Thursday, June 11, 2009

Coaches make more than professors

Top-notch professors, coaches don't come cheap :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education: "There are 69,000 people who work for public universities in Illinois, and none of them is paid as much as Ron Zook, the University of Illinois' football coach, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.

Zook was paid nearly $1 million to coach the Illini last year."

----------------
This comes on the heels of the Chicago Tribune's expose of the "clout list" for getting into the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course your typical Philosphy or Sociology department doesn't bring in the revenues that a major college football or basketball program does.

Beth said...

The president of the U of Central Florida, John Hitt, takes home nearly $900,000 in salary and bonuses while UCF closes academic programs and lays off faculty. (not sure this link will work: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FQAOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XHgDAAAAIBAJ&dq=top%20university%20president%20florida%20salaries&pg=2810%2C684147 ) UCF's football coach, George O'Leary will make a little more than a million ( http://smu.scout.com/a.z?s=357&p=2&c=766483 ) despite poor team performance and the preventable death of a freshman player last year.

Salaries are creeping up all over for the top guys. They are a mutual admiration society.

I love the bogus excuse in the msn story (linked below) that presidents don't get tenure so they need more money to compensate. John Hitt has tenure AND a nearly $1 mill pay package.

Football coaches don't get tenure, though.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/News/are-university-presidents-overpaid.aspx

Evan McKenzie said...

If college sports teams were really the independent profit centers they pretend to be, they would already have departed from their universities and gone off to be professional teams. But they don't. And that is because they wouldn't be profitable. Most college sports teams don't generate diddly squat. The teams are dependent on the schools that supply them with players (scholarships, housing, food, etc.) fans, training centers, stadiums, publicity, credibility, and many other resources. There are some big-name sports programs that generate money. But even there, the requirements of Title IX (mandating equal treatment for women's sports) lead to abolition of men's minor sports in favor of the big money sports.
Where I teach--UIC--we don't have a football team at all, and based on my years at USC, I assure you it is much better not to have one. The problems these big-time athletic programs generate are not worth it. You end up with coaches demanding special treatment for star athletes in every aspect of school life, and athletes taking advantage of their status.

Evan McKenzie said...

Beth--We in the U of I system have the same thing. The administrators get the highest salaries and the best of everything else. The staff are mostly unionized civil servants, which means they almost can't be fired. They might as well have tenure. Then we have the coaches, and the medical, dental, and pharmacy people. Bringing up the rear are the instructors who deliver this product called education to the people called students.

I'm happy to be a college professor even with the low pay, but when you see administrators making ten or twenty times your salary while making colossal and horribly costly mistakes, it kind of makes you a little testy at times.