Last week the head of the Utah State Board of Regents proposed pay hikes for all of the college and university presidents in the state system, as much as by 24% in one case.  The reason cited was that the state has trouble keeping good university presidents.  The past two presidents of the University of Utah now make far more heading large universities elsewhere, and the president of Southern Utah University is leaving to take the head position at Eastern Kentucky University at double the salary he made in Utah.  Keeping Utah education “competitive” makes sense, so far as it goes.  The problem is that it stops with the upper administration.

Faculty salaries at state universities were frozen from 2008 to 2010, and faculty members have received raises of one percent per year for the past two years, with another one percent increase scheduled for the coming school year.  This wouldn’t be all that bad, given the current economic climate, except for the fact that the salaries of existing faculty members have been frozen for something like six of the last twenty years, and annual raises have exceeded 2% only in about three of those twenty years – and faculty salaries on average are in the lowest twenty percent nationwide.

A number of Utah universities have dealt with the salary cap by filling the positions of departing or retiring faculty, partly by hiring more adjuncts and partly by setting a much higher salaries for new faculty, so that longer term and more loyal faculty effectively get penalized… and so that good professors who don’t have to worry about spouses’  jobs or family connections have a tendency to depart for greener pastures, none of which helps improve faculty morale or higher education.  

Yet the Utah legislature, which continually touts education as a priority, spends so little per pupil on elementary and secondary education that even Idaho – the next lowest in the United States – spends nearly  20% more on each student than does Utah.   Utah’s public school spending per pupil is 43% below the national average, and the fact that it has the most crowded classrooms is just one reflection of that.  So is the amount of remedial help high school graduates need when they reach college.

The same sort of mentality applies to the legislature with regard to higher education as well. There’s a great deal of lip service, but a real reluctance to provide funding.  And when university presidents raise money from private donors for needed facilities, the legislature balks at providing the funding for operating and maintaining such facilities.  At the same time, part of the universities’ annual state funding is based on enrollment growth.  So… let’s get this in perspective.  They want more students with less funding for each student, and they require tuition increases, adding to the burden on students, while underpaying faculty, effectively forcing universities to court donors for funds to build needed facilities that the legislature doesn’t want to maintain  … but they want to reward the university presidents.

Does that sound familiar?  Of course.  It’s the current big business model.  As one critic suggested, Utah really shouldn’t be applying the “big business” model to education, not if it wants to improve education.

But then, does the legislature really want that… or just to create the impression that it cares about real educational improvement?  After all, it’s easy to pay the CEO more… and much, much harder and more costly to fix the larger problems.