The Salary Hate Machine

So Chad Rogers is at it again.

Rogers' claim here -- that higher education administrators are making too much despite continuing cuts to their institutions -- is hardly a new one.

Also, anytime you see this:

"Our informants in the Southwest Louisiana Tea Party contributed to this report!"

you should be wary.

Still, his other sources seem legit, although I haven't double-checked his numbers yet.

A few issues:

1.) He posts big numbers for Lombardi, Layzell, and others, but he only posts a historical salary comparison for Clausen. Why didn't he post any of the others? Are the trends not as damning? Or was he just too lazy?

2.) Did Rogers forget that Clausen isn't Commissioner of Higher Education anymore? In fact, did he forget that we don't have a commissioner of higher education at all right now because the legislature rejected the Regents' candidate for that position?

Did he forget why the legislature rejected that candidate? Oh yeah, it's because they thought he was going to get paid too much -- even though he was getting paid less than Clausen was.

Read that article. The legislature rejected Layzell's proposed salary at $319,000; that's more than $100,000 less than the pay package Rogers attributes to Clausen.

Not only is he only applying past trends to one administrator, he's applying those trends to a position that currently doesn't exist. And it doesn't exist exactly because the state is being fiscally conservative in paying for it.

Hardly the most convincing argument for rampant waste.

3.) Even if Rogers could prove that higher education officials were getting paid too much -- and he can't -- that's not anywhere near a substantive solution to higher ed's budget issues. LSU's budget alone has been cut by more than $43 million in the past two years -- knocking even a few hundred thousand off each of the supposedly offensive salaries wouldn't come near touching that.

It certainly doesn't come anywhere near the more than $300 million that higher education in general has been cut.

Again, Rogers isn't the only conservative guilty of trying to use administrator salaries as scapegoats for budget cuts. It's an argument we've heard before, over and over.

It's also an argument with little substance and even less real significance.