How Much is Too Much

As I checked my Facebook feed I found a story being posted quite a bit with some interesting comments. The story is the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees awarded their Chancellor a $40,000 bonus. This is pretty inflammatory news to many of my friends who are still going to college in a MNSCU school.

The Chancellor makes $360,000 a year which people are screaming is too much. So that raises the question how much is too much? For most people it's roughly $1.00 more than they themselves make. I personally hate the phrase, "He/She gets paid too much." Why do I hate it? Because what right does somebody have to say another is making too much unless they are that person's boss? Yes if I'm your boss and don't believe your doing a good enough job to earn your salary then I have some reason to claim you're making too much money and thus can fire you or lower your pay. But I've not heard a single person come up with an exact formula that determines if somebody makes "too much." Last I heard businesses have a right to determine how much they pay their employees. Now complexity can be entered into this since MNSCU receives public funding but I'm unsure if the Chancellor's pay comes for tax payer money received by the state or a different source. Either way even lowering his wages to $50,000 wouldn't cut the tuition of each student by any noticeable amount.

The other thing that nobody seems to bring up is the fact $40,000 isn't a whole lot of money for MNSCU. According to their website they have 32 public colleges and universities. $40,000 divided by 32 mean if that money were evenly distributed throughout MNSCU each college would get a whopping $1,250 each. In layman's terms that means each school would get just about absolutely nothing.

Looked at another way they have 54 campuses so each campus would get about $740.74 which is less than some students pay for books in a semester.