As I was perusing the Internet a few weeks ago, I ran across an article discussing public and private higher education salaries. Since I'm always the compiler of random facts, I decided to pay the lousy $6.95 to The Chronicles of Higher Education so as to acquire a random fact concerning university president salaries. With the ever- increasing cost of tuition, a look at how much the individuals running the top educational institutions in the U.S. make was well worth my money. I decided to apply my superhuman statistical knowledge to crunch some numbers (for those interested in replicating my research, I used high-level programs such as Excel and Windows Calculator) for calculating medians, and yes, even some trends.

Specifically, my analysis was focused on UMBC's head, Dr. Hrabowski. Since $35 of every UMBC students tuition goes straight to Dr. Hrabowski's pocket, I though this knowledge would be beneficial to the rest of the students (incidentally, this $35 figure is almost equivalent to the $39 mandatory fee for student activities). The following are reasons why I want to be UMBC's president:

1) Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III makes a combined $417,000 a year. This total includes approximately $10,000 a year towards his private vehicle, some $30,000 for his mortgage, and assorted club membership fees. Borat says: "Very niiiice."

2) The median four-year public universities presidents total compensation is $397,000 a year, so Dr. Hrabowski is not far away ($20,000 is still a lot of money to me, but only represents a 5 percent deviation) from the median. This means if you can't become UMBC's president, any other public university will do you just fine.

3) Dr. Hrabowski benefits from an average annual pay raise of 4.5 percent.

4) Dr. Hrabowksi, assuming he stays at UMBC in the coming years, will tentatively break the half-million mark during the 2010-2011 academic year.

5) Dr. Hrabowski makes more than each of Maryland's senators salary combined by over 80 g's. It will take Governor O'Malley two and a half years of work leading the state to even come close to Dr. Hrabowski's one-year salary.

6) You get the best damn parking spot and office at UMBC (although I don't envy the office when the elevators in the Administration building break).

Yup, I'd love to be Dr. Hrabowski. Then again, he's been plagued lately by a multitude of problems such as low enrollment, "red ink", and UMBC's image as a place you go to get a good degree, but waste 4/5/6 years of your social life. I guess he's fixing the enrollment issue by lowering the standards and accepting sub-par academic performers into our community just to meet quotas. But wait, are these the kind of quality decisions people who are paid over $400,000 make? Hell, if so, pay me $70,000 a year and I'll make the same quality decisions AND save the UMBC community $350,000.