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Promoting Quality Higher Education– An Investment in Oregon’s Future

PSU-AAUP

The One Percent: The Corporatizion of American Higher Education

July 11, 2014 / PSU-AAUP

Forbes
July 10th, 2014

Co-authors Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood discovered student debt and low-wage faculty labor rose faster at state schools with the highest paid presidents than the national average. Moreover, administrative spending surpassed scholarship spending by more than 2 to 1 as full-time faculty declined as a percentage of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty.

Following the fall 2008 financial crisis we expect to see drastic reductions in overall pay – especially at the executive level. This is not the case. In the “top 25” presidential pay rose from $727,002 in 2009 to $974,006 in 2012 – an average inflation-adjusted increase of 34 percent in only 3 years. Comparatively, the American Association of University Professors reports full-time professorate pay at public and private research universities rose 2.2 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, from 2007-08 to 2013-14.

The growing disparity between top 25 executive and faculty pay illustrates that universities are becoming more corporate. Accordingly, the AAUP opines:

"Disproportionate salary increases at the top…reflect the abandonment of centuries-old models of shared campus governance, which have increasingly been replaced by more corporate managerial approaches that emphasize the “bottom line.”

Professional employees are now the largest group of non-instructional staff on campus. The Delta Cost Project estimates these positions (Business analyst, human resource officer, admissions officers among others) rose, on average, 2.5 to 5 percent per year between 2000 and 2012 and now comprise nearly one fourth of the on-campus workforce.

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