The University of California’s Board of Regents is considering a proposal that would up the salaries of its 10 chancellors by an average of 33 percent over the next four years, The Sacramento Bee reports.
“The plan, which will be discussed in a closed committee meeting today, is drawing fire from critics who question the propriety of such increases in a tight budget year for the state,” the reporter, Dorothy Korber, writes.
The regents will vote on the proposal at their Thursday meeting in Los Angeles, she writes.
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23 Responses to U. California to Up Chancellors’ Pay?
patbowne - March 8, 2012 at 6:56 pm
“The relationship is increasingly between the producer (in the case of higher ed, the professor) and the consumer (the student)”
The first time I read this, it sounded empowering because it identified me, the professor, as the source of the valued commodity. Then I reflected on your example of the book industry, where consumers are driving the price of ebooks down toward zero.
jselingo - March 8, 2012 at 9:21 pm
patbowne: for the last 15 years I have lived through the same disruption in my industry, where some people refuse to pay for information. These changes have been incredibly destructive to the traditional newspaper industry, but left in its wake has been new outlets like ProPublica and individuals doing great work outside of the confines of publications. The traditional newspaper industry was lazy, counted its money, and ignored the threat of the Internet. Some great work has been lost, but I believe that over time people will pay for quality. The same will be true in higher ed, although it could be a destructive process.
arrive2__net - March 9, 2012 at 2:20 am
I think its a good thing that “higher education” is under competition to hold down costs and to become more student-centered. Online and elearning has opened up huge opportunities for people to learn, and to earn degrees, certificate, etc. …it’s a great thing for America and the world.
It will be interesting to see how the future plays out. Truly there’s likely to be big changes in higher education but the discussion and projections of the it’s future I’ve seen often seem to lack a cognizance of the forces that created the present, and how the forces that continue to operate may influence the future. Alternative forms of higher education, including self-study, unaccredited and marginally accredited schools, correspondence study, etc have been around for a long time, yet governments, nonprofits, and corporations have built huge and expensive brick and mortar campuses and professorial staffs against that background. Campus universities provide a place for the willing to live, and to focus on learning for an extended period. How important is having that core institution to educating the hundreds of thousands that start college every year? I guess only time will tell for sure.
Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com/education.htm
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
waratah104 - March 9, 2012 at 7:07 am
Excellent article. I agree with the article that people will pay for quality. As i have watched the disruption in publishing I have argued that technology is driving the cost of undifferentiated content toward zero. Those who differentiate their content, read infuse quality into it, still compete well. Its about injecting wisdom, insight and judgment into content and in fact moving away from selling content as a thing and instead selling it as an experience. Technology supports that transformation and those able to do it, whether universities or other organizations, will succeed. Those who don’t, won’t.
mickfan - March 9, 2012 at 8:37 am
One of the implications above in the “producer” and “consumer” example is that a college education is just about individual courses or professors. The curriculum as a whole, programs, integration, etc., are important. More and more general education programs and degree programs are creating more coherence, from the first-year gateway courses to the capstones. If students are jumping around (and they are), then they are taking individual items from the food court, not sitting down to a well planned meal. I agree that we must understand students’ behaviors, but we must also find ways to get them and keep them for their own educational benefit.
clware - March 9, 2012 at 8:55 am
Despite such a dramatic change, so many political entities and state governing groups and legislators insist on imposing a 4-year (or 5-year, if they’re being “generous”) period for graduation rates/completion rates. They work upon a model that might have been true 40 years ago but isn’t really now, not at most public universities anyway. And that failure to recognize today’s realities leads to all sorts of ways that universities end up with the proverbial short end of the stick. This is especially true here in Louisiana, where our funding is no longer at “state-supported” levels and now will be tied to graduation rates. And those rates will be, of course, in a 4 or 5-year period.
squacky - March 9, 2012 at 8:57 am
This “swirl” metaphor is being used more and more, and I hate to admit it, but it’s true: Every time I read it or hear it uttered, I can’t help but think of toilets. Maybe that says something about my ideological leanings on this particular issue. I don’t know. But more importantly, it does raise an important question: Do students attending colleges and universities in the southern hemisphere swirl the other way?
ellenschrecker - March 9, 2012 at 10:24 am
Scary, very, very scary. Selingo is onto something here. Academics and the institutions that house them need, of course, to rethink what they are doing and what value — intellectual, economic, social, civic, etc. — they add to the rest of society. Once they can figure that out, perhaps they can (if given enough money for the all-important P-R push) convince their fellow citizens to support a vigorous and diversified system of higher education. Dare I say the word “taxes.”
But, it’s getting late and the dystopic prospect of a world of internet entrepreneurs peddling their own individual courses without any serious quality control is quite terrifying. As is the prospect of the disappearance of a community of scholar-teachers who transmit and add to our communal store of knowledge. Sounds like we’re going backward here.
cdwickstrom - March 9, 2012 at 10:42 am
Another factor in the “jumping around” and “swirling” phenomena is the extent to which curricular mandates are not met in regularly scheduled course offerings. My nephew recently experienced a two semester delay in completing a BFA from a southwestern public university because the department offering his degree program was not able to hire faculty to teach two upper division courses required for degree completion. One was a capstone course. The result was that he enrolled for a semester in another public university, taking equivalent courses, and then struggled through the articulation processes to get the upper division courses transferred. The result, as I said, a two semester delay in degree completion, and an added $9,000 to his student loan debt, both of which would have been unnecessary if the primary institution in question had managed curriculum and staffing more effectively.
cdwickstrom - March 9, 2012 at 10:45 am
And how do they manage “Spring Break” in October? Must be horribly confusing.
simplycurious - March 9, 2012 at 11:15 am
Perhaps there is a hubris associated with receiving information, especially information that doesn’t neatly integrate into our collective institutional epistemologies, with little effort in trying to understand its meaning. This article suggests that the academy is not the product, but a distributor of products. Do we have the product shelf-ready for distribution in a way that the customer can fully utilize it?
This article begs question: who are my customers, what are their needs, does my process effectively deliver those products. As a distributor of products, should I worry about “aged product” in my inventory? It seems that the customer is switching distributors.
How long can the answer remain: sign them up for another 15….
cdwickstrom - March 9, 2012 at 11:41 am
For as long as Carnegie classified “Masters L”, publicly funded, institutions continue with such stated goals as “to become a major urban research institution” or similar such statements which ignore the real expectations of the “funders”, which is to “transfer knowledge to the next generation” and “to prepare them for demands of the 21st century world”. As long as teaching effectiveness is not seriously included in the tenure rubric, and as long as executives in higher education are chosen almost totally from within the academy, the problem will continue.
John Matthews - March 9, 2012 at 11:48 am
In addition to the “swirl” affecting credit courses and degree programs, there seems to be an uprise in noncredit course popularity and accessibility, which can allow a person to get knowledge at a lower cost. Here’s an interesting article that addresses this issue: http://witsey.com/news/18-the-education-industry-is-there-a-noncredit-course-revolution-in-our-midst
squacky - March 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Let’s get some grant money and investigate…
DarwinWeeps - March 9, 2012 at 12:31 pm
The NSC analysis is illuminating but the report is actually titled “Transfer & Mobility,” and for good reason. “The report defines transfer as any enrollment in a new institution after fall 2006 that is not concurrent with a continuing enrollment at the initial institution, and that precedes the completion of a degree or certificate. This kind of enrollment change was counted as transfer or mobility regardless of whether any subsequent enrollment changes were observed, even if the student returned to the origin institution at some later time” (p. 6).
In other words, it includes lots of enrollment patterns that fall outside the conventional understanding of “transfer.” I would bet that a lot of the 4-year to 2-year mobility is temporary, followed by a return to the home (or another) 4-year institution. Because the analysis starts with first-time students, the return trip for students following such a pattern is absent from the analysis.
These are complex phenomena. Analytic choices and definitions matter. The Chronicle staff needs to do a better job of understanding the news they report.
bcbailey64 - March 9, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Bang on – especially the comments pertaining to the near future application of technology allowing students to bypass many traditional post-secondary institutions altogether. Massive global online courses, and badges as a new form of credentialing students will soon create a tsunami of change. Colleges and Universities CAN thrive in this rapidly approaching new age if they start planning for it NOW. Burying their heads in the sand and wishing it would just all go away is a recipe to make sure that their institutions certainly will. In the winds of change, institutions can either be flexible and bend or remain rigid and be broken in half.
cdwickstrom - March 9, 2012 at 2:21 pm
Brick and mortar institutions will have to become much more facile at articulation, assessment and credentialling to keep up. They are not very good at any of these, in most instances.
nschaumann - March 9, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Some segments of the publishing industry have not been disintermediated. For example, ebooks are more expensive today (generally $12.99) than they were a couple of years ago ($9.99). This has nothing to do with author or consumer empowerment; rather, it’s because of the so-called “agency model” of pricing under which the publisher sets the price and the e-tailer (e.g., Amazon, or Apple) takes a flat 30% cut. Contrast this with wholesale pricing, where the distributor sets the wholesale price and the retailer is free to charge whatever price it wishes (including less than wholesale, if that makes sense).
Far from empowering authors or consumers, the current pricing model in the e-publishing industry has centralized control in publishers, who now dictate even the retail price.
jennoh2 - March 9, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Are their recent statistics on the percentage of transfer students who do in fact graduate? I think it is interesting that there is an increase of students transfering from 4 year institutions to 2 year institutions. I think there are two reasons for this: 1) the student was not ready for college and consquently did not do well their first few semesters, thus they “stop” and then later return to a community college. 2) a four year institution is too much money, thus the student transfers to a community college.
Richard Grayson - March 9, 2012 at 8:45 pm
The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department is going to stop the collusion involved in the agency model, either through a settlement or litigation.
iduhpres - March 10, 2012 at 7:15 pm
If we believe that the end
product of a college education is a growth
on the part of the student and not just putting in 6 years at a particular
school to meet requirements, we need to realize that is should not matter where
the education takes place. There should be a national clearinghouse for
students who take courses in many schools, using different modalities but do
not qualify for residency at any one school. There should be a national
standard for courses taken, credits acquired and then the ability to be awarded
a degree for gaining an education. We need to break the residence monopoly
which is really just a way to make students pay money to a particular school.
But that is if we really believe that education is more than making it through
a particular school.
DarwinWeeps - March 12, 2012 at 12:35 pm
The stats on “4-year to 2-year transfer” are likely inflated quite a bit. See my comment about definitions above.
mwilson1382 - March 17, 2012 at 1:37 pm
This research looks at the traditional transfer but I would think a large population of transfer would be in a non-traditional form. What I mean by that is those students that may have completed an Associates degree (or may have not finished), went into the work force and are now going back to school because of promotion, keeping their job, finding a new job, or several other reasons that might be out there. The student coming back to school after a break is a large demographic that should be accounted for.