Misguided University Students Protest The Wrong Thing

University of Nevada students have started protests over education cutbacks. Students should indeed be protesting. However, they are protesting the wrong thing!

To help straighten this out, please consider UNLV Students Walk Out of Classes in Budget Protest.

College students around Las Vegas are demanding lawmakers leave higher education alone.

To prove just how serious they are about fighting back, hundreds walked out of class Tuesday and headed to the Grant Sawyer Building, where lawmakers were holding an finance committee meeting, to make sure leaders get the point.

"I think people are fired up. It is very clear that we are not going anywhere and it's very clear that we are serious about what we want," said student Michael Flores.

Nevada Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley and Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, and others, came to thank the students for their passion. "Can there be some level of cuts? Yes. But can it be 30-percent? No," said Buckley.

By protesting against budget cuts, students are protesting in favor of higher tuition and higher taxes.

Protesting is the right thing to do, but they ought to be protesting tuition and teacher salaries instead.

University Salaries

Here is a some information I gathered the other the other day on university salaries. I started with the University of California. However, I am sure salary insanity exists at all major universities.

Please consider University of California Pay Schedules.

I did a search for "Gross Pay Greater Than $75,000" and found 38,041 hits.



A search for "Gross Pay Greater Than $100,000" turned up 21,529 hits.



Gross Pay Greater Than $150,000 Has 7,669 Hits


Amazingly, schools have the gall to complain they are being underfunded by the state. They are not underfunded, there are tens of thousands of school employees who are overpaid.



click on table for sharper image

Close to $4 billion a year goes to those making $75,000 a year or more. $2.66 billion goes to 21,529 employees making over $100,000 a year.

Bear in mind those are 2008 figures.

Kids on campus ought to take those salary schedules and post them on every university bulletin board they can find. In fact, they ought to print out lists and march right into the Dean's Office and protest.

Instead, students in Nevada are protesting budget cuts. The irony is that without budget cuts and without teacher salary cuts, tuition will keep rising. Effectively, students are rallying for their own demise.

Addendum:

My friend "BC" writes:

This needs to happen at an increasing national scale in order to reach the critical mass of mass-social recognition that at half or more of current college students are wasting their parents' money (or the money they must borrow) and their own time pursuing credentials which will see continuing diminishing returns into the future to the point that the net benefit from a bachelor's degree from the '90s hereafter will be perceived as meager to non-existent.

The US economy has created no net new private sector payroll jobs in 11 years, whereas males age 24-54 have seen no net increase in payrolls in 13-14 years and counting. In effect, with such punitive taxes on labor and little or no private sector growth possible because of Peak Oil and debt deflation, it increasingly does not pay to work for a private wage or salary in the US.

Thus, borrowing and/or spending out of pocket tens of thousands to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars for 4 or more years of post-secondary "education" in a discipline other than the life and physical sciences, medicine, or engineering is hardly more than funding bloated state and private school bureaucracies and their increasingly unsustainable pension fund assets and payouts.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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