Your State's Highest-Paid Employee

State governments have a lot of people on the payroll. There are legislators, judges, social workers, inspectors, police, and the educational system, from elementary school to state universities. Deadspin looked at the records and determined the highest-paid employee on each state's public payroll.

Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, one hockey coach, and 10 dorks who aren't even in charge of a team.

Those "10 dorks" are also university employees: chancellors, presidents, or deans (and then there's Nevada). At the link, you'll find more information about where the money for the coaches comes from, and where it might otherwise go. Link  -via Digg


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It seems like we're looking at this from two different angles. If I understand your points correctly, you appear to believe that a college would be better served by having the money that would be spent on its coaches be distributed throughout the school. I believe that a college program that brings in more money than it spends is beneficial to the school because there is a greater amount of cash to be shared by the programs in the college. Both of us agree that more funding is good for the college, we just see different ways of obtaining those funds.

The various military services do have sports teams that receive perks above and beyond their salaries.
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These massive payments are grotesque, but this state of affairs reflects the tastes and interests of the population. College sports are big business, and university administrators must believe they are making an investment with such payments. Legislators could mandate salary caps for schools receiving government funding, but imagine the outcry.
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A university is (or at least was) not a place just for developing careers, but a place to learn. As people got more eager to jump start careers and costs have driven people to be more utilitarian, people have made their time at a university more targeted at developing careers. But that is not the only thing one can do at a university. Even with a career centric curriculum, there are still opportunities to develop other interests and skills. Opinions on whether physical abilities and strategies fit into being an acceptable thing to learn at a university or not is going to vary a lot and probably be pretty set in most people's mind anyway though.

And for a few it is a career development. Although the rate at which a college sports player ends up going pro is 1-2% (although apparently 10% for baseball), that is not much less than chances in some other fields getting to what the training leads to. Physics graduate school is heavily biased toward teaching academia practices, but a rule of thumb gives about 5-15% actually ending up with a career in academia.
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who decided that money for academia needs to go to sports? I don't understand why people donate money to a school because of their sports wins/loses. why isn't it Professional Military Football, Professional Police basketball or Pro Social Security Hokey?

I think the answer is because it's not the place for that, the military is a place where people train and defend our freedom, the police are there to protect and serve the law, and well.. you get the point.. why is college not the place to train and develop people's careers? how do "professional" sports fit in there?
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