Pink slips given to top higher education officials

It will be interesting to see if the positions they "shed" grow back with new faces and titles.

Not every student that is enrolled in colleges is qualified to be there in the first place. Most of them have no business to be there at all. This is also a numbers game for colleges, because their funding and turf building are based upon just the bodies recorded on paper.

Most of the students take full time enrollment to get free financial aid or signature loans guaranteed by state and federal governments, and it is well known that more than 60% of these student loans can never be recovered, and ultimately it is the poor taxpayer that is bearing all such bad loans by way of higher taxes. We are deceiving ourselves by saying that we are educating students that lack either he minimal motivation or the basic intelligence to grasp higher levels of education. Students know this before they enter the colleges.

Every day is a day of "partying" on all state and private colleges, involving free flow of booze, experimentation with all kinds of psychedelic and mind numbing drugs, and of course sex.

The admission standards are abysmal. Pare down the student body by more than 50% of what it is now. That is where the educational reforms should really start.

More than 50% of the courses offered in the colleges are useless and they are not making students wiser or qualified to survive in the real world. In short, these public institutions (as well as a good number of for-profit private colleges) are paper mills that are churning out educated illiterates. There is no real education.

Then, cut out more than one level of administrators/management group.

Cut the funding to all public institutions by more than 50%, as a first step.

"The U.S. Department of Education reports that the average salary of a professor at Connecticut State University is $95,000." That does not seem like a lot since 169 teachers in Bridgeport made over 90K in 2009 (last year at Ctsunlight.org) 203 in Hartford and 159 in New Haven. I am sure it is more in 2011. One would think a college professor would make significantly more than a public school teacher but evidently not.

CSU HR Chief Survives Cut

It's interesting that the VP of HR at CSU manages to avoid having his job whacked, even though he was at the center of the chaos during the Carter administration. I'm sure he will land on his feet at some other cushy job within CSU or the state - and at no savings to the state budget. Is that fair?

The most interesting comment in the article is Meotti's complaint that there aren't enough Faculty to teach the courses students need.

First, people need to understand that Faculty offer the courses they want and not necessarily the courses students need and in the sequence students need them. Departments decide on course offerings and students will just have to wait.

Second, Meotti ought to take a close look at the Teaching Faculty release time reports for CSU. Huge numbers of faculty not teaching but rather doing something else. Especially at Southern. CSU Faculty are supposed, by contract, to teach 4 courses. At Southern, if only three of the courses offered by a Faculty member run, another fourth course is often NOT assigned, creating a 75% per cent load which of course Faculty love. And then of course they can do the jobs of others perhaps because they like not being in the clasroom with those pesky students.

Southern's Faculty numbers may exceed the quantity needed to offer their curriculum but then with so many reduced loads it looks as if there is a problem there. If people really want to reduce costs make the Teaching Faculty work full time. The full time they agreed in their contract to work.

This is great news. Coming from the private sector to work in the Community College system was a shock to me. It is an amalgam of incompetents who have no clue they are have out of date skills, if that. The IT department is an abomination. They came through on a listening tour to the CCs last spring to gather input on the effectiveness of the systems. They explained how they'd been to 10 CCs already and that they had had TWO retreats to discuss what they'd heard so far, and in the fall they'd be writing a white paper about their findings to continue their discussions about what the future needs are for IT. They'd been touring the state and going on retreats and had accomplished nothing. How much money did this cost? How many lost work hours servicing real IT needs? GOOD RIDDANCE. Can't say I'm sorry to see them go. Now, clean up the individual CC's IT departments. Just as inept and just as overpaid. Keep up the good work Mark Meotti.

Etodd: You can view salaries of any state employee, including Meotti's and Feroe's, here: http://www.transparency.ct.gov/html/searchPayroll.asp

Red69Viper: It was not the Mirror's decision to keep the names private, they were not released to us. The information we were able to get were the titles of the positions eliminated and their salaries.

Jacqueline Rabe Thomas

Cymbal, I'm sorry to say but using a blanket statement calling all of the CCs It Department members inept is inaccurate and irresponsible. The average pay for CC IT personnel is actually less than the private sector equivalent. To top it off, having no resources, no training and faculty expecting every piece of new technology to be expertly implemented by yesterday, makes it all the more fun and frustrating.

With that all said, does that mean that every IT department member pulls their weight, of course not. This kind of waste though is evident at every level and frankly the higher levels in the CC system need to be looked at first. This means presidents, deans and directors(non-union), that is where the bulk of the fat is in the CC system.

Now, if you still disagree, I would highly suggest working in IT and dealing with faculty for a few months and then see what your point of view is.

Identify and phase out the unnecessary welfare and entitlement programs as well as cut out all taxes by 20% right now, and 10% every year thereafter, so that no one asks for hand outs any more. No more entitlements, no more welfare programs, and no more free lunches, because we should not let parasites to thrive and suck the blood and vitality of this great nation. Every family, village or county should take care of its own.

Mansfield1, I totally agree with you about Southern. Believe me, I have seen the most incompetent and inept people at Southern. Some have been their way too long and some don't even care about students success or achievement. Some have their own cliques that feed on to the students their as well. Even their are some faculty that should not be their in the first place. Also, Diversity at Southern is a JOKE as well. Their are some at Southern that treat the place as if they own it. I also know one faculty who also double dips as a Resident Hall Director. on top of that, Southern has made the incoming freshman, into super seniors because they keep tacking on so may requirements to Graduate from Southern that No one at Southern Graduates on time. I have even seen from Southern a general lacking in caring for the students and at Southern, it's all about Status symbols and who you know. One thing they really need to do is clean house and get rid of all the deadweights and incompetent people at the CSU and community college system.

JRabe, to be able to show the entire education continuum of becoming leaner, would you be so kind as to ask Pk-12 Dept of Ed about its slicing out a layer of highly paid managers and the position by position title and savings?

To the other bloggers - whether the lists are given with or without names by the agencies, it is best to leave the names out of these published lists. We can accomplish informing the public about the state's strategic moves without dragging already beaten down individuals' names and families into it unnecessarily.

I agree completely with Mistyriver. Mr. Meotti is a politician and an insurance company lobbyist who happens to be connected to the party currently in power. He has no experience on any college or university campus, has no experience as an educator or educational administrator or faculty member. His work at the Department of Higher Education -- the remains of which are now being "managed" by his old friend and political crony -- resulted in him keeping those who were his "friends" and getting rid of those who were not. None of us on the campuses believed that was evidence of any sort of praiseworthy management skill. We watched with amusement how that Department became little more than a silly bureaucratic shell. Now we are all under his "management" on the CSU and Community College campuses. Perhaps he will continue to use his "Hoshin" game to determine the future of our work as well? If I were Robert Kennedy, I'd watch out.

To Quncy, while no managers have been laid off (yet) a layer of managers were sent a letter indicating the layer will cease to exist. So yes, no one is yet laid off, it is a position reduction and a type of layoff to be in effect sometime in the coming months. It is unclear whether or not the letter indicated if they would be absorbed elsewhere in the organization (likely at a lower pay scale). Meanwhile, it would be an enhancement to this article on higher ed to know how the K-12 department is addressing bloated managerial levels. Hopefully they will comply with a simple request rather than forcing an FOI.

gdrobiak, it is hard to say which college will be awarded the new MTC since none have the industry partnerships that a little college close to Ma. has. It will take many years to establish the connections with the industry. I wonder which college is capable of doing that? Although it is a great idea, it will take a long time to developed.

I am always amazed when so many people members get involved in commenting about a subject about which they have no knowledge. Realkook, your name is very fitting because your idea of everyone carrying their own weight sounds great but is not possible for the low income students at state institutions. Your comment sounds very bigoted and stupid. As I looked at the titles of those given pink slips, it included retirees and Mike Meotti only gave the Mirror the names of mangement , what about the middle management that he brought over from the higher education. How much are they paid? If you want to talk incompetence I can name a few of Meotti stooges that he kept from his Higher Ed staff.Chancellor Kennedy, the Governor and hi spolitical friend Mike Meotti have missed a great opportunity to maximize savings in this merger. The truth is none of these leaders have any expertise amd I hate to say, knowledge in such mergers but by failing to centralize the operations, they have left millions annually on the table. Not to add a more efficent operation. The 12 CCC and 5 university sites still have vice presidents of every function ( Finance, IT, Purchasing, Academic Affairs, Administration, Bursars, Admissions, IR ETC) at every location with a top level hierarchy. So you dismantled the system offices which are minute to the campuses.Everyone talks about private industry and public, I have vast experience in both places and private industry would have centralized these operations. By the way, private industry has their share of imcompetents as well as public.Ignorance does not discriminate.This shows me Governor that you have put a boy, in business acumen and experience,(Meotti) to do a man's job. The loser, until this governor gets voted out in a few years, will be the students and taxpayers of this State. If this administration did not know how to effectively process the merger, they should have left it alone. As far as the faculty is concerned, the unrestricted fund balances shown in the CSU and CCC financials should have been used to hire full time faculty.Meanwhile, UCONN is hiring every day without restriction because Gannon is the Governor's friend. By the way, this is the most political administation in the state's history. Many of the heads of critical departments (i.e. Dept of Rev)are politicians with no training or expertise in the areas of their appointments. What a mess!!!!! By the way, Luke22, the VP of HR is not who you think, he is our Deputy Governor'd buddy from Comptrollers who was at the University of Maine.

The one thing the merger should have done is standardized all college classes between the CT state universities and the community colleges. That means a 4 credit Anatomy and physiology class at a community college is the same with every state university, instead of having mixed credit systems. Such as community colleges and most CT state universities award 4 college credits for Anatomy and Physiology. As oppose to Southern, where they only award 3 credits for Anatomy and physiology class. They should standardized all the college classes so that transfer between two systems is seamingless and simplified with no guess work as to what classes can transfer and what doesn't. They should make all the GPA's that you have earned at the community colleges transfer with you to any State University. The GPA's should at least follow you from community college to the CSU system as well. They need to hammer out the transfer agreements and make the classes standardized and the same between the two systems.