This is Joseph.
There is a letter by Clifford Ando on the costs at the University of Chicago. This passage particularly struck me as interesting:
So where is it coming from? These are very large salaries at the assistant professor level and are well above the salary cap for federal grants, even with it currently increasing briskly, so even research grants don't much sense unless they are massive. Keep in mind these are assistant professor salaries, so we'd expect them to increase with rank quite substantially.
Consulting does not seem to be something that could cover so much and they have 200 faculty. There endowment is > 1 billion, so maybe that is the answer? But at around $5 million per faculty member it still seems to be light.
Anybody have insight into what is going on here?
No undergraduate pays full tuition at a major private university, but often get significant support from the campus. At a major business school, the students often do pay the full tuition as it is covered by their employers. (Note this is almost never true for graduate students.)
ReplyDeleteI would guess, and this is just a guess mind you, that many of those 200 faculty are not FTEs. The number of adjuncts is much higher than one would expect from a typical department as the institution and the faculty member both get benefit from the association.
Famously, business school faculty get paid much more than faculty in other departments. Check out the University of California's pay scales, for example. The lowest rank business, econ, or engineering faculty make $100k while other faculty make $61k.
https://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/compensation/2023-24-academic-salary-scales.html