Thursday, February 23, 2006

Taxpayer Protection Amendment Exhibit 1

Bruce Murphy reports that the average salary of a full professor at MATC is more then $ 91,000, far more than the average at UW and, I think it would be safe to say, Marquette. The instructors at MATC have a higher teaching load (although, at least in the academic areas, they teach at a far more basic level)but have no expectations with respect to research and are, not to put too fine a point on it, generally (maybe even universally) less credentialed and accomplished than profs at the universities.

Murphy notes that MATC operates "under the radar" but much of the nuts and bolts decisions made by other units of government also draw little attention. More fundamentally, he suggests that one of the reasons for this bizarre salary level is that MATC has a source of revenue, i.e., its ability to levy a property tax, that the UW does not have. The absence of additional revenue, in other words, has limited salaries at UW. Costs at MATC have expanded to consume the "available" money.

Discuss among yourselves.

3 comments:

Dad29 said...

...and the MATC retirement plan is fairly fat, too.

steveegg said...

It's also an exhibit in Jessica McBride's crusade to make the tech college boards elected.

Seth Zlotocha said...

Nice try, Rick. Very clever, as usual.

But this debate isn't about any individual example of potential excess you mention as an "exhibit"--even if you can list a dozen of them. It's about the necessity for and aggregate effects of a constitutional amendment that restricts revenue for all governmental units in the state.

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but Jessica McBride is right to focus the debate over MATC instructor salaries on the issue of having elected boards for technical colleges in the state. This is because if it's decided that MATC instructor salaries are indeed too high, a reasonable resolution might be to start calling for elected tech school boards. An unreasonable resolution for the issue would be to pass a constitutional amendment restricting revenue for all governmental units in the state.