Comment by WitCanStain
4 days ago
Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.
[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...
Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.
Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.
Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.
Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...
Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...
Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.