Comment by shiroiushi
1 day ago
>The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
I found this on Google:
And:
The average at Oxford is much higher than MIT. Note: GBP to USD is currently 1.27
According to the sister comment to mine, Oxford pays only professors well, and everyone else quite poorly. There's a lot more to a university's staff than just the professors.
"Professors" at a UK university are the most senior academic staff - mind you there does seem to be a move in some universities to move to US style job title where all academics are a professor of some kind.
When I worked in UK academia the hierarchy for permanent academic posts was something like: lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor.
Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut.
Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
I feel like that is circular logic. We started with the idea that the US is more expensive. That isn't an explanation for why it is more expensive. Why do we have so many more admins, and why do we pay them so well compared to median income, while Europe does not?
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