Ben Vincent
United States
Vancouver
Washington
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I got an email at work today about a new website That shows how money in WA is being budgeted and spent. This is a response to some of the transparency laws that we've passed here.
http://fiscal.wa.gov/
Among other things, it shows the salaries of all state employees. (yes, you can look up mine if you like) There's some interesting information there. Like the fact that that there are a few people in my agency at the same point on the pay scale as me who made almost twice what I did in 2010 (the only year that shows up in queries at the moment). I believe this is because it counting total payments to each person rather than just base pay - so overtime, per diem, and possibily cashed in leave.
I haven't played with it much, but I've noticed a few things so far:
- Working on a ferry is apparently pretty lucrative. If you search under the Department of Transportation for people making $100,000+, there are a ton of ferry related positions that come up.
- there are a lot of really highly paid professors at UW. A search of the University of Washington for those making $200,000+ lists an awful lot of professors and professors without tenure.
I found this second point pretty interesting in light of the president's recent comments about reducing the cost of education higher education. I think a lot of the ballooning costs of college tuition can be laid at the feet of ever expanding administration departments, but I had no idea there were so many highly paid professors.
Anyway, check out the site.
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King Ævil
South Euclid
Ohio
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Those professors making $200K+ are likely bringing in millions in grant money apiece; the state may not be paying any of their salary or benefits. If they're MDs, some (if not most) of their income will be from patient care.
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Not Just Wrong- SPECTACULARLY WRONG.
Spain
Texas
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The reason for the high priced professors is that they're 'rising stars'. A department will draft in a 'star professor' for a couple of years, in order to flesh out vacancies and the like. Makes the department look good, and then they turn around and her go off to the next school.
What's worse is that most of these people get a lot of extra money from various sidelines that they do in addition to their 'teaching', which is mostly doing a couple of lectures while letting TA's do most of the heavy lifting. An engineering prof I know at WSU was the third highest prof at the University, and made triple his salary working as an professional 'expert witness' in court room cases on metallurgy.
Most professors at WSU and UW make absolute crap. If you go to Pullman, you realize that a lot of professors- several of them tenured- don't even live in Pullman, not the highest rent area of Washington. They live in a trashy little community called Albion, in mobile homes. That's if they're lucky to even have a job from year to year. The money that these 'star professors' suck up isn't a balloon- it all comes from the same pie that has to split several dozen ways.
The administration, on the other hand, all lives in town.
The problem is how money is dispersed at a University. The State sends money down to WSU, which is initially dispersed by the Admins in the French Administration building. WHAT IS LEFT is then sent down to the different colleges to fight over, who bicker tooth and nail over funding. THEN, the different departments in each college have to fight it out. And FINALLY, all the professors have to fight amongst themselves within the department.
Its total backbiting, all against all bureaucratic warfare, making Academia a very nasty environment in which to work in, at times. At least when there is money/reputations on the line.
Personally, I think that the key thing that has to change is the role that Adminstration departments have in determining what are the 'fixed' costs of a University. This gives them a huge advantage in the bureaucratic warfare over budgets.
This isn't helped by I600/I601, which capped spending and tax increases in the state. Because spending by the state is capped- except for 'capital improvements', you get wierdness like the huge building craze that occured at WSU right as I was leaving. We got a new library, but NO BOOKS to put inside it. That's right- the building was a 'capital improvement', but funding for books and staff to man the library wasn't. The result is a gorgeus building that has tons of empty shelves.
UW in some ways is worse, due to the extent to which some departments get funding from Corporate funding (like the College of Computing does from Microsoft), and STILL gets their full share of funding from the University for the department. This is while several other departments are starved for funding.
In other words-
Its a total, utter, complete mess.
Darilian
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Christopher Bird
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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Darilian wrote: Most professors at WSU and UW make absolute crap.
Actually, most American professors period make absolute crap. This is because over two-thirds of professors in the USA are adjunct professors, which is universityspeak for "the equivalent of temps." They have no job security worth mentioning and extremely low salaries.
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"L'état, c'est moi."
Canada
Vancouver
BC
Roger's Reviews: check out my reviews page, right here on BGG!
Who let this guy become wargame subdomain moderator anyways?
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Christopher Bird
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
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It should be noted that "doctoral-granting universities" is an official category meaning "grants 20 or more doctorates a year" and which comprises about 1/10th of all universities (let alone community colleges) in the USA.
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Bob Briggs
United States
Lynnwood
Washington
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Looking at the chart which shows sports paying out more is not reflected of the income sports brings to a school, else why would they pay so much? I believe education is underfunded, more so in the primary and secondary education than on a college level, the main problem is how funds are allocated and spend in the state's budgets and again in the individual districts and colleges. Those areas which have levy are finding voters are tired of paying additional taxes when they see there is so much waste in government and thus, the educators get the short end of the stick.
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Ben Vincent
United States
Vancouver
Washington
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I wasn't really aiming for this to turn into a discussion about professor's salaries. I just searched for the highest paid positions in the state and it was surprising to me how many of them were professors at UW.
Anyway, I poked around a bit more over lunch today. One of the databases that is available on the site is called Open Checkbook. It basically shows bills that different agencies pay to outside agencies or companies, and also reimbursements to state workers. Things like utility and phone bills, for example, and also per diem and travel reimbursement.
There seems to be only one month's worth of data available at the moment. The category that caught my eye was for POV mileage reimbursement. There's a three page list of payments to individuals who claimed reimbursement. The winner for December 2011 appears to be a guy from the Ferries division, who was paid $2154. The reimbursement rate is $0.51/mile, so he's claiming over 4200 miles in that month. Also interesting are the dozen or so payments from the liquor control board to "petty cash."
Another useful area is to track all of the charges racked up by individual legislators.
I'm genuinely curious what sort of effect these kind of reports will have. A lot of things that might look like fraud, waste, and abuse to someone just cruising the site are undoubtedly completely above board. But that doesn't mean they won't be effected if enough questions are raised by some irate citizen or the press. On the other hand, I'm quite certain there is a certain amount of ongoing fraud, and this might help shine the spotlight in the right areas. It's also just edifying to know where our money is going.
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Dana Vincent
Vancouver
Washington
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Hopefully quickly while I've got a couple minutes:
1. UW is a research institution, so yes - many of the high salaries are likely to be grant writing professors who do research and bring in millions of dollars of grants and F&A costs. Their salaries are often at the NIH cap unless they have administrative appointments that pay an additional amount from non-federal sources. This is not unusual and all grant writing professors are held to the same cap, no matter where they are in the country.
2. Federal grant funding restricts grant writing professors from writing more grants. That is: if they are paid 100% on federal grants, they are required to spend their time on that research and have no paid time to write additional grants. Especially in this age, grant writing takes a significant amount of time and in order to keep with effort reporting and federal funding requirements - many researchers have to spend their own time writing grants. How this is put in place at universities is obviously questionable...I just bring it up because salary may include the understood additional personal time requirement of grant writing professors purely on federal funds to maintain their research programs.
3. Practicing MDs at academic universities can be paid a base salary, which could be found in the report, and can then be reimbursed additional bonuses/costs based on billing guidelines for patient care. This information would likely not be in that list because it would likely come from the hospital/practice side of the organization, which is likely to be a private structure. This is not unusual.
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