Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds – NYTimes.com

I’m posting this link because I think it is interesting.

Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.

5/20/14 I added a comment on the report site.  Here it is.  (For those that have already seen the essence of the first two paragraphs in other posts, go to the last paragraph for something new.)

I taught math for many years at a private university (Washington University in St. Louis) and my experience observing higher education, leads me to believe the report. From everything I have seen, higher education is not about education at all. It is about prestige and revenue. If an administrator can achieve those two things, she will succeed.

I think it is important that people understand how true that is. For that purpose, I have a blog www.inside-higher-ed.com. If anyone reads about my experience of being told by my chairman to make a critical engineering math course a “cookbook” course, I think the goals of administrators will be clear. Those goals will especiallly be clear when the reader realizes that the real issue was whether the math department or the Engineering School got to teach the course (probably lots of budget money), and that the way to do it was to dumb it down to make ALL the students happy. My chairman even told me that math had “wrested” a course away from Engineering and that they weren’t going to let them get this other one from math.

At the very least this report should make people realize that, if higher student debt and reduced teaching resources don’t hurt the pay of a university president, then that university isn’t about education at all.