Ever wonder why college tuitions are spiraling out of control?

[Earth_First]

Here's an excellent example why:

SUNY pays 3 chauffeurs for Chancellor King
Erika Rosenberg
Albany bureau

(March 2, 2005) — ALBANY — The State University of New York has three people on the payroll to drive Chancellor Robert King, whose $250,000 salary and $90,000 housing allowance already make him the highest-paid official in the state.

Edward George, Raymond Sellie and Thomas Winterstein work for SUNY, earning a combined $174,700 a year, and serve as chauffeurs for King and other officials, according to job descriptions provided by SUNY.

Sellie and George are confidential aides whose first duty is "transporting the chancellor, senior staff, presidents and/or board of trustees while on official university business."

King said Tuesday it's actually Winterstein, a former state trooper, who does most of his driving. King travels on SUNY business in a state-owned Ford Expedition. If Winterstein is on vacation, one of the other two drivers may fill in, King said. "There's only one me, so it only takes one person," he said.

http://democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050302/NEWS01/503020329/1002/NEWS

[Greybnk48]

1. Well the money is not going to non-tenured instructors

Who are currently making up a sizeable proportion of the teaching staff at universities. I gross 33,500 after years of grad school and lots of loans to pay back.

[Warpy]

6. And tenure is going the way of the bustle and buggy whip

It's becoming impossible to get, making academic types who want to teach and research turn into perpetual nomads, working for the length of their contract (no more than 5 years) and then having to pick up and move to a different college on a different contract.

In the meantime, undergrad class sizes certainly haven't gotten any smaller, the dorms are still inelegant, and little attention has been paid to upgrading a lot of the equipment in a lot of the labs.

One wonders if the massive team sports programs are partially to blame, along with the explosion in administrative salaries.

[Deja Q]

2. Despicable. And as many of us learned math, it's easy to UNcombine that

salary figure.

[On the Road]

3. They Have a "Chancellor King"?

No wonder. Monarchies are always expensive and inefficient.

[yurbud]

4. U's and comm. colleges turned into Walmarts and banana republics

It's a simple idea: It's cheaper to pay a few corrupt people at the top a lot to keep everybody else down than to pay everyone fairly. Just like the dictators in the oil countries or oligarchs in the Central American plantations.

Faculty need to make students aware of this with a simple question.

How many administrators are you going to remember after you graduate?

Do you know who was President of Princeton when Einstein was there? Did that person contribute as much to society as Einstein? Then why do we pay people in that job five to six times as much as instructors?

[Tux]

5. EMU

Eastern Michigan University bought land and is building a mansion for the president with EMU money but it'll be owned under the president's name.

Heck, if this keeps up, I'll never attend grad school even if I can get a job were I have to be a Christian or attend the manager's church.

[Radical Activist]

7. Stories like this offer an excuse to cut higher education

It means legislators will say, "look at all the money State U is wasting on chauffeurs, goofy studies on insects, and paying radical left wing speakers to come on campus." Spreading stories like this only makes it easier for higher education budgets to be cut.

In Illinois tuition is going up because the Democratic Governor keeps proposing budgets that give less money to public colleges and Universities. They are forced to raise tuition to compensate. Politicians can get away with that because most college students don't vote and don't make that connection. Students need to know that Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy mean the states have less money for Higher Education, which means they pay more tuition. That is a far more important message than this article.