Why The "Haves'' Don't Get It

I really don't think Elliott Hirshman, incoming president of San Diego State University, planned to begin his new $400,000 gig at the exact same time the Cal State Board of Trustees voted in a new 12% tuition increase (that's on top of a 10% tuition hike last year). Neither did the CSU trustees. I have no doubt that the unfortunate timing of the fat paycheck and tuition hikes for students was a completely honest mistake.

That's because Hirshman and the trustees live in an alternate universe from undergraduates scrambling to figure out how they're going to come up with $6,000 a year to pay for school. What does an Elliott Hirshman know about living on minimum wage with three roommates? Does he relate to the difficulty of falling asleep at night counting the thousands of dollars in debt today's graduates face coming out of college?

When I graduated from San Diego State in 1988, annual tuition cost about $900. At the time, former SDSU president Stephen Weber was pulling down $105,000, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission's 1988-1989 report on executive compensation.

Including the controversial pay raise, the new president at State is making almost four times what Weber made way back then. Student tuition, of course, has accelerated at an even faster pace -- about six times what I was paying in the late 80s. This fall, CSU students will pay $5472 in basic tuition for the year, still a bargain, to be sure. A pittance, in fact, to someone making $400,000, or even half that.

The reason the media glare is burning so relentlessly on San Diego State at the moment is that TuitionGate, or the latest example of unsupportable executive compensation in the face of draconian budget cuts, or whatever you choose to call it, provides the perfect analogy to the problem of economic disparity on a national scale.

The basic issue is that the people making policy live in a world where the bills get paid and the IRA keeps on growing and the future looks basically the same that it has for the past 15 years. How can this group decide what is an appropriate amount to exact from a 22-year-old graphic designer making $2300 a month, or a middle-aged single Mom making $15 an hour doing accounting at night so she can spend her days working toward a nursing degree?

Maybe the Board should consider recruiting a group of students to study the issue and come up with its own cost analysis and recommendation for executive pay. Oh, and be sure you pay them. $25 an hour would be a decent place to start. Does it sound like a lot? On an annual basis, that's just over $50,000.