Are those numbers a sum of the total benefits or something? It seems insane that a campus security guard is making 170k.

It's total pay without benefits. It includes overtime and on-call time (which are typically paid at a higher rate).

It wouldn't surprise me that an experienced security guard is making $170K; the state itself is expensive, and they have to retain staff. The staff is often ex-cop, and guards very frequently work overtime (paid time-and-a-half or more). The guard may be a people manager (I don't know which row you're referring to but it looks like the typical guard makes far less).

I don't know.

I knew that salaries at public universities are public in many states, so thought to google it -- but the details can vary.

It seems insane that you need campus security guards at all oO

Why?

Because police is a thing?...

A lot of campuses have actual police. In some ways campuses are similar to a municipality and have many of the services that entails (fire, trash, water, power, snow removal, parks, and security/law enforcement).

You could similarly ask why a town of 50,000 people needs a police department.

When you put it in terms of total number of people...it does make sense. A lot of universities down here in Texas have a small town+ amount of students and faculty and they tend to have their own police departments and other services.

My university had a police department because it is, as one might expect of a flagship state university, an enormous landmass with billions of dollars in infrastructure and equipment, plus about 6,000 full-time residents living in university-owned housing. Residents of a certain class of people who are prone to doing stupid, illegal shit.

Consider the liability to which a bad security guard can expose your organization! Not that pay guarantees quality but still

Having worked in university administration before I would say that anyone who lasts as a manager is a professional politician, so expect them to have engineered a very good reason and possibly have allied with another department.

As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they have got.

But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more trouble than they can handle.

The head coach of football gets paid $4mil a year (4x the president) and is the highest payed employee. The top 7 staff are all sports related.

Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.

Yes, this is extremely common.

On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.

On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular; football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over 50,000, and during football season there will be games on TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.

I'd never considered that a sports program could be revenue producing. That's quite interesting. Although it seems weird that higher education and (almost-professional) sports are so tightly coupled.

An interesting outsider perspective is this clip of Steven Fry going to an Auburn game: https://youtu.be/FuPeGPwGKe8

Regarding the latter, it’s weird and certainly was exploitative when college athletes weren’t allowed to monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is exploitative.

I was more thinking that there's not a particularly natural overlap between sports and academic ability. You'd think that by tying the two together, you'd get both worse sporting and academic performance than if they were unrelated.

The US has a decidedly liberal viewpoint on education. Sports ability is in some sense an educational endeavor. The ancient Greeks called it "athletics".

So US educational institutions don't really have any hangup against treating sports any differently than they might treat a CS class.

They are a subject you have to study and train at...and sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).

Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else academically once you get to something approaching a division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself or sports non-participants). The people actually in these programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.

This is hardly an American phenomenon. The Bauhaus was famous for incorporating athletics too.

I never meant to imply that athletics wasn't a serious pursuit. I agree that physical capability is part of being a well-rounded person. It's certainly common here (Aus) for schools and universities to have sports teams and to strongly encourage participation.

What I find strange in the US context is the emphasis on it as a (revenue generating!) spectator sport. I understand that amateur (for want of a better word) sports can be highly entertaining; what I don't understand is why you'd go to university teams to find the best amateurs. I've played and watched enough sport to know that it's common for academic and physical abilities to be not particularly well correlated, particularly at tails of the distributions.

Not really. You can’t major in playing sports, you can’t get credit for it, and i don’t know what you mean by “as rigorous as anything else academically”, but it’s probably not true. I didn’t play division 1 anything but I did play in college (no scholarship).

It's batshit insane either way in the grand scheme of things. It just goes to show how market forces don't necessarily incentivize the things we actually want or need.

It seems like crowds of 50,000 people want this enough to regularly pay for it, subsidising other people’s education in the process.

A college like UW may have sports revenue on order of $300M, much of which goes to the university, and means students may pay less than if there were no sports. Dig carefully through UW finances, which are usually public record. Paying a coach whose program is a massive profit center enough to have a team of quality enough to land bigger TV deals may be a financial benefit.

I always see people saying that sports is financially positive on its own, but my actual experience is a ~10% tuition hike to subsidize sports expansion, so ...

Without knowing how much sports revenue offsets tuition, which I just showed you how to investigate, your 10% anecdote from millions of college students is irrelevant. It’s both possible sports offsets your tuition by 30%, and later you saw a 10% raise, but until you compute that initial offset your 10% gripe is meaningless.

My university's athletics program pulls in so much money and some of it funds academic programs. No money goes from academics to sports.

So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and self-funding, but it funds academics as well.

It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to Manchester University.

Very common at larger state universities that have been around a long enough time to have a significant sports following.

It makes sense if you do the math.

Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.

A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!

Universities in the US administer the main second-tier sports leagues for basketball and football, so yes, it’s common (though strange, I agree).

Yes, and not just at public universities.