Universities have vastly expanded the percentage of their budget that goes towards administrative and brand building roles. Redistributing it towards teachers and grad students would be a good start. In addition, public universities could receive greater public funding.

Also sports budgets.

Big budget, popular sports teams typically pay for themselves through ticket sales.

Which does not describe U Chicago...

Uhh, no thanks. The research money should be spent on research, and the student tuition should be spent on students.

That research and undergraduate education are combined together is the real problem here.

There’s a natural connection between the two: you need qualified people to teach students and many of the best students are looking for research experience in labs doing real work. Given what tuition runs these days, any place which doesn’t have those is going to see students passing for other institutions.

The problem isn’t pairing the two but generations of overhead growth combined with a decline in the federal funding which used to support researchers, both of which mean compensation has fallen behind in real value.

Researchers are extremely unqualified to be teachers. That's because researchers are good at researching.

And this skill has very little overlap with teaching undergraduate students.

And on the other end, a fairly small percentage of students end up doing any research in college.

In an ideal world, researchers would research, and people who specialize in teaching would teach.

You do NOT have to be some cutting edge leader in your field to teach undergrads. Simple skills, like being an engaged and interesting speaking are way way way more important than how many papers you've published.

In my opinion and experience, the process of teaching itself makes you a much better researcher. People can get bored doing research, epecially if it is primarily solo research. Plus, teaching forces you to learn a subject much more thoroughly than you would otherwise. And if you want to expand your research to a slightly different topic, teaching that topic can give you a lot of knowledge and confidence in that topic. I feel like teaching+research institutions do better research than pure research institutions.

One of my best teachers was a hard core researcher.

Some of my worst teachers were teaching specialists.

And the most influential person in my undergraduate career? A researcher.

There are always exceptions, of course.

My point is the research and teaching are orthogonal skills.

It is certainly possible for someone to be both a good researcher and a good teacher.

I am just saying that I don't care how good of a researcher they are. The only thing I care about is how good of a teacher they are.

So let's judge the teachers based SOLELY on their teaching skills, and not have writing papers have anything at all to do with whether they are hired as a teacher.

I started my research career as part of my undergraduate education.

The wages will never be high. Thats just the nature of the job. But unions can fight for things like working conditions for TAs and helping students deal with abusive advisers. Students are strongly incentive not to bring complaints against professors since they hold all the power over potential career advancement. Unions could help here too.

Really more than students unionizing its adjunct faculty that are being severely exploited. Whereas PhDs at least get a degree for their troubles, adjuncts just get straight up robbed, and too many of them are living on public assistance and non-guaranteed contracts.

"...and helping students deal with abusive advisers."

This is one thing I hope the unionization movement will genuinely change. There's not much room to move the needle on pay, but having students have a means of addressing abuse besides "Throw myself on the mercy of the department and hope they don't shred my career" would be a huge step.

Interestingly, one of the grad student union's arguments in a place I was at was, essentially, "You're flooding the university with cheap adjuncts, and it's devaluing our career path", which I thought was, at the very least, an interesting take.

There's actually a lot of room to move the needle on pay even. I know a CS department that is giving it's grad student a >$5000 yearly raise from $25K because it's grad student union (unofficial) found out that CS students are getting much worse pay compared to the other engineering grad students. 5000 is a lot of money for grad students.

Agreed. It's about balancing the power dynamic, not the wages.

ICOs. The time to invest in UCoin is now!

"BaronVonSteuben"? Are you some sort of Utican?