Academic

This Marginal Revolution post on faculty subsidization is, um… interesting. And here I was thinking that football paid all faculty salaries

Actually, more interesting is a comment from the post which I provide below the fold.

There may be a way to find out how much the professors within a given department are subsidized by their universities using published information. Look at the required course curriculum for undergraduates and see which and how many out-of-major classes are required by the university for graduation.

If the university’s education program is balanced, then all academic majors will have roughly equal exposure to various disciplines outside their primary fields (for example: a Biology major is required to take an English class and an English major is required to take a Biology class).

But, if the students in one discipline are required to take classes in another, without a reciprocal requirement for the students in the other field to take classes in the first discipline, then the students in the first discipline are being required by the university to subsidize the other discipline. The more one-way the requirements, the more the field is being subsidized. This would be how the university’s administrators communicate the relative values they place upon the various academic majors. 

Posted by: Ironman at Aug 11, 2008 9:00:36 AM