salaries are all in the 300k range, and all go to world-class engineering and sciences faculty who bring in millions in research grants each year. The chancellor, deans and one coach also break 300k, but that's it.

So, different schools, different governance models, different outcomes.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are not arguing this. If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits. The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees…

> In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). I think it depends on the endowment. If the University in fact has a lot of money, then I think they _should_ be operating at a loss while taking advantage of their cushion. But yeah for the majority of univ…

Endowment money is often contractually allocated to specific things to prevent this exact scenario.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#83
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, why won't anyone think of the poor administrators who get paid obnoxious salaries for doing effectively none of the labor that goes into providing an education for the students.

While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the Coll…

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college? Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant?

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#84
post #28

The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the cont…

I think the "experience" is vastly overrated with the one exception that it helped me meet my wife.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the Coll…

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can…

I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate.

And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.

Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.

Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).

Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#86
post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off. The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.

Yea we really need to buck this trend, if anything we should be using city resources to prop up people affected by COVID so the cities economics don't collapse.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#87
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.

It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was: $945,000 in salary $276,474 in bonuses $31,874 in nontaxable benefits $5.8 million in deferred compensation plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :| p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)

Fun read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ann_Jackson#Rensselaer...

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can…

I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate. And you'll see that…

If, as other commenters have said about their schools, there are double-digit numbers of administrators making over $1m, why not just cut their compensation to near that of lecturers?

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#89
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the Coll…

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can…

> Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?

Among other reasons: It takes an entire team to manage the lifecycle of grants, it's too much work for a single person to accomplish. In addition to the work needed to apply for a grant, there is also mandatory reporting and compliance to that needs to be completed. Additionally, a dean doesn't have the capacity to bind the entire university to the terms of a grant (nor the awareness to safely do so), so you run into problems with interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly encouraged.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#90
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can…

I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate. And you'll see that…

No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.

Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.

I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.

There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.

Post reply on HN