Sloppywmu
While I 100% agree with you that WMU is a thriving concern, I feel that I must point out, if only for the benefit of EUROPEAN customers, that with but one exception all the students are American, or at least university students, undertaking the aviation sciences degree course. Last I heard it was oversubscribed, and rightly so. However, in terms of training for a European licence WMU has all but died the death, as has already been described.
Before anyone leaps on the hint of a frozen ATPL for $30,000, let me just point out that in America the vast majority of Americans already have somewhere to live, unlike European students who will have to pay for food and accommodation for about 13 to 14 months. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, it is generally cheaper to get from Kalamazoo to Battle Creek than from the UK.
As regards the exorbitant salaries that the expatriate instructors were earning, lets just put them into context here. While I was there, many of the FAA instructors had very few flying hours. I remember several instances whereby a person was a student on Friday and on the following Monday walked in through the doors with four gold bars on their shoulders as an instructor. Many of the junior FAA instructors measured their flying hours in three digits and often their instructional hours in just two (if any at all at the start). The JAA instructors, on the other hand, each had several thousand flying hours both total and instructional. Not only were they vastly more experienced than any FAA instructor, they were also teaching ab initio students to go from zero hours direct to the right hand seat of a commercial airliner, something that not a single FAA instructor was doing the whole time I was there, nor, I suspect, are doing now.
If you are like the majority of young FAA instructors when I was there, you are probably hours building with a view to getting an airline job as soon as possible. I do not blame you for that and I wish you every success. However, ALL the JAA instructors were career instructors and were there on a long term basis (or were until the witch hunt). As an employer, it makes little commercial or financial sense to pay what was frequently a transitory workforce the same kind of salary as a hugely more experienced and permanent group of professional instructors. (By that I am not doubting your professionalism as a pilot or instructor. It is a comparison between those who instruct permanently as a profession as opposed to those who are hours building). That is why there was such a discrepancy in the salaries. Having said that, the expatriate staff members have had their relocation expenses stopped, so they face the cost of moving back to the UK themselves (probably not less than $10000). Also those FAA licensed instructors who worked for the JAA program have had their "exorbitant" salaries cut by around 20%.