“Bank of England Financial Policy Committee member Michael Cohrs said the culture and incentives at banks need to change in order avoid systemic problems.

“Ultimately, it is the culture within individual banks and the incentive systems that drive risk taking which need to be changed,” he said in the text of speech delivered March 23 in Edinburgh. “The good news is that I see evidence that banks are changing incentive systems and this will lead to a different culture within the banks which society will prefer.”

The record of the FPC’s March 16 meeting published last week noted that banks have made progress in limiting pay while they build buffers against future shocks, though the panel said they still need to raise more capital. The FPC meets quarterly on an interim basis while legislation on its powers is considered in Parliament.

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German business confidence unexpectedly rose to an eight-month high in March, suggestingEurope’s largest economy will return to growth even as the sovereign debt crisis curbs euro-area demand for its exports.

The Munich-based Ifo institute said today its business climate index, based on a survey of 7,000 executives, increased to 109.8 from a revised 109.7 in February. Economists forecast it would remain unchanged at the initial February reading of 109.6, according to the median of 44 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey.

Unemployment at a two-decade low is fueling domestic demand, while the European Central Bank’s injection of more than 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) into the banking system has helped to bolster investor sentiment. Germany’s benchmarkDAX share index is up 18 percent this year. Still, manufacturing output unexpectedly contracted this month as governments and households reduced spending across the euro region,Germany’s largest export market….”

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China Construction Bank Corp. (939), the world’s second-largest lender by market value, posted a 24 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit after higher lending and fee income outweighed provisions set aside for bad debt.

Net income climbed to 30.2 billion yuan ($4.8 billion) in the quarter, from 24.4 billion yuan, according to calculations based on full-year figures published by the Beijing-based lender yesterday. That compared with the 31.4 billion-yuan average estimate of 22 analysts in a Bloomberg survey.

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Tough times for the planet when it comes to real estate….

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Singapore’s industrial production grew less than economists estimated in February as a slump in electronics output persisted.

Manufacturing rose 12.1 percent from a year earlier after a revised 9.6 percent decline in January, the Economic Development Board said today. The median of 13 economists surveyedby Bloomberg News was for a 16.2 percent gain.

Asia’s manufacturing rebound from the first two months of the year, when the output numbers were distorted by the Lunar New Year holidays shutting factories, may be limited by Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and China’s slowing economic growth. The region’s currencies have declined in March even as six months of the strongest U.S. job growth since 2006 bolstered the outlook for demand.

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Source

The dollar strengthened against the yen for the first time in four days on bets U.S. growth is gathering pace.

The Australian dollar climbed versus Japan’s currency as prospects for a recovery in the world’s largest economy supported demand for higher-yielding assets. The euro weakened against the dollar after Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said Spain could reignite the region’s debt crisis. Economists said a U.S. report this week will show orders for durable goodsincreased in February.

“The U.S. economy is still relatively outperforming, which is supporting the U.S. dollar for now,” said Lee Hardman, a currency strategist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in London. “Investor concerns appear to be rising over Spain.”

The dollar rose 0.5 percent to 82.78 yen at 6:51 a.m. New York time. It appreciated 0.2 percent to $1.3241 against the euro. The 17-nation currency was 0.3 percent stronger at 109.62 yen, after rising as much as 0.5 percent to 109.86. The Australian dollar advanced 0.6 percent to 86.70 yen.

“The market feels almost compelled to sell yen as it has been the main trend in early 2012, although that trend is now flashing reversal signals,” Hardman said.

The dollar gained before a March 28 report that’s projected to show bookings for long-lasting U.S. factory goods rose 3 percent last month, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

Treasuries fell, with the 10-year yield rising five basis points to 2.28 percent….”

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Asia

Europe

Futures

Currencies

Commodities

LIBOR, EURIBOR, 10 year yields for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany

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Josh Gerstein

When President Barack Obama signed the health care bill two years ago, the legal challenges to the law were widely belittled as long shots — at best.

But as the cases head to the Supreme Court this week, what looked to many like far-out legal arguments to undo “Obamacare” don’t seem so zany anymore.

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You can lead a student to knowledge, according to an old academic saying, but you can’t make him or her think.

I recently wrote about the possibility of testing and certification for what I called a “college-level GED.” Like the current GED test for high school equivalency, it would award certification to bright, hardworking job applicants who want to show potential employers how much they know, even though they never graduated from college.

I heard from a number of readers who supported the idea. Some were eager to take the test now, if they could. But the most thoughtful question I received went like this: What about the “critical thinking” skills that we traditionally expect campus academic life to teach and encourage?

I agree. Critical thinking is the brain’s investigative reporter. It questions assumptions and requires more than the memory to pass most standardized tests.

But we do have tests for that. For example, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, launched in 2000, gives a 90-minute essay test to freshmen and seniors that aims to measure gains in critical thinking and communication skills.

However, recent studies of CLA results reveal another major problem, not so much in the testing of critical thinking as in how little critical thinking is being taught.

One new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, questions whether a large chunk of today’s college students are learning much on campus that they didn’t already know.

Following CLA results and other data for 2,300 students at 24 public and private colleges, Arum, of New York University, and Roksa, of the University of Virginia, startled the academic world with their finding that 36 percent of students made no significant learning gains in critical thinking and communication skills from their freshman to senior years.

That tends to confirm what reader Jerre Levy, a retired University of Chicago professor of psychology, wrote: “I wish with all my heart that a college degree implied that the person holding that degree was capable of critical thinking. However, this is, sadly, not true.”

Among the jaw-dropping examples Levy related in her email to me and a later phone call was a senior who reacted with memorable resentment to a two-week take-home assignment to critically evaluate a scientific journal article.

The professor specifically requested a hard-eyed assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the article’s sources, methods and conclusions. She did not, repeat, not want students simply to summarize the contents. She stipulated that last part in capital letters.

Yet when the students returned their papers, she recalled, one offered nothing but what Levy said she didn’t want: “a content summary, without a single evaluative statement.” When the student complained about her zero grade, Levy explained the goose egg. The student argued back indignantly, “But that would have required THINKING!”

It was the winter quarter of her senior year, the young woman explained, and she could memorize as much as any professor gave her and earn As and Bs but, until this course, she had “never been required to think!”

“If students can get a degree from the University of Chicago without having either the will or capacity to think,” Levy said, “then it is certainly true of less selective universities and colleges.”

Read the rest here.

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Full article

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* Magnitude 7.1 quake struck north west of Talca

* Quake not expected to cause tsunami

* Codelco says Andina and El Teniente mines operating normally

Read the rest here.

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Japan’s markets open higher; Nikkei average up 0.3% – @MarketWatch

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• Biometric camera stores details of everyone who walks past it
• Stores ‘library’ of face info
• Can scan through 36 million faces per second searching for people
• Will be on sale to governments within next year

By Rob Waugh

PUBLISHED: 11:41 EST, 23 March 2012 | UPDATED: 11:45 EST, 23 March 2012

A new camera technology from Hitachi Hokusai Electric can scan days of camera footage instantly, and find any face which has EVER walked past it.

Its makers boast that it can scan 36 million faces per second.

The technology raises the spectre of governments – or other organisations – being able to ‘find’ anyone instantly simply using a passport photo or a Facebook profile.

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Timothy B. Lee — Writer with Ars Technica and the Cato Institute

Farhad Manjoo gives Slate readers advice on “how to stop investing your money like an idiot.” He lucidly explains the principles of good investing, but then says that “for people who have extra money but not a lot of time or facility with investing, there has never been a simple way to invest in the rigorous, disciplined way that experts advise.” Manjoo is far from the first writer to make this claim (and I’m kind of a broken record on the subject), but this isn’t true. Vanguard has had funds that do exactly that since 2003, and they’re significantly cheaper than the options Manjoo discusses in his article.

Manjoo reviews three options, and the one option Manjoo ultimately recommends, called Betterment, is pretty good. You tell Betterment how you want to allocate your money between relatively risky assets (like stocks) and relatively safe ones (like Treasury bonds). Betterment then automatically buys a mix of assets that fit your criteria and automatically adjusts them over time.

Read the rest here.

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By Jonathon Braden
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

It might be his best deal yet.

Warren Buffett got a bottle of Scotch, a loaf of traditional Jewish bread, a bag of Cheetos and the rights to the food in three large drums and a box.

All for free.

For thousands of years, Jewish people have sold their leavened goods — anything containing grain that rises when baked — to non-Jewish friends before the eight-day observance of Passover begins. Any unsold leavened products are donated to charity.

Jewish law forbids eating or having leavened goods during Passover, which celebrates the Exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt after being freed from slavery.

Rabbi Jonathan Gross of the Beth Israel Synagogue in west Omaha had an idea. He would ask Omaha investor Buffett — an 81-year-old agnostic and the third-richest man in the world — to take part in the “Sale of Chametz.”

Gross typed up a letter.

He included a little background on how the sale would work: Buffett would buy the goods, Gross would buy them back later.

“Price is low before Passover. Price is high afterward,” Gross said. “It’s a great short-term investment. So who would really appreciate this better than Warren Buffett?”

Gross also included the name of his friend Rabbi Myer Kripke, for whom the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion & Society at Creighton University is named. Kripke has been friends with Buffett for 50 years, since they were neighbors in Dundee.

A few days later, Gross got an email from Debbie Bosanek, Buffett’s longtime secretary, saying Buffett liked the idea.

“The beauty of being an agnostic is that you are in no position to make any judgment about anything,” Buffett said in an interview. “You can join in on anything.”

Read the rest here.

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College students and their families have struggled to pay for the rising cost of tuition, a cost that has been driven in part by swelling administrative expenses.

Over a 20-year period, the growth in administrative personnel at institutions of higher education has outpaced the growth in both faculty and student enrollment.

Critics refer to this as administrative bloat and contend it shows that universities and colleges are inefficient institutions.

Defenders say colleges are adding administrative staff to meet student needs.

An IBD analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1989-2009 the number of administrative personnel at four- and two-year institutions grew 84%, from about 543,000 to over 1 million.

By contrast, the number of faculty increased 75%, from 824,000 to 1.4 million, while student enrollment grew 51%, from 13.5 million to 20.4 million.

The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases.

Administrative personnel are employees who are not engaged in instruction and research. The jobs range from university president and provost to accountants, social workers, computer analysts and music directors.

One reason administration at public institutions has grown faster may be that bureaucracies tend to expand their staff and programs over time, regardless of need.

“The increase has a lot to do with all the money these institutions pull in from third parties, like state funds and student financial aid,” said Daniel Bennett, a research fellow at the conservative Center for College Affordability & Productivity. “They’re using it to grow their staff rather than on students.”

Since students are insulated from the full cost of tuition, administrators feel less pressure to spend more on faculty to teach students.

Bennett has also written that an onerous regulatory environment that higher education faces may be partially to blame.

“In order to comply with the government’s requirements, colleges need to employ a staff that is responsible for providing the multiple state and federal agencies with compliance reports and data,” he wrote.

Acknowledging that some of the increase may be due to administrators wanting “to re-create themselves,” Dan King, executive director at the American Association of University Administrators, claims it’s also due to changing needs.

“Students are coming in less prepared, needing more remedial assistance,” he said. “If they need help from a writing lab or math lab, that’s usually done by administrators. That’s something that universities didn’t have to provide as much even 10 years ago.”

Source

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Matthew Philips
10/27/2011 | 9:37 am

The numbers are in on how much it costs to go to college this year, and (surprise) they’re up again, thanks largely to decreases in state funding and increasing enrollments. The biggest price hikes came in the public sector: An 8.7 percent increase for in-state tuition at public two-year schools, and an 8.3 percent jump in the price of four-year public institutions, for in-state students.

Read the rest here.

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By Douglas A. McIntyre, 24/7 Wall St.

via MSNBC.com

The 10 most-visited websites in America may share a few characteristics, but interestingly enough, none are in the same business, with the exception of two portals. Each has a different business model as well. An analysis of these largest sites shows that no single model has helped one type of Internet property or another to dominate the web in terms of traffic. The collection of media that is the Internet shows how essential web diversity has become to Americans’ lives.

This list of the most visited sites includes the world’s largest search engine, web portal, video site, software company, social network, encyclopedia, and e-commerce site. One of the sites on this list, Wikipedia, is a nonprofit that runs on a budget of a few million dollars a year. Another, Google, has revenue that will be well above $50 billion. Revenue is not essential to size online, but size can be essential to revenue.

Internet giants have been in particular focus recently, mostly for three reasons. The first is that large sites collect millions and millions of pieces of information about their visitors. Governments, both inside the U.S. and, especially, in Europe have become concerned with how this information is gathered, to whom it is given, what is done with it, and for what financial consideration. Naturally, sites with the largest number of visitors are at the center of this because their inventories of user data are so vast.

Another reason large Internet properties are of interest lately is the upcoming initial public offering of Facebook. The online social networking site has close to one billion members, many of whom spend hundreds of hours each month on the site. The company’s value is set at about $100 billion ahead of the public offering, which is extraordinary because Facebook’s revenue was less than $4 billion in 2011. There is a great disparity among the value of the most visited websites, causing a debate about why users of an e-commerce site are worth any more or less than users of a search engine or a social network.

Finally, sites with tens of millions of visitors are in focus also because of the mass movement of Internet users from PC to smartphones. Smartphones have browsers that operate nearly identically to those on PCs. Strong processors and high-speed wireless connections allow smartphone users to visit the same sites and use them in the same way as they do on computers. The owners of all sites are in a frenzy to see if they can hold onto their user base in the smartphone environment. What happens to the very largest sites will at least be instructional.

24/7 Wall St.: The 10 Most Hated Companies in America

With each year, the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with websites of various sizes, features and functions. The most-visited sites have been among the largest ones for several years. That tells a great deal about the real interests of Americans, probably as much as any other set of markers.

24/7 Wall St. used data from Quantcast to rank the sites. The rank is based on the number of people in the United States who visit each site in a month. The data are updated daily. Revenue figures are based on SEC filings for the public companies and for those in the process of going public. For others, the information is based on data from third party analysts. Revenue data or estimates are for full year 2011.

10. Microsoft.com

• Monthly audience: 61,981,128
• Year founded: 1975
• Revenue size: $69.9 billion

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) website traffic does not include visits to content sites it controls such as the MSN portal, MSNBC news site or the Bing search engine. The visitors counted are for the online corporate destination of the world’s largest software company. Microsoft’s site primary purposes are to sell, download and support its most widely used software products — Windows and its business suite of tools. Microsoft.com is also the destination for public company information, including financial data and the company’s significant patent and intellectual property legal activity.

24/7 Wall St.: How America’s richest companies invest their cash

9. WordPress.com

• Monthly audience: 63,933,088
• Year founded: 2003
• Revenue size: $10 million

WordPress has two large online destination sites. One is WordPress.org, a place where millions of bloggers download basic open source software they can use to create and maintain their own websites. The WordPress.org traffic is not included in WordPress.com’s traffic figure. WordPress.com is the destination for a broad spectrum of users — from small bloggers to large companies — that use the site to post information and design their blogs. WordPress.com is operated by Automattic, which sells custom design, custom domains and upgrades to the basic WordPress open source software. While the WordPress for-profit business has products used by a large number of different media and large companies, Automattic does not charge high enough fees to make the “upgrade” business a large one.

8. Wikipedia.org

• Year founded: 2001
• Monthly audience: 77,354,504
• Revenue: $20 million

Wikipedia is operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. The work of the foundation is to support a collection of open source encyclopedias. This already includes dozens of encyclopedias written in the world’s most common languages. The number of articles created for the sites is huge. The English version alone has 3.9 million articles. The German language edition has 1.4 million articles. The tiny budget of the foundation is being used to drive global traffic to the level of one billion readers and the number of articles to 50 million. All of the capital for these projects is donated to the nonprofit foundation. Wikipedia is most famous for making information on a universe of subjects available for free to anyone with access to the Internet. But with such a large amount of content and small staff to monitor its quality, Wikipedia is also infamous for being inconsistent with mixed quality in different subjects.

7. MSN

• Monthly audience: 78,095,128
• Year founded: 1995
• Revenue: $2.5 billion

MSN.com is one of the three largest Internet content portals, along with Yahoo! and Aol (NYSE: AOL). Its business is supported by display advertising and search revenue. The portal model is based on providing millions of visitors access to a large range of content. This includes a number of areas that used to be exclusively the role of national magazines, newspapers, radio and television. News posted by the portals is among their most visited content, and so is content about sports, entertainment and self-help. The portals have expanded into areas that can get some local advertising revenue, particularly automobiles and real estate. Premium news and entertainment content have recently become a large part of the offerings of these sites as well.

24/7 Wall St.: 10 companies profiting most from war

6. Twitter

• Monthly audience: 90,790,080
• Year founded: 2006
• Revenue: $140 million

Twitter is described alternatively as a “microblog” and as a “social network.” Users, which by many estimates exceed 300 million, can post messages of up to 140 characters at a time. This is microblogging to the extent that the “tweets” are available for large numbers of people to read. It is a social network to the extent that it allows users to exchange details about their lives, plans and interests. The problem Twitter faces is that it has not been able to turn what some industry experts believe is 200 million tweets a day into a viable business. Advertisers have shown a reluctance to put marketing messages into these tweets because they are so short and because Twitter users have often rejected using a service that has become partially commercialized. Some of the Twitter users with the largest followings, mostly celebrities connected to millions of fans, use these followings as a way to promote causes, products or even their own careers. So far, this has proved a more successful way to exploit the service than traditional advertising.

5. Yahoo!

• Monthly audience: 94,840,280
• Year founded: 1995
• Revenue: $5 billion

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been at the center of a number of controversies over the past several years. It rejected a rich bid by Microsoft in 2008, had three CEOs in four years, and executed a large series of layoffs. Recently, a substantial portion of its board of directors resigned. Yet, the remarkable size of the website’s traffic has not changed, and the parent company continues to be profitable, despite a lack of revenue growth. Some of the sites on this list would welcome Yahoo!’s profits. The Internet portal makes money from a combination of display and search advertising. Yahoo! runs far behind Google in terms of search engine traffic, and it holds only 14 percent of the U.S. market for search activity, according to Comscore. But it still manages to capitalize on that small share.

4. Amazon.com

• Monthly audience: 99,374,352
• Year founded: 1994
• Revenue: $48 billion

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the primary website for the world’s largest e-commerce company. It is an online superstore with an immensely diverse virtual inventory. It sells nearly anything brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Kroger (NYSE: KR) sell. And that is to list just a few. Amazon has used the traffic and customer base it has established over the years to enter a number of new, lucrative and even revolutionary businesses. This includes electronic books, which barely existed five years ago. It includes the e-reader business, which Amazon pioneered with the 2007 introduction of the Kindle. And it includes the online video-on-demand business. Amazon has recently been transformed from a company that competes with other retailers to one that also competes with the likes of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) in the content delivery business and with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the consumer electronics sector.

24/7 Wall St.: The most profitable stores in America

3. Facebook

• Monthly audience: 149,488,208
• Year founded: 2004
• Revenue: $3.7 billion

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with nearly one billion members, plans to raise enough money through an IPO this year to value the company at nearly $100 billion. The site is not even 10 years old. The meteoric rise of the business is largely due to how it altered people’s use the Internet. Before Facebook, Internet use was mostly passive. Visitors went to a portal to get information, to a search engine to get research results, and to video sites to watch content. Facebook helped the Internet evolve into a two-way interpersonal medium on which people voluntarily offer a great deal of their personal information to interact with friends, family and business associates. In the process, Facebook has been at the core of one of the most revolutionary changes in human interaction. Despite this, Facebook has not been able to find a way to make a great deal of money from its huge membership, particularly when compared to Google and Amazon.

2. YouTube

• Monthly audience: 159,975,920
• Year founded: 2005
• Revenue: $1.6 billion

YouTube is the largest video site in the world. To give an idea of its dominance of the U.S. market, 18.6 billion videos were viewed at this division of Google in January against the a total of 40 billion nationwide for all websites. The average number of minutes per viewer for Google’s video content, almost all of it on YouTube, was 448 minutes in January, compared to 57 minutes on Yahoo! and 22 minutes on Facebook. YouTube’s sales are only 5 percent of Google’s total revenue, an extremely small amount given its size. To a great extent, this is because most of the content posted at the site continues to be low-quality, user-created videos, and these videos do not create an environment attractive to major marketers. YouTube has found other ways to pursue revenue. Premium content owners have started to use YouTube to build audiences, and they often pay YouTube for traffic. YouTube also has set up a paid video rental business and joint ventures with several studios. Despite all of this, its revenue was only $1.6 billion in 2011, as based on several estimates. YouTube is the only site on this list that could not have existed before the advent of the broadband technology that allows the transfer of large amounts of data online.

1. Google

• Monthly audience: 185,167,472
• Year founded: 1998
• Revenue: $37.5 billion

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is the largest search engine in the U.S. Its dominance goes beyond that. It is also the largest search engine by market share throughout most of Europe. The only large markets where it has stiff competition happen to be emerging markets with huge populations such as China, India and Russia. Google has two substantial challenges now that will determine whether its business can continue to expand at the extraordinary rate of the past decade. First, there is a great deal of competition to become the primary search engine on new tablet PCs like the Apple iPad and smartphones like the iPhone. As more Americans turn to these portable devices to use the Internet, it is not certain that Google will be able to hold the dominant position it currently has against Microsoft and Yahoo! The second challenge Google faces is expanding its other offerings beyond search. It is unclear whether it can use its Google.com site as a means to help it successfully market these products, including applications that compete with Microsoft’s Windows products or e-commerce products like Google Wallet. Google has yet to demonstrate that it is more than a single legged company — at least so far as sales are concerned.

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By David C. Levy, Published: March 23

No public expenditure has a more productive impact on a nation’s health than its investment in education. But college costs have risen faster than inflation for three decades and, at roughly 25 percent of the average household’s income, now strain the budgets of most middle-class families. They impose an unprecedented debt burden on graduates and place college out of reach for many. This makes President Obama’s recent statementthat college is “an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford” an especially urgent message.As a career-long academic and former university chancellor, I support this position. But I disagree with the next assumption, that the answer to rising college costs is to throw more public money into the system. In fact, increased public support has probably facilitated rising tuitions. Overlooked in the debate are reforms for outmoded employment policies that overcompensate faculty for inefficient teaching schedules.

Through the first half of the 20th century, faculties in academic institutions were generally underpaid relative to other comparably educated members of the workforce. Teaching was viewed as a “calling” in the tradition of tweed jackets, pipe tobacco and avuncular campus life. Trade-offs for modest salaries were found in the relaxed atmospheres of academic communities, often retreats from the pressures of the real world, and reflected in such benefits as tenure, light teaching loads, long vacations and sabbaticals.With the 1970s advent of collective bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result has been more equitable circumstances for college faculty, who deserve salaries comparable to those of other educated professionals. Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees.Not changed, however, are the accommodations designed to compensate for low pay in earlier times. Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.

Such a schedule may be appropriate in research universities where standards for faculty employment are exceptionally high — and are based on the premise that critically important work, along with research-driven teaching, can best be performed outside the classroom. The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules. In fact, they often work hours well beyond those of average non-academic professionals.

Unfortunately, the salaries and the workloads applied to the highest echelons of faculty have been grafted onto colleges whose primary mission is teaching, not research. These include many state colleges, virtually all community colleges and hundreds of private institutions. For example, Maryland’s Montgomery College (an excellent two-year community college) reports its average full professor’s salary as $88,000, based on a workload of 15 hours of teaching for 30 weeks. Faculty members are also expected to keep office hours for three hours a week. The faculty handbook states: “Teaching and closely related activities are the primary responsibilities of instructional faculty.” While the handbook suggests other responsibilities such as curriculum development, service on committees and community outreach, notably absent from this list are research and scholarship.

I take no issue with faculty at teaching-oriented institutions focusing on instructional skills rather than research and receiving a fair, upper-middle-class wage. Like good teachers everywhere, they are dedicated professionals with high levels of education and deserve salaries commensurate with their hard-earned credentials. But we all should object when they receive these salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers.

The cost for such sinecures is particularly galling when it is passed on to the rest of the middle class and to taxpayers in states that are struggling to support higher education. Since faculty salaries make up the largest single cost in virtually all college and university budgets (39 percent at Montgomery College), think what it would mean if the public got full value for these dollars.

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.

If the higher education community were to adjust its schedules and semester structure so that teaching faculty clocked a 40-hour week (roughly 20 hours of class time and equal time spent on grading, preparation and related duties) for 11 months, the enhanced efficiency could be the equivalent of a dramatic budget increase. Many colleges would not need tuition raises or adjustments to public budget priorities in the near future. The vacancies created by attrition would be filled by the existing faculty’s expanded teaching loads — from 12 to 15 hours a week to 20, and from 30 weeks to 48; increasing teachers’ overall classroom impact by 113 percent to 167 percent.

Read the rest here.

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Stock returns by month are not as variable and unpredictable as one might think, over the long run.

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