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One Psychology class brings in more revenue than the entire Duck Baseball season.

Last updated on 02/26/2014

2/26/2014 update: UO Psychology Department announces pouring rights contract with Widmer Brothers Brewery for intro psych lectures. Lucrative grad seminars still open for bids.

2/25/2014: Psychology:

Let’s do the math. At UO tuition and fees per credit are $178 for in-state, $608 out-of-state. Freshmen are about 50/50, so figure ~$400 a credit. So a 4 credit course brings in an average of $1600 to UO, per student. To pick just one large lecture class, Psychology 201 (Mind and Brain) typically has 500 students. That’s $800,000 in revenue.

The professor will be paid about $15,000 (assuming standard teaching load and teaching/research split, and including benefits). The grad student assistants will get about $10,000 each.

Baseball:

According to the NCAA, UO’s baseball team brought in an total of $439,246 in ticket sales. Add in the $253,027 for beer and parking, and the entire season brings in $792,273 in revenue.

The coach will be paid $612,021, including benefits. The assistant coaches will get about $184,00 each.

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14 Comments

  1. Leporello 02/25/2014

    So what’s your point, do we need more basketball teams?

  2. bat girl 02/25/2014

    I applaud your math, especially since my math is dismal. But the baseball quotient doesn’t in any way hinge on math. I suspect you know it and yet, you find windmill tilt so easy.

    Do yourself a favor and spend energy on finding savings elsewhere. Though highly questionable, baseball has been built to be a fixture and so it will be … no denying.

  3. Anonymous 02/25/2014

    And the psychology lecture will be many times more entertaining.

  4. Keith Appleby 02/26/2014

    “The grad student assistants will get about $10,000 each.”

    I think you are including the cost of tuition remission in this calculation which is not actually take home pay or of material benefit for the GTF. If tuition were a million dollars per term, the GTF would not be “getting” a million dollars per class taught with the tuition waiver. The tuition waiver is basically monopoly money. The waiver has value inside UO, for example, when you are doing budgeting and the like. But, there is no value to the waiver outside of “the game”.

    In actuality, a GTF who makes the minimum wage “gets” less than half of the amount that you mention per class taught over the entire term.

  5. Anonymous 02/26/2014

    Since I paid for my graduate degree, I “got” loans to cover tuition, and I still “have”, 15 years later, monthly payments on those loans. So GTFs don’t “get” free tuition; they actually do receive something of great monetary value.

  6. Keith Appleby 02/26/2014

    “Since I paid for my graduate degree, I “got” loans to cover tuition, and I still “have”, 15 years later, monthly payments on those loans. So GTFs don’t “get” free tuition; they actually do receive something of great monetary value.”

    You are missing my point. There is obviously “use value” in a tuition waiver, but there is no “exchange value”. I can’t sell a tuition remission and it isn’t going to pay for my major dental work (nor does a GTF’s current insurance plan, actually). So, it is misleading to say that a GTF gets $10,000 for teaching a course when more than half of that is in the form of monopoly money.

    It always used to be problematic for GTF’s when the UO Admin would raise tuition and then try to convince us that we had had received “raises”. I would imagine it still is.

  7. ScienceDuck 02/26/2014

    In the real world, a manager of a company division would not be able to take home in pay the division’s entire revenue. Why are coaches treated nearly uniquely in terms of compensation?

  8. Anonymous 02/26/2014

    I live with a GTF and she laughed hysterically when she read, “The grad student assistants will get about $10,000 each.” for one class.

    • anon 02/26/2014

      Biology grad students in IMB and ION get (I think) $24,000 in stipend for being a GTF in their first year for 1 class per term. That’s $8,000 a class… add some extra for health insurance and you’d be close to $10,000 a class. Is it very different in Psychology?

    • Oryx 02/26/2014

      Agreed with anon. above: in all the natural sciences I’m aware of, it’s common to get about $8k + benefits for being a GTF for one class. (That is, $24k/year salary, 3 terms, 1 class per term.)

      • Hilarius Bookbinder 02/27/2014

        The funding structure in the hard sciences is much more advantageous for GTFs than in the humanities.

        It is not uncommon for a first-year GTF in the humanities to make less than $10K per academic year in take-home wages.

        Around 45% of our bargaining unit makes below the minimum wage.

        70% of our bargaining unit fall between $400 & $600 short of UO’s own (posted on the Graduate School website) cost of living estimate *every single month*.

        Then we sit across the bargaining table and have a lawyer, who is being paid upwards of $250/hr to defend the same crew that pay a baseball coach 80% of his unit’s revenue, tell us “the GTF should not expect their stipend should cover their living expenses.”

        We’re not asking for the moon. Hell, we’re not even asking for a lot. We’re just asking to have enough.

        The money they are spending on this one man alone–the baseball coach–could fund the minimum wage floor we’re asking for in our contract. And we’re being treated at the bargaining table as if this is an extravagant demand.

        • anon 02/27/2014

          I understand GTFs in the humanities have it hard, and my comment about science GTF stipends was not trying to argue against there being good reasons for GTF bargaining. I was trying to clarify, given the “laughing” comment, if Psychology GTFs are paid much less than $10,000 per class, or if it was a laugh because that GTF’s experience is far different from a Psychology GTF.

          • Hilarius Bookbinder 02/27/2014

            Oh, I didn’t think that was your intent. Sorry if I came across that way.

            I’m not sure what the situation is for Psychology GTFs. In general, GTFs working off grants are in a much better financial position than those dependent on departmental funds, and I’m not sure what the situation is in that respect for Psych GTFs. In either case, I suspect that laugh came from the disparity between the $10K number and that particular GTF’s experience.

            FWIW, this cuts deeper than just GTFs not being fairly compensated. In the humanities, it’s costing us prospective students. In my own department, we’ve lost almost half of our last 3 first-choice cohorts, because of stipends–or at least this was what the indicated in their declination letters. To put in stark numbers, GTFs in my department are paid ~$15K/yr less than our nearest competitor institution. In other words, our stipends are so low that they could double them, and we’d still be paid $2K-$3K less/yr than that institution. That institution also does not require teaching in the first year. And this is in a department that actively commits any surplus departmental funds to giving us incremental raises. UO is losing upper-crust recruits by tamping down GTF salaries and in stead of acting to remedy this situation, the administration is hiding behind tuition hikes to claim that they aren’t doing so.

            We teach ~30% of FTE at UO. And 70% of us can’t meet the standard of living. The admin’s answer to this so far has been to raise tuition and claim it’s a fix.

  9. uomatters Post author | 02/26/2014

    Comparing with what assistant coaches get, that means the compensating differential for ass-kissing is about $100K. Ballpark, as they say.

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