Public university president? No worries if you're in Texas.

Good news if you're the president of a public college or university and find that a salary under a million dollars, bonuses, and special accommodations aren't enough for your struggling lifestyle of driving only a Maserati. According to Forbes, things are looking up, especially if you're in Texas.

The Chronicle of Higher Education released their latest report on the highest paid public school presidents and chancellors, and two of the top three--and three of the top ten--come from the Texas system, all of whom made over seven figure salaries.

News gets even better for the poor schlub presidents scraping by on $800,000 a year: Salaries rose by 5%, on average, for public school administrators. This is compared to the usual 2-3% annual raise typically seen.

So who are the top ten paid public university presidents and chancellors?

1. Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University $1,554,058

2. William McRaven, Chancellor, University of Texas system $1,500,000

3. John Sharp, Chancellor, Texas A&M University system office, $1,280,438

4. W. Kent Fuchs, President, University of Florida, $1,102,862

5. Michael A. McRobbie, President Indiana University system $1,067,074

6. Eric J. Barron, President, Pennsylvania State University at University Park, $1,039,717

7. Michael V. Drake, President, Ohio State University, $1,034,574

8. Michael K. Young, President, Texas A&M at College Station, $1,000,000

9. Jean E. Robillard, Interim President, University of Iowa, $929,045

10. Raymond Watts, President, University of Alabama at Birmingham, $890,000

Let's not forget that both Texas A&M and the University of Texas' head football coaches made roughly $5 million EACH last year. The basketball coaches? Potentially around $3 million.

I already knew the stereotype that everything was bigger in Texas. I just never knew that meant public higher education salaries as well.



Let's not kid ourselves, though. Tenured faculty is always told there is no room in the budget for salary increases. Likewise, colleges and universities--public and private--are relying more and more on assistant professors that can be paid on the cheap with little to no benefits offered.

But at least the administrators found money in the budget for themselves. Phew--I was worried there for a moment.

Aristotle would be eating a lot of ramen if he were alive today. And not the boutique restaurant kind.

Forbes Magazine caters to the wealthy, the kinda wealthy, and the really bored people in a doctor's office who can't bear the idea of reading another Reader's Digest.

Which explains why Forbes would have an article detailing the college majors least and most likely to have millionaires as an alumnus. Turns out Kierkegaard would be panhandling if he was alive today.

Researches at WealthInsight analyzed data on over 100,000 high net worth individuals with assets of $1 million or more--and philosophy majors made up the least of them.

The list:

1.  MBA (12.1%)
2.  Engineering (10.7%)
3.  Economics (8.2%)
4.  Business studies/business administration (5.9%)
5.  Law (4.7%)
6.  Accountancy (2.9%)
7.  Finance (2.1%)
8.  Management (2.0%)
9.  Commerce (1.9%)
10.  Computer science (1.9%)
11.  Politics (1.3%)
12.  Mathematics (1.1%)
13.  Medicine (1.0%)
14.  Physics (0.9%)
15.  Chemistry (0.9%)
16.  History (0.8%)
17.  Marketing (0.7%)
18.  Biology (0.6%)
19.  Psychology (0.6%)
20.  Philosophy (0.6%)

Consider me stunned that those in the world of business, finance, commerce, accountancy, economics--everything that makes a worldwide business flourish and make the affluent richer--somehow dominate the top ten and would produce the most millionaires. Goodness! You might think there was some sort of incestuous relationship between it all!

You might ask where English majors are on this list. The cynic in you might suggest not oven 0.6% of them are millionaires. Your inner Negative Nancy might suggest writers are starving artists because, well, they are starving. The pessimist in your soul would suggest English majors must be a sad lot.

And you'd be right. But we're not sad. Just broke.

Facebook is less particular about their hiring practices, while still being particular.

Potentially an executive at Facebook.

Investment banking.

Law.

Consulting firms.

A small handful of other professions.

Does your mom or dad wear a monocle or own a Bentley [but only with a man servant behind the wheel]? Did your grandfather have a closet full of top hats and smoking pipes? Do you know the elderly nanny that raised you better than your mother and father?  Does your name sound like a piece of furniture from Pottery Barn? Congratulations! You won the life lottery, and odds are you're employed in a small segment of career fields that desire such a background.

Facebook once operated similarly as well. As a smaller, promising upstart years ago born of Harvard's bosom, Facebook focused on hiring from a pool of candidates largely out of Ivy League schools, with the occasional Stanford thrown in for good measure. But today, as powerful companies focus solely on pedigree regardless of ability, the pool has drained thin. Very thin. This has led Facebook to expand their own talent pool search.

"We recruit from three hundred schools," Facebook vice president Janelle Gale mentioned at a San Francisco educator conference recently, all while shuffling her abacus and looking to be awarded a gold star. "We want to hire people who’s need to learn is greater than their need to be right," Gale said. What does that even mean? I don't know, but it's exciting in its ambiguity!

"We want people who are open and receptive. We want to make sure people are in jobs they are good at and enjoy," she continued.  People who are open and receptive and willing to accept being wrong when told so? Sounds like me as a bagger boy at a grocery store when I was fourteen. Where do I sign up?

Gale never specifically detailed the alleged three hundred schools Facebook recruits from, but Forbes analyzed LinkedIn's searchable database and found "at least 40 Facebook employees attended Arizona State, while nearly as many hail from Cal State, Chico. The University of Oregon has at least a dozen alumni at Facebook; Texas Tech can count six."

That's a steep drop off. Texas Tech counts six and we're only four schools into counting. Incuding the Ivy League and a handful of other overly connected schools, we still have a list of roughly 280 schools to flesh out. So how thin is this Facebook job search?

This is all related to what Lauren Rivera wrote late last year in the Harvard Business Review, studying how elite corporations have an incestuous relationship with elite schools, creating a cycle of elitist entitlement. "[Elite professions have] on-campus “school lists” [with] two tiers, based largely on prestige," Rivera notes. "So even before applications are received, employers allocate jobs based on alma mater, skewing opportunities toward (and against) students from particular campuses [...] This leaves most students from nonlisted schools out of the game."

Phew. At least we now know Facebook's hiring ambiguity wasn't done out of nobility but just pure necessity. The plebeian masses thought they might have a chance for a second, and that can't happen.

Forbes Magazine reminds us that writers are poor. Very poor.

"No one has ever written his way into the ranks of the 400 richest Americans..."

So begins Forbes Magazine's story, reminding us once and for all that writers are the hobos of civilization apparently.

The good news is that 49 of those same richest Americans have written books. The bad news is those books were written by the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Turner, Charles Schwab, and George Soros--almost all entirely nonfiction and about how they're fabulously wealthy.

Yeah-yeah--but do those books share the finer aspects of being a hobo writer? I think not.



photo: Reuters, via Politico

Forbes releases their list of America's top colleges.

You know, the usual suspects.

Effin: It's a state of mind.

Proper nouns are funny things. They can be completely harmless, but scare the hell out of corporations. Take Facebook, which doesn't much care if you grew up in a small village in Ireland called Effin--they think you're being vulgar.

Effin right.

According to Forbes, big business is having trouble playing Grammar Police. They're so afraid of offending people that they immediately assume you're being a flippant little bugger by saying you live in Effin, County Limerick, Ireland, and ban you from using it.

I don't know what this means if you live in Intercourse, PA. It's not Effin, but then again few things are.

Forbes Magazine: Your school is just not that pretty.

Forbes Magazine likes ranking things. It's the only way someone without the last name Forbes would bother reading Forbes Magazine after all.

So lo and behold, Forbes ranked what they call The Most Beautiful College Campuses. It's like the Miss Universe Pageant. That means Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford Universities all look beautiful in the evening gown competition. And do I even need to mention how attractive the University of Virginia looks in swimwear? Très chic!

The real head-scratcher is Kenyon College. It's one of those colleges you forget exists until you hear it mentioned in a list like Most Beautiful College Campuses. Forbes interviewed a student named Ellie Norton who talks about visiting 15 colleges and universities as a high school senior. She settled on Kenyon College because of a rational reason. "It was so amazingly beautiful, I just knew it was where I wanted to be."

I felt the same way about Fitchburg State back in the day. The Civic Center parking lot was so expansive, I just knew it was where I wanted to park for the next four years.