Scott Walker is in the news for wanting to cut the budget of the University of Wisconsin by 2.5 percent and/or tweak the mission statement to include vocational readiness (nytimes).
A vocational mission for the university doesn’t make a lot of sense in a state where child support is typically a flat 17 percent of the defendant’s pre-tax income, without any limit. A person who wants to have the spending power of, e.g., a veterinarian, doesn’t need to go to the University of Wisconsin’s vet school. He or she can simply have sex with three veterinarians (married or single, drunk or sober), obtain custody of the resulting children, and then collect roughly one third of each vet’s after-tax income (17 percent pre-tax being approximately 33 percent after tax). Wisconsonians can go to college and work to do things that they love and find personally rewarding; if they want cash they can get it more straightforwardly and securely from having children.
What about the cuts? Is 2.5 percent really that bad? Since universities don’t strive for operating efficiency and since they are big employers, subject to an ever-increasing array of costs, absent structural changes the university probably needs at least 4 percent more each year just to stay even. So a 2.5 percent cut is likely a 6.5 percent cut compared to what the university had been planning. Could the university absorb these cuts and still operate in the traditional “stick speaking human in the front of a classroom full of listening humans” manner? Sure. In the book Higher Education? the authors back out the numbers and find that colleges are paying professors between $242 and $820 per teaching/office hour. You can’t spit in the street in Madison without hitting a PhD, many of whom would be delighted to work as adjuncts for a lot less than that. The simplest ways for the university to respond to budget cuts would be (1) eliminate tenure so that it doesn’t have to pay a lot of professors that it doesn’t actually want, and (2) offer to pay anyone qualified a straight $50/hour to teach classes. They could then look at cutting back on some of the administrative positions that they’ve added over the past few decades.
I like the idea of eliminating the bloated administrative positions first, our State Colleges have become the new DMV.
How would your proposed model affect the funneling of Federal Grants to Universities? Can you assign an hourly value for PhD grants writers?
David: Trimming administration never works! You can’t ask an administrator to decide that administration is not worth the cost incurred.
I don’t think the grant-writing and research stuff needs tweaking. Presumably it is a self-sustaining profit center or the universities wouldn’t be doing it.
Hi Phil, you make this “A woman can just have three children and then she has the benefits of a man’s full salary” argument a lot, and it rings false to me — of course, she has the salary, and now she has three children to raise absent a loving relationship with the fathers.
Are we assuming she’s interested in a career? If so, I’d suggest hiring at least two nannies to cover 7am-9pm every day, so that she can attempt to keep up with her childless coworkers and get promoted as often as they do. Is she still very rich?
If we’re assuming she’s willing to sacrifice her career growth to participate in childcare in a way that childless people aren’t, isn’t that a cost that we can argue someone in society should pay her for, given that we have a societal interest in creating children and someone’s got to look after them?
Maybe we’re assuming that given the choice between trying to juggle a career and raising three kids by herself, she’d rather just stay at home with them. Isn’t that also a sacrifice we can argue she should be compensated for?
Anyway, that’s how I feel about it; I’d be curious if you’ve written about this, or know of anyone who’s tried to measure the lifetime income loss a woman incurs from having children to raise (and especially having children as a single mother), and have considered whether we might simply be approximating a fair compensation for it with child support laws.
Chris: You raise some great points. As one economist we interviewed pointed out, however, if it were not a good deal to obtain custody and collect child support parents would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to try to win that position (and/or avoid losing it).
A minor correction: The child support laws of Wisconsin are not exclusively for the benefit of women. A thoughtful man with a bit of planning can position himself to receive child support from a higher-income woman. Census Current Population Survey data from March 2014 show that approximately 95 percent of the time a person receiving child support in Wisconsin is a woman, but that means 5 percent of the time it is a man!
You posited the case of a child support plaintiff who wants to have children and also a career. Fortunately in the U.S. we have an array of commercial day care providers for children age 0-4 and taxpayer-funded day care (“public school”) for children age 5-18. The cost of commercial day care does not substantially reduce the profitability of a Wisconsin child. When the defendant earns more than the plaintiff, the guidelines provide for most of the day care cost to be paid on top of the “child support” calculation. This is true in most other states. The defendant who is ordered to pay child support is also ordered to pay for day care and/or nannies.
The cases that we heard about from attorneys and/or pulled from files in courthouses show that many of the most successful child support plaintiffs also have high earnings from wages. The beauty of Wisconsin’s system, from a winner parent’s point of view, is that high earnings from wages don’t reduce one’s child support revenue.
Finally, and this is an option only available to women, a Wisconsonian who wants to make money from the child support system but not have to spend any time taking care of a child can sell abortions at a discounted rate to the net present value of the projected child support payments. The attorneys we interviewed said this typically yields a payment of at least $250,000 after about 3 months of pregnancy.
[Just how much time do parents spend on children? It turns out that single parents spend less than married ones, not more. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/04/08/chapter-3-how-do-mothers-spend-their-time-at-home/ shows that stay-at-home single mothers spend about 15 hours per week on child care (compared to 20 for married mothers). A working single mother will spend about 10 hours per week on child care. This is slightly less time than a working married mother invests in her children.]
If you eliminated tenure, they would never be able to hire another professor again–Why would anyone want to go there? That kind of change is really hard to make unless you somehow coordinate with a large number of other schools.
Doug: “If you eliminated tenure, they would never be able to hire another professor again”. At least some high quality schools in the U.S. don’t offer tenure, e.g., http://www.olin.edu/about/
The current tenure system goes back only to about World War II (see http://www.aaup.org/issues/tenure ). Universities were able to recruit staff prior to that. What’s changed in your view? Has competition from other employers become more intense? Certainly K-12 public schools pay much better, even adjusted for inflation, than they did back in the old days.
On whether administrators would rather reduce or increase staff: read “Parksinson’s Law” by C. Northcote Parkinson.
I agree with Glenn Reynolds: Replace full time ‘benefited’ administrators with no-benefit adjutant administrators.
I agree with your suggestions, and only partially dissent on eliminating tenure. I think some protection against being fired for your opinions is a good idea, and there is a case that academics should get this more than most other professions.
However, a commentator at Marginal Revolution pointed out that modern day tenure doesn’t do this anymore, since universities know how to get around it by not offering tenure to academics with controversial opinions in the first place. Also, I’ve noticed from a few publicized cases, that if universities and their donors really want to get rid of an academic with tenure, they can, there is just more paperwork involved.
It could be the goal of getting it so people can not be fired for stupid reasons is unachievable. There will always be employers who want to fire people for stupid reasons and they will be able to find their way around any system you come up with. And it really is impossible to keep employers from using stupidity and malevolence in hiring. The only way to counter this, assuming people want to, is a basic income guarantee.
But yes, in a flooded labor market, if your industry is being killed because of the high salaries and benefits of your current employees, in principle it should be easy to replace them with people of equally high quality from the vast pool of underemployed. This is what ultimately killed private sector unions. The problem with industries such as higher education is that government subsidies allow them to operate inefficiently, and second everyone there is in on the scam.
Phil, with all due respect, your habit of connecting EVERYTHING to child support is getting tiresome. I don’t mean to pry, but do you have some personal stake in this issue? Did you get particularly screwed in a divorce?
Government bureaucracies and esp. universities are accustomed to permanent growth in their budgets, well above the rate of inflation. This has been going on consistently for 40+ years. So, even the smallest cuts are greeted with loud yelps of pain and accusations that the cutter wants to return us to the Dark Ages (even though cutting 2.5% would only put you back to the “Dark Ages” of 2013, which I don’t recall as being a particularly dark period for universities. As for your helpful suggestions on where to cut, fuggedaboutit. Every bureaucrat is familiar with the Washington Monument ploy. If Congress cuts the budget of the Park Service by 2.5%, they don’t close Podunk Swamp National Park in Nowhere, N.D., which is visited by 5 people annually. NO, they close the Washington Monument. Likewise, a 2.5% cut in the Wisc. State Univ. system won’t mean that they will have to switch a few classes to adjuncts. They will have to close the gyms, the basketball team and the cafeterias (never mind that these are profit centers).
>If you eliminated tenure, they would never be able to hire another professor again–Why would anyone want to go there?
Guess again. In many fields there are 10+ PhDs for every available faculty spot. They could eliminate tenure and offer minimum wage and combine teaching with janitorial duties and they would STILL get candidates desperate to work in their field.
Philg,
“The authors back out the numbers and find that colleges are paying professors between $242 and $820 per teaching/office hour.”
This is clearly a bullshit statement.
For every hour I teach, I put in at least one hour (if not more) in prep time. I also grade exams and produce worksheets, which also takes a lot of time. I have to deal with at least 50 emails a week from students. I sit on several administrative committees at the department an college level. I have to meet my PhD students on a regular basis.
And yes, I also have to conduct research on top of all this.
I’m guessing I spend at least 60 hours a week on matters connected with my job.
So I reiterate. The numbers cited are pure BS.
PS: I claim that if tenure were eliminated, then I would be earning probably double what I am earning now, since academic employment compensation would be more market based (my friends who work on Wall St. who have math PhDs are earning three times my salary). Tenure, IMO, amounts to a trade-off between job security and a lower salary.
John: The authors of that book, one of whom is himself a professor, did qualify their calculation: “We readily acknowledge that [professors] do something outside their classroom and office hours. But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research, the utility of which we question in a later chapter.”
They were probably looking more at humanities than your field of mathematics. And, if a professor has tenure and cannot be fired, I think it is fair to look at the minimum hours that must be put in. If you are not well-prepared for your lecture and show up to ramble on a bit about calculus, do you get fired? If instead of preparing worksheets and exams you use ones provided by the textbook publisher, do you get fired? So it is great that you are dedicated to high performance but it isn’t really part of your job or the reason why the paychecks keep coming.
Philg,
I do not know what
“But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived”
means, since my merit raise is determined by research, teaching and service.
Concerning,
“the utility of which we question in a later chapter. ”
It all depends how you define utility. I think pure mathematics, as a human endeavor, is pretty much useless. But the best of it is a great contribution to civilization. The problem with the types of analyses economists very often make is that they want to attach a number (growth, etc.) and they don’t really have a sophisticated way of determined the quality of life.
As far as your the second paragraph of your response to me goes, it’s pretty easy to make a faculty member’s life miserable if he/she fails to perform. Examples: give that person a horrible schedule (we teach night classes here too; imagine giving that faculty member two 4-credit classes, one in the morning and one at night), or give them horrible committee work. If they don’t perform, they do not get a raise. Example:
There was a woman at Brown, when I was teaching there, who basically skirted her responsibiilities shortly after she was tenured in the mid 1960s (she did the bare minimum to avoid dismissal of tenure). Guess what the department did in response? It froze her salary forever: in the late 1990s she was earning what an Associate Professor earned in 1968 (which was probably around $12000).
At my university, there have been several cases of dismissal for failure to perform at the bare minimum. There is a system in place that appears to work fine.
Finally, you did not address my postscript.
Regarding this comment from Phil in entry number 6:
“It turns out that single parents spend less than married ones, not more”
This makes a lot of sense to me. I find it much easier to take care of my 2 kids when my husband is traveling and not contributing to making things more time and energy consuming than they should be.
Elisa: Yes! Remember that the State of Wisconsin (and most other states) has your back! Whenever you want to you can keep most of his paycheck but dispense with his interference, adding the paycheck of a new partner if you so desire. Even if you don’t pull the trigger, reminding him of this fact of American life might motivate him to do what you tell him 🙂
John: Make someone teach in the morning and then in the afternoon? That was our world as junior pilots for Delta. Wake up in a mid-range hotel at 04:45, fly for one hour (collect $20), wait for five hours in a public airport terminal somewhere, fly for 1.5 hours (collect $30), and finally clock out (and into a Hilton Garden Inn) about 16 hours after leaving that first hotel. We did it for a total of about $20,000 per year and were glad to have the job.
As for your PS, I do agree with you. If tenure were eliminated the market-clearing wage for some professors, especially those for whom there are attractive private- or government-sector alternatives, should go up.
Philg,
What does a pilot earn, who works for the big airlines (e.g. Delta)?
Say, someone who has 15 years of experience flying the big jets?
John: Due to the federal government’s prohibition on competition from efficient foreign airlines, such as Ryanair, and the intersection of FAA and union organizing regulations that I wrote about in http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines a pilot for a major airline can earn much more than the market-clearing wage.
So the pilot who has flown “big jets” for 15 years probably flew regional jets for 10 years or so and is now close to 40 years old. He or she will have to retire between age 55 and 65 (65 is a hard legal stop but many pilots can’t hold a First Class medical that long). I did a quick Google search and United will pay a 737 captain about $185/hour (after 15 years the pilot should have upgraded from first officer to captain). So that’s about $185,000 per year (1000 flying hours per year is typical). As a junior captain, however, this person will be away from his or her family nearly every weekend and holiday and sleeping in hotels 20 nights per month.
Absent all of the regulations the wage would probably be about $80,000 per year. (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes532012.htm says that the median for all commercial pilots is $75,000 per year)
Philg,
Another tangential question:
Do economists know how to measure the value of a theorem in pure Mathematics?
The value of a theorem is largely social but limited to an exclusive group (usually only of interest to other mathematicians in the specialized subfield). On rare occasions, theorems are celebrated as great human accomplishments (for example, Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, Perlman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture, and more recently, Y.T. Zhang’s result on prime gaps.
What impact on our economy do these results have?
But the endeavor of proving theorems is considered to be one of the main jobs of a pure mathematician.
John: An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing!
I’m always puzzled when I hear people talk about replacing stringently selected professors with the cheapest available unemployed PhDs, especially at academically elite universities like Wisconsin. I guess I can understand drop-out student politician types like Scott Walker not getting it, but I would think people like Phil who’ve drunk long and profitably from the teat of a major research university would get it.
Research universities like Wisconsin are the envy of most countries in the world e.g., India/China, who’re gladly spending billions to get there, but finding that the culture of high standards, open thought and ambitious ideas is not something you can buy that easily. It is fashionable to have a cynical view of academe, but I believe it is probably beyond doubt that US scientific, technological and cultural ascendancy have a lot to do with its universities. Put another way, I suspect Phil will probably try to send his kid to MIT or Princeton rather than Bunker Hill Community College or its 4-year discount equivalent. It’s always entertaining to read Phil’s polemics, but sometimes you gotta scratch your head and go all McEnroe: “you cannot be serious”.
Regarding your explain of pilot wage and hour structure, aren’t there more junior pilots than senior pilots and why is it that the senior pilots are able to maintain control of the union and claim most of the pie?
Why are shareholders willing to pay more than a few cents a share for airline stocks if historically they get wiped out in a Chapter 11 every time?
Would it be possible to standardize the procedures across airlines so that for a given type of aircraft, any pilot could fly for any airline? While this would reduce pilot strike power, that’s not the FAA’s problem. Maybe in return, the union and the airlines could switch to a “hiring hall” model. In some unionized industries, the union controls who works. The employer calls up the union and says “send me 5 longshoremen today” and the union sends over (supposedly) its five most senior available guys. This way, Sully could fly out of SF and some other guy who lives on the east coast could fly out of Newark.
Phil (I assume it was you who wrote this post, and not the blog post writer you advertised for some time back on your website)— I’m surprised that you, a beneficiary of an MIT education (mission: “to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century”), would trivialize Walker’s proposed changes as a “tweak” to include “vocational readiness.” Look at the changes for yourself: http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/06/scott-walker/despite-deliberate-actions-scott-walker-calls-chan/ . That’s not a tweak, it’s a wholesale change. The proposed #1 mission was “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” Mission statements matter, because they serve as justifications for expendiatures. The proposed mission statement would be the perfect justification for the University to focus on offering tractor maintenance classes. Lord knows Wisconsin has a lot of tractors. Feed silos, too. But major University mission statements tend to look like MIT’s: pursuit of truth and knowledge. And from that kind of mission we get the kind of Science with a capital S that we’ve all benefited from.
Matt: “stringently selected professors”? What research university are you talking about that stringently selects professors for (a) interest in teaching, or (b) ability to teach? Recall that in a comment above I noted “I don’t think the grant-writing and research stuff needs tweaking. Presumably it is a self-sustaining profit center or the universities wouldn’t be doing it.” So, sure, a professor-researcher who brings in $2 million in grants every year can be selected and compensated well, either with a high salary or a promise for unlimited guaranteed employment. But why pay the same for people who are part of the university’s cost centers?
Greg: You were impressed with the old mission statement? It seems way too long and redundant to me, e.g., what was the difference between “discover knowledge” and “extend knowledge”? I agree with you that Walker’s vocational ideas are misplaced in a state where more money can be made from children than from working. But the idea of streamlining the mission statement seems like a good one.
Philg,
Admit it: you are deliberately trying to provoke your readership.
Walker’s intention is merely trying to score political points with those on the far right who cannot stand public universities. The points he scores will presumably position him well in the presidential primaries.
A question: do you personally think that universities should be reduced to job training centers?
John: Well… I admit that every posting tries to provoke a discussion!
I can’t look inside Scott Walker’s soul and say what his intention is.
Do I personally think universities should be job training centers? As noted, above, definitely not in Wisconsin. Nearly every Wisconsonian is equipped at puberty with everything necessary to earn a comfortable income!
What about in neighboring Minnesota where child support is capped? I do think that universities there should be vocational? No. In fact I think that having vocational departments dilutes a lot of the focus of university managers. Probably it would make sense to spin off any department that isn’t plainly pure scholarship (e.g., Classics) or that attracts research funds (e.g., Physics, Biology, Mechanical Engineering). Then a university’s management can concentrate on being truly great at research and not on how to recruit as many paying customers as possible in a law or business school.
So, as noted above, I agree with Walker’s idea of simplifying the mission statement. I don’t agree with his emphasis on vocational training for the University of Wisconsin. I think that would more properly be the job of high schools.