Can’t get top college faculty on the cheap

Georgia Tech is ranked with MIT and Stanford University as being among the best engineering schools in the country. Boston and Silicon Valley thrive, in large part, because of the innovations their extremely well-financed universities have produced. MIT’s average faculty salary is $135,800 and Stanford’s $159,500. Six figures and well worth the investment even in a recession.

In the past, Georgia thrived largely via its hammer-and-nail driven economy. That’s not coming back any time soon. If Georgia is to get out of its economic slump, it will be through research-driven innovations, which will create an abundance of jobs, including plenty of six-figure ones.

Even the AJC conceded: If you want to have a medical college, you are going to have to pay high salaries. Doctors make high salaries. So will the people who teach them. So it is not news that 638 people at the Medical College of Georgia make six-figure salaries.

That leaves us with the 2,250 six-figure jobs at all the other colleges in the University System, or about 8 percent of that segment of the University System’s workforce. Let’s visualize this in another way.

If we lined up 100 workers and said eight of them were paid more than $100,000, would you demand an investigation? I guess you would in a communistic state, which, last I heard, Georgia is not.

Here is the real news. Last year, the net growth of six-figure jobs was just 17 as opposed to 300 in each of the three preceding years. If you take Georgia Tech and the Medical College of Georgia out of the equation, then there was a net loss of six-figure jobs.

Indeed, at the University of Georgia, the state’s flagship national research institution, the number of staff making six-figures dropped by 43 and at Georgia State University by 19, according to the AJC’s own figures.

The story was half right that there had been a growth of six-figure jobs, but recent trends indicate that day is over.

For some faculty jobs, it is hard to pay less than six figures and get quality people, especially in areas such as computer science.

Here is why: A 21-year-old relative of mine just received a computer science undergraduate degree from a very good, but not an Ivy League, university. He was a good, but not stellar, student, who never had held a full-time job. He just took his first job, hired right out of college for $85,000, plus liberal benefits. And his friend got hired, too, at the same figure.

So if kids with absolutely no experience and no advanced degrees are making $85,000 a year to write computer programs, what do you think you will have to pay experienced faculty who can teach these kids? The answer for the future, six-figures.

The story mentioned in passing that some of these six-figured faculty and administrators bring in grants and donations. Would you invest $100,000 a year in someone who brought in $1 million to do the research needed to cure a cancer, better educate our children, improve nursing care in Georgia or improve the economy?

I would, and I would bet so would most Georgians.

Leonard Witt holds the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication and is executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University.