23 ms·

Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

downrightmike 9y ago
Wall of text warning.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  Good, that beats the heck out of a Youtube ELI5 or a slideshow of tweet-sized snippets. A 30-second skim suggests that the writing is of high enough quality to warrant a 10 minute read. Since it is all on one page, I can ctrl-S and read it on the bus. Buses are also good.
- dcre 9y ago
  It's this crazy thing called an "article."
- pvdebbe 9y ago
  Let's see. The paragraphs are relatively short and there are pictures alongside the text. Where is this wall of text you speak of? It's a wall when there are no linebreaks, paragraphs.
forkLding 9y ago
I have actually had an idea related to the sort of debt had to be taken by American university students for their academics. Why not use a mixture of blended learning and Coursera, where students pay not just professors but also industry folk for cutting-edge knowledge but also open up a marketplace for Youtube tutorial people to do physical workshops in their cities that can be charged and move onto a sort of Airbnb for education and workshops? I feel a lot of straight-up learning can be gained and the 3% charged per workshop will go towards scholarships. For people who think you would be paying high prices per lecture/workshop in this model, a university student has already been paying about $50 or more per lecture. Instead of basically physical/manual admin systems in individual centralized universities, you have decentralized software system managing schedules and booking workshops/lectures. Just an opinion and thought I've been having, any feedback welcome.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Coursera is maybe not a great example - they don't even vet their courses before starting to sell them, and they won't necessarily offer refunds if you want to drop a disappointing course partway through. It's full of courses with two weeks of 'intro' material which references the exciting things which will (not) be taught in future weeks, and it seems more like a diploma mill or collection of half-baked blog posts than any sort of real education. I've had overwhelmingly negative experiences with them. EdX is a quality platform, though, and MOOCs in general could fill that role.
- gmarx 9y ago
  You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests. I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top universities do a better job of this. From that perspective I think the main advantage of the sorting is that it is easier to teach if your students fall into a narrow band of ability
  - asdfjklasdfjkl 9y ago
    It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one: You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework. I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.
    - bllguo 9y ago
      very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment. I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.
reaperducer 9y ago
Whether it's a university or a government or any other bureaucracy, the money eventually flows to the top. And the top tier of employees have no incentive to remove their own livelihoods. Thinning the waste at the top is a great idea, but never gets done unless a bigger bureaucracy makes it happen.
- Overtonwindow 9y ago
  MY favorite are the exorbitant salaries paid to sports faculty, even when the sports program is loses money.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    The universities that have highly paid coaches are the ones with premier, highly successful programs and earn way more from ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and merchandise than the coach is paid. It's like any other business (and it most definitely is a business), you need to pay well to attract the best talent.
    - lutorm 9y ago
      If this article (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-madness-of-college-basketball-coaches-salaries/475146/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-ma...) is any guide, the money made by the athletic department mostly goes to the athletic department and not to funding anything else useful.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        I would agree, but dispute the claim that athletic scholarships are not "useful." Most collegiate athletes do not progress to professional careers in their sport. Their education (at least in theory) prepares them to be contributors to society after they graduate. Athletics is an "auxilliary enterprise" at most educational institutions. It's self-funding, thanks to alumni donations and a few high-revenue sports (basketball and football for most, maybe hockey in some areas) that fund scholarships in all the non-revenue sports like rowing, golf, track and field, etc. People like to gripe when the football coach makes more than the university president, but the football program funds that, scholarships for the players, and much more.
muninn_ 9y ago
We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted, perhaps the word "pointless". But certainly there are administrators on the public school payroll who's job is ensuring regulatory compliance and collecting/filing the evidence of compliance, and that function did not exist years ago. Now, whether or not that is "pointless" is a debatable. The laws were passed in the first place to cure some perceived ill. It's fair to have an ROI discussion around that.
  - grzm 9y ago
    If it is the word "pointless", I bet your parent used it as that's the phrase that's used in the submission title.
- fav_collector 9y ago
  What government regulations are relevant in this case?
  - secabeen 9y ago
    OMB Circular A-21 is a good example of a significant set of regulations on universities use of federal grant money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMB_Circular_A-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMB_Circular_A-21
mnm1 9y ago
Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution but clearly many people are making big money in this business at the expense of students. The federal loan programs certainly don't help either. Allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would also lessen this money feast for universities. Alas, no solution looks in sight so I do my part in keeping money away from these money furnaces.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Consider donating time or money to underfunded public schools or community colleges. A lot of these programs are chronically underfunded and teach those who are most likely disadvantaged in the first place.
- TrainedMonkey 9y ago
  I do agree that admin costs are too high. However I think most of the tuition growth is due to decreases in state and federal funding.
  - Finnucane 9y ago
    That's true for state schools, where subsidies have been cut almost universally.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Look at any state university org chart from 30 years ago compared to today. The difference will be striking. Yes state subsidies are down, but administrative growth has also been accelerating.
  - mnm1 9y ago
    This is a private school so I'm not sure how much that applies. I haven't been able to find any figures on this, however, so I suppose it's possible.
Overtonwindow 9y ago
Extremely unpopular opinion: Let's cut both the extra admin, and excess tenured professors. In fact, the entire tenure system should be completely upended. At my alma mater there were a lot of professors who didn't have enough students sign up for their classes, or their field of study was phased out, or reduced. Instead they sat around doing "research" and when they were forced to teach, quite a few openly expressed disdain for teaching.
- chriskanan 9y ago
  As a tenure-track professor, obviously I'm biased, but tenure doesn't mean you don't have to work. Professors still have to pull their weight around the university and department. If nobody takes their classes or they aren't bringing in research dollars, that would be a problem that would be brought up in their performance appraisals. The vast majority of tenured professors make about 1/2 to 1/4 of what their value is in industry, and at research institutions most work 60+ hours per week. On average, I work far harder now than I did as a PhD student or when I was in industry. An interesting alternative tenure are renewable five year contracts, which are used at some teaching universities and some prestigious research institutes. About a year before the contract expires, a professor at these places has to document their successes and convince the institute to renew their contract. The idea is that a professor basically would be "going up for tenure" every five years (but not receiving it, just getting their contract renewed for 5 more years). If they start getting lazy, their contracts don't need to be renewed. Going up for tenure requires putting together about 100-200 pages of documentation describing your research, pedagogy, service, etc.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    What impacts can performance appraisals have on a tenured professor? Is it possible to be fired or have your salary severely cut simply from poor performance?
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Almost never. You'll get fired if you sexually harass a student, but not for performance in the classroom.
slackstation 9y ago
The pointless admin is from services given to the students. Universities (that aren't household brand names like the Ivys) compete on services and facilities. And because most students are young and using other people's money (their parents or their future selves) they will choose schools not because they have the best deal educationally but, because they beautiful grounds, newer, swankier dorms and all of the social clubs and facilities for those like sports fields, etc. It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things. It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.
- celim307 9y ago
  Yup. College is conspicuous consumption in a lot of ways
- Applejinx 9y ago
  Yes. It's not unreasonable to cite this as an example of capitalism functioning normally. Competition produces extra money for institutions that are covering their core missions (one hopes) and also virtue signaling that they're super successful and wealthy. You could call it greed, or simple self-interest: if the administrators have correctly perceived that the insanely wealthy will only make gifts to institutions plated in gold with peacock feathers, then their personal feelings about gold and peacock feathers are irrelevant: they can seduce the wealthy, or not, and they can win the gifts, or not. Definitely worth study, and definitely an interesting study in perverse incentives. After a point, nothing is valued BUT gold and peacock feathers because they're so inextricably a part of doing business. And it's certainly not aimed at the students. It's aimed at the impossibly wealthy, who wish their gifts to be associated with institutions that are absurdly swanky for the students. What the students want doesn't have anything to do with it, it's purely for donors.
- Fej 9y ago
  I have at least one good example...at my university there is an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Sounds pointless on its face, but it's not. It helps students start businesses and obtain patents, for example.
Animats 9y ago
Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City. 35 acres. 2,700 people on site. None are students. None are faculty. No teaching or research will occur there. It's all administrators.[1] "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development", says Stanford's FAQ. ("Development" in university-speak means fund-raising, not building construction.) Now that's management bloat. Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/
- zaphos 9y ago
  The article is about UK Universities. Stanford is not broke. http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    It can still be the case that they are spending excessively on administrators. They can easily use any potential savings by adjusting the way their scholarships taper off versus income.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Apparently over the years they have reduced administration, at least in some areas. Maybe now they are just slightly less bloated. That said, some of the boat may have to do with government oversight for their research grants.
      - candiodari 9y ago
        But as engineers all of us over 25 know exactly what happens when managers "reduce" "administration". After said activity there is more administration and less of everything else.
    - 9y ago
meri_dian 9y ago
I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over-employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3 could realistically be done by 1. However it's also important to recognize that not all of the runaway growth of University bureaucracy is due to poor management or redundant workers; expansion of IT infrastructure and increased regulatory requirements - especially for public institutions - demand more labor. These are the obvious culprits, but beyond these, because the modern University has become far more than just a place of higher education and has come to resemble a miniature city, it is expected to serve the diverse non-academic needs of tens of thousands of students, in addition to more traditional academic needs. Counseling and advisory services, recreational activities, food service, engagement and diversity programs, ubiquitous computing, etc. all add to the University's bottom line. Universities fear that if they were to stamp their feet and refuse to supply these amenities in the name of keeping down tuition, matriculation rates would decline as students would seek greener pastures elsewhere. Add to this the fact that Universities receive no penalty from the market for continually increasing their prices. Because student loans are available to service ever increasing tuition costs, and students pretty much need to go to college to succeed in the 21st century, demand for college education is highly inelastic. What economic entity wouldn't raise its prices if it knew demand for its product wouldn't suffer? In a traditional market, as one supplier increases price, competitors enter the market offering lower prices. This doesn't happen in the market for higher education because the value of a University is largely tied to its prestige, and prestige cannot be easily generated by competitors. We bemoan the high cost of University education then mock the University of Phoenix and similar offerings. Market dynamics are the guilty party here.
- secabeen 9y ago
  This is a good answer. The price increase is not uniform across the academy, and much of it is signaling-based. At many state schools, the amount spent per student has actually gone down over the last 30 years: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-educational-expenses-lower-today-20-years-ago-report-finds https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-educational-e... College is more expensive for the student because state funding for students has dropped precipitously. That means an increase in tuition, but that increase pretty linearly-maps to the decrease in state funding. Now. many private schools have increased their nameplate cost. This is the signaling issue I mentioned before. When StateU tuition rises from $5k/yr to $10/yr over 5 years, the private universities use that increase to justify an increase in their nameplate cost from $25k/yr to $40k/yr, because they can. Of course, few people actually pay that. Increases in the actual amount people pay for college (other than at 4-year state funded schools, due to the changes in state funding) are much tamer than the headlines say: http://www.businessinsider.com/college-cost-changes-over-25-years-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-cost-changes-over-25-...
rfdub 9y ago
I work in post secondary administration, so I think I have some perspective here. Part of the problem, at least in the US & Canada (Where I live) is that post secondary institutions are positioning themselves less and less and places to get an education and more and more as places to go for an "experience." Its no longer enough to provide a quality education, universities now are selling themselves on their facilities, their "student life" and all the other intangibles that are secondary to actual education. This leads to all the administrative bloat we're seeing as now that many schools are functioning more like glorified 4 years spas they have to have departments filled with staff to plan events, throw parties, Snapchat sports games, provide "save spaces," etc. I haven't been in the sector long enough to have a real handle on when or why this shift happened, but from my perspective its the primary driver of the increasing administrative bloat. Schools are competing more on the intangibles, and so they need to invest more into these areas, which means more staff and more overhead. Personally I think the whole university model isn't long for this world though as there are plenty of ways competency can be signaled apart from a fancy foil-stamped piece of paper and eventually when the costs of university education don't provide a positive return over any reasonable time horizon students are going to start looking for alternatives en masse and the market will innovate to meet that demand.
- 2017Dude 9y ago
  Not sure about student party life experience given the recent rise of "no-fault" false rape allegations. Cannot be as careless anymore.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    There is a huge new "student ethics" bureaucracy to handle that stuff that never used to exist. In the past, if you got drunk and did something you later regretted, that was your problem, as it is for any adult in the real world.
    - epaulson 9y ago
      That's not true at all. Universities used to be much more involved in student life. Read up on 'In Loco Parentis' in higher education.
bluetwo 9y ago
As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of: (Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) ) And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.
- jimbokun 9y ago
  Now that's a business model screaming for disruption.
  - analog31 9y ago
    Ironically, adjuncts are a disruption of a previous business model.
  - fooker 9y ago
    http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Start/235121 http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Sta...
  - cousin_it 9y ago
    When people talk about "disruption of education", they usually mean either online courses or boot camps. I think that's unfortunate. There are huge benefits to learning stuff the traditional way, by taking a class in person, on a schedule, with a curriculum and a teacher and an exam at the end. There are also huge benefits to hanging out with working scientists and picking up their enthusiasm. These are the important things about attending a university, and they aren't even that difficult or expensive to set up! Can we get that kind of "disruption", please?
    - gravypod 9y ago
      The only benefit I see is the piece of paper I'm going to get from the university at the end of my wild ride.
- justadeveloper2 9y ago
lspears 9y ago
Just use Udacity or Coursera
santaclaus 9y ago
Is this true in the US, in general? My alma mater has a circa 9 billion dollar endowment... yet it still sends me sob story letters soliciting donations.
- tapatio 9y ago
  Mine too. They should be issuing us dividend checks, not asking for donations!
c517402 9y ago
Administrative bloat isn't just a problem at the University level, but across all levels of education in the US.
- igravious 9y ago
  The article is about British universities.
pragmar 9y ago
Probably the best deep dive I've read on the cost of higher ed was published a few years ago by Robert Hiltonsmith. This addresses US universities and colleges as opposed to UK, so the issues may not be one to one and the data is a little dated (published in 2015). Still, a worthwhile read. http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-myth-and-reality-crisis-college-affordability http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-my...
dmix 9y ago
Obligatory: > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. > Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. > The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm
- astrange 9y ago
  Why do SF writers like putting their names on what's basically an office coffee mug joke?
  - evanb 9y ago
    I doubt Pournelle named it that himself. But it gets awkward to discuss something when somebody else has named it after you---I spent an hour as an undergraduate watching Shor simply call it "the factoring algorithm", trying to avoid the word "I".
    - aidenn0 9y ago
      Even Richard Hamming, who was famous for having said that greatness is having your name spelled in thelower-case, didn't name hamming distance; that was someone else at AT&T (Shannon, IIRC).
- analog31 9y ago
  All I remember of Jerry Pournelle was his monthly piece in Byte Magazine, describing his adventures with a computer that never seemed to completely work.
mrslave 9y ago
In addition to this article, from the vlog "Plunging Enrollment at Mizzou" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc>: They can't pay all of the administrators that they need. need Also consider that the bennies at de facto government jobs are also higher than market rates (e.g. contribution to retirement schemes, insane types of paid leave) and it's funded with your taxes or government debt (future taxes). The FA also addresses the politicization of college education which wasn't my point but interesting nonetheless.
cperciva 9y ago
About five years ago, the president of my university proudly announced at a Senate meeting that they had appointed a new Director of Sustainability, to help ensure that the university's operations were sustainable. I asked if, in light of the increasing administration headcount, they thought appointing a Director of Sustainability was financially sustainable. They clearly didn't get the message; while that particular Director has moved on to other things, there is now an Office of Sustainability with about a dozen people.
scythe 9y ago
How? I've been hearing variations of "universities have too much administration" for at least a decade. I still haven't heard any solutions that aren't ridiculously expensive or already being implemented (and failing). Except, of course, for the solutions like "make it impossible for most of the people who currently attend college to go to college" which are approximately as politically viable as making French fries illegal and which furthermore do not really seem to have any mechanism to fix administrative costs other than "market voodoo". One thing that tends to come up repeatedly when these discussions do reach a modicum of depth is the persistent gaming of the university rankings system. Universities game the ranking system by e.g. encouraging students to apply who are not likely to get in so that they will appear to be more exclusive. It would be nice to improve university rankings so they can't be so easily gamed, but will this actually make a significant difference? I'm not convinced yet that rankings actually have that large of an influence on university policy, in the first place. The need for universities to police student behavior is another unfortunate situation. It's my understanding that federal cost-cutting is basically behind the moves on the government's part to implement policy by way of schools' enforcement of student misconduct. An honest politician should be able to fix this by allocating money for the government to do what it should have been doing in the first place, but increasing spending is very hard these days...
dmix 9y ago
In an administrative heavy organization every problem seems to be answered with "how can we add more administrative layers, processes, and backroom deals to satisfy x group (management, media, special interest groups, voters, etc) that something appears to be being done?" rather than asking "looking at all available options what is the best way to resolve this problem (inside and out of government)?". Basically a "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" type of thing. This is the difference between group A (admins) and group B (engineers, teachers, etc) in Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. The former is often presented as a clever talented group of smart people who savvily work the system in TV shows like House of Cards but I question the utility it really offers the world when the ROI is so often questionable. I'm curious how much of this modern dysfunction in modern governments (not just in the US) is due to the fact politicians are now almost entirely career politicians who spend their formative years in this insular world. The majority coming from the same private schools and 90% of them with law degrees. Rather than in the past, such as the founding fathers, who were businessmen, writers, and intellectuals first embedded in the real world who then went into public service. The same analogy applies to Universities with administrators being raised within the system rather than the teaching staff intimately familiar with the front-line realities of the organization. [1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm
- corpMaverick 9y ago
  This is what happens to software development within large corporations. Developers are being managed by a bureaucracy that doesn't have a clue about software development.
norswap 9y ago
It seems increasingly likely to me that the whole academic model is on the verge of existential crisis, and headed towards profound transformations. I'm curious to see where this leads. Hopefully someplace better than before. (I shoul mention I'm a PhD student)
randyrand 9y ago
The admin is not useless. It's tasked with gobbling up as much cash for the endowment as possible.
4bpp 9y ago
People are happy to claim they want to downsize university administrations when the appeal is voiced like this, but another kind of editorial that pops up just as frequently in the opinion press later, they will be just as enthusiastically demanding more counseling for students in emotional quandaries, more university-mediated internship opportunities, more officials providing sexual assault prevention training, more recourse to resolve student-advisor disputes in a way that shifts the power balance towards the student, more varied dining options and a plethora of other goodies that can mostly only be realised with more and/or more powerful admin staff.
taksintikk 9y ago
Maybe they can start by getting getting rid of the NCAA (private corporation) siphoning billions from colleges and universities.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  The article is about British universities.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Kind of unrelated, but I am extremely disappointed in how much 'giving back to local communities' has been abandoned by modern universities, in favor of their massive administrative payrolls. What used to be a core tenant of thought, is now a dollar figure. If you live in the state, you get a discount. End of story, obligations fulfilled, full stop. But it's not a commitment or a central belief. No university will open its facilities to community members. No stage will be available for public performances, no instruments or machines will be made available for inquiring minds, no local organizations will spend more than a few hours on campus for a field trip. Providing those things would cost money, sure enough. But they used to be part of a university's mission. Some of the older ones still enshrine the ideal in their mottos. That should mean something. It doesn't.
- sackofmugs 9y ago
  Do you have evidence of this? I'm just curious because I see all sorts of university events open to the public. Both in public and private universities. There's musical performances, special events (like physics students hosting solar eclipse day and providing hundreds of glasses to the public), theater performances, sporting events (for a low cost), donations to local charities and events, etc.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    Just anecdotal evidence - I guess I see what you're describing as part of the student experience. Other people are allowed in, which is nice, but those things are done for the students' benefit. I mean that no university I've dealt with in any capacity, (which, okay, is only about a half-dozen,) has shown even the slightest interest in educating their local communities. That 'commitment' begins and ends with a discount given to a handful of people.
tqi 9y ago
"For instance, before introducing a new procedure they would need to eliminate an old one." If someone wrote a tech article suggesting that companies should require removal of a line of code for every new line introduced, do you think that article would make it to front page of HN?
- savanaly 9y ago
  For the analogy you're drawing to really hold, we have to picture a computer where the bytes get a lot of work done on their own and our code merely exists to slow down and redirect their efforts (in other words, a negative and a possible positive). If you were concerned with the fast, efficient operation of the computer then you might indeed want a rule like "one in, one out" for lines of code.
  - RugnirViking 9y ago
    When space was limited in game cartridges in the past I can imagine such a rule actually existing in a real buisness setting. One line of code in, one line of code out. That would lead to some really weird software, and it would take longer, but it would probably improve the software in some metrics like performance
exabrial 9y ago
I agree. We could start by dropping Politcal Correctness, safe spaces, etc and embrace Free speech, with the assumption that truth will always win in the long term (ex: heliocentrism). This means the painful process of letting the opposition speak, which is lost on the current generation.
SoMisanthrope 9y ago
Cut the ease of lending via U.S. Student Loans. There's a clear and direct correlation between "easy money" and the bloated cost of a baccalaureate degree. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/09/08/student_loans_drive_up_college_costs_what_should_we_do_about_it.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/09/08/student_loans...
Fej 9y ago
The university I go to is now run more like a business, with top-down leadership. Questioning the higher-ups is apparently grounds for firing. The disgust with the administration has gotten to the point that few recent graduates plan to donate, ever. Tuition is so high that it feels like they already got all the money they deserve.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
This article is purportedly about UK universities, but half of the evidence quoted is from studies of _US_ universities. So no matter how strong the evidence, it's irrelevant. The second half of the article is prescriptive but short on details. What does it mean to require "people to fully carry out their own fanciful ideas"? Does it mean that someone who decides the trash should be collected every other day rather than every day, should actually collect the trash? Like many people, I'm attracted by headlines which align with my own biases. But my level of bias here is unchanged after reading the article!
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
The problem in the UK is there is no significant competitive pressure. What would help is separating the teaching from grading, just as it is in schools. Right now an employer has to consider a degree from Oxford Brookes in a completely different light to one from Oxford University. If they knew the students were graded in exactly the same way then it could really shake the system up.
- IanCal 9y ago
  I'm not a fan of that, it's adds huge drag to any change. Want to add a module on deep learning that you also want to test? Now it needs to be added by a country-wide exam board. Want to add something on cognitive neuroscience to the standard "AI" degree? Only if everyone can teach it. Given how regularly things are messed up by the boards on simple GSCE level questions covering far fewer subjects, I'd not like to have that applied across everyone.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I'd be interested to know how much variation there really is, when visiting universities with my children the options looked remarkably similar. There might be some drag on creating new courses but there could be huge savings as well. One thing I'm sure is the academic community wouldn't like it, it would need to be forced on them.
forsakenkraken 9y ago
As one of the 'pointless' admin staff at a British Russell group university, the article seems to be overly hammering home the authors point which has to be partly to do with the book 'Bullshit Business' that he's trying to sell. I don't deny that there are issues in the university system here in the 'United' Kingdom, but I feel he's overhyping issues to get clicks and sell his book. As several previous commenters have noted, we have a some what dysfunctional market, where most universities charge the same fees. For students you're still picking based on courses and reputation. You can't really pick a cheaper 'no-frills' university. This marketisation has leeched into the central university services, where we're turning everything into a product to sell. Not much of a market when academics have to use us. We are very cheap, it's not like we've got to make money. Obviously if you got rid of that, you'd be able to remove some staff. You'd still need quite a few to meet the legislative demands which are required of universities these days. There are definitely some truths in the article. Not everyone needs to go to university. Certainly there are some students who are getting massive amounts of debt for very little gain. Universities do chase various league tables and other such measures (some imposed centrally) which does require lots of data gathering. Large amounts of data require staff to deal with that data. Students do really like shiny new buildings, so universities go on building sprees. Again a poor NSS (national student survey) can potentially reduce students and thus income. But to be fair, you'd want things to be nice when you're paying £9k per year for your fees alone. REF and TEF aren't well liked by academics, so I'm quite sure a lot of them would be happy if they were dropped. It's unsurprising that the article is penned by an academic and one of his main suggestions is the dropping of REF. The USS pension scheme deficit is probably misleading. If you want some detailed reading around that, then Mike Otsuka's articles are good - https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka
deleted 9y ago
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perseus323 9y ago
I worked at my university after graduation for 2 months (as an employee; well funded project). A project that should have had no more than 4 developers had 3x that many. Tool 2.5x as long to finish (I left in the middle). Crippling, dysfunctional politics, lunch meetings with stake holders, useless field trips. I think everyone involved knew what was going on and didn't care.
PeachPlum 9y ago
My University, Huddersfield, isn't broke and is debt free to boot. > In addition to the Creative Arts Building which opened in 2008, a new £17 million Business School opened in 2010, followed by the £3 million Buckley Innovation Centre in 2012, the £22.5 million Student Central building in 2014, and the £27.5 million Oastler Building for Law and the School of Music, Humanities and Media, in 2017. £5.5 million invested in University Campus Barnsley. > The University now attracts students from more than 130 countries. With an annual turnover of approximately £150m each year, it estimates it is worth £300m annually to the local economy. And yet there is rabble rousing concerning the Vice Chancellor's £337,000 salary http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/university-huddersfield-vice-chancellor-sees-10775384 http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/universit...
auggierose 9y ago
> In some courses, like business administration, students’ capacity to think got worse for the first few years. That's what I suspected for quite some time now :D
ana_1337 9y ago
What part of this is due to over-regulation and grant requirements? Seems huge.
deleted 9y ago
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DimeFoolish 9y ago
The tenure system allows strange, awkward, and awful people to hold lifetime jobs. This is one of the most stupid concepts ever devised by "smart people." Further, get rid of "easy money" visa vie the U.S. Federal Student Loan program. If you're stupid, you don't belong in a higher education setting. Boom. Problem solved. And yes, you PhD morons, I'm talking about you.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Wall of text warning.

devrandomguy 9y ago
Good, that beats the heck out of a Youtube ELI5 or a slideshow of tweet-sized snippets. A 30-second skim suggests that the writing is of high enough quality to warrant a 10 minute read. Since it is all on one page, I can ctrl-S and read it on the bus. Buses are also good.
dcre 9y ago
It's this crazy thing called an "article."
pvdebbe 9y ago
Let's see. The paragraphs are relatively short and there are pictures alongside the text. Where is this wall of text you speak of? It's a wall when there are no linebreaks, paragraphs.

I have actually had an idea related to the sort of debt had to be taken by American university students for their academics. Why not use a mixture of blended learning and Coursera, where students pay not just professors but also industry folk for cutting-edge knowledge but also open up a marketplace for Youtube tutorial people to do physical workshops in their cities that can be charged and move onto a sort of Airbnb for education and workshops? I feel a lot of straight-up learning can be gained and the 3% charged per workshop will go towards scholarships. For people who think you would be paying high prices per lecture/workshop in this model, a university student has already been paying about $50 or more per lecture. Instead of basically physical/manual admin systems in individual centralized universities, you have decentralized software system managing schedules and booking workshops/lectures. Just an opinion and thought I've been having, any feedback welcome.

leggomylibro 9y ago
Coursera is maybe not a great example - they don't even vet their courses before starting to sell them, and they won't necessarily offer refunds if you want to drop a disappointing course partway through. It's full of courses with two weeks of 'intro' material which references the exciting things which will (not) be taught in future weeks, and it seems more like a diploma mill or collection of half-baked blog posts than any sort of real education. I've had overwhelmingly negative experiences with them. EdX is a quality platform, though, and MOOCs in general could fill that role.
gmarx 9y ago
You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests. I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top universities do a better job of this. From that perspective I think the main advantage of the sorting is that it is easier to teach if your students fall into a narrow band of ability
- asdfjklasdfjkl 9y ago
  It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one: You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework. I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment. I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.

reaperducer 9y ago

Whether it's a university or a government or any other bureaucracy, the money eventually flows to the top. And the top tier of employees have no incentive to remove their own livelihoods. Thinning the waste at the top is a great idea, but never gets done unless a bigger bureaucracy makes it happen.

Overtonwindow 9y ago
MY favorite are the exorbitant salaries paid to sports faculty, even when the sports program is loses money.
- ams6110 9y ago
  The universities that have highly paid coaches are the ones with premier, highly successful programs and earn way more from ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and merchandise than the coach is paid. It's like any other business (and it most definitely is a business), you need to pay well to attract the best talent.
  - lutorm 9y ago
    If this article (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-madness-of-college-basketball-coaches-salaries/475146/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/the-ma...) is any guide, the money made by the athletic department mostly goes to the athletic department and not to funding anything else useful.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      I would agree, but dispute the claim that athletic scholarships are not "useful." Most collegiate athletes do not progress to professional careers in their sport. Their education (at least in theory) prepares them to be contributors to society after they graduate. Athletics is an "auxilliary enterprise" at most educational institutions. It's self-funding, thanks to alumni donations and a few high-revenue sports (basketball and football for most, maybe hockey in some areas) that fund scholarships in all the non-revenue sports like rowing, golf, track and field, etc. People like to gripe when the football coach makes more than the university president, but the football program funds that, scholarships for the players, and much more.

muninn_ 9y ago

We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.

dbcurtis 9y ago
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, perhaps the word "pointless". But certainly there are administrators on the public school payroll who's job is ensuring regulatory compliance and collecting/filing the evidence of compliance, and that function did not exist years ago. Now, whether or not that is "pointless" is a debatable. The laws were passed in the first place to cure some perceived ill. It's fair to have an ROI discussion around that.
- grzm 9y ago
  If it is the word "pointless", I bet your parent used it as that's the phrase that's used in the submission title.
fav_collector 9y ago
What government regulations are relevant in this case?
- secabeen 9y ago
  OMB Circular A-21 is a good example of a significant set of regulations on universities use of federal grant money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMB_Circular_A-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMB_Circular_A-21

mnm1 9y ago

Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution but clearly many people are making big money in this business at the expense of students. The federal loan programs certainly don't help either. Allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would also lessen this money feast for universities. Alas, no solution looks in sight so I do my part in keeping money away from these money furnaces.

muninn_ 9y ago
Consider donating time or money to underfunded public schools or community colleges. A lot of these programs are chronically underfunded and teach those who are most likely disadvantaged in the first place.
TrainedMonkey 9y ago
I do agree that admin costs are too high. However I think most of the tuition growth is due to decreases in state and federal funding.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  That's true for state schools, where subsidies have been cut almost universally.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Look at any state university org chart from 30 years ago compared to today. The difference will be striking. Yes state subsidies are down, but administrative growth has also been accelerating.
- mnm1 9y ago
  This is a private school so I'm not sure how much that applies. I haven't been able to find any figures on this, however, so I suppose it's possible.

Overtonwindow 9y ago

Extremely unpopular opinion: Let's cut both the extra admin, and excess tenured professors. In fact, the entire tenure system should be completely upended. At my alma mater there were a lot of professors who didn't have enough students sign up for their classes, or their field of study was phased out, or reduced. Instead they sat around doing "research" and when they were forced to teach, quite a few openly expressed disdain for teaching.

chriskanan 9y ago
As a tenure-track professor, obviously I'm biased, but tenure doesn't mean you don't have to work. Professors still have to pull their weight around the university and department. If nobody takes their classes or they aren't bringing in research dollars, that would be a problem that would be brought up in their performance appraisals. The vast majority of tenured professors make about 1/2 to 1/4 of what their value is in industry, and at research institutions most work 60+ hours per week. On average, I work far harder now than I did as a PhD student or when I was in industry. An interesting alternative tenure are renewable five year contracts, which are used at some teaching universities and some prestigious research institutes. About a year before the contract expires, a professor at these places has to document their successes and convince the institute to renew their contract. The idea is that a professor basically would be "going up for tenure" every five years (but not receiving it, just getting their contract renewed for 5 more years). If they start getting lazy, their contracts don't need to be renewed. Going up for tenure requires putting together about 100-200 pages of documentation describing your research, pedagogy, service, etc.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  What impacts can performance appraisals have on a tenured professor? Is it possible to be fired or have your salary severely cut simply from poor performance?
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Almost never. You'll get fired if you sexually harass a student, but not for performance in the classroom.

slackstation 9y ago

The pointless admin is from services given to the students. Universities (that aren't household brand names like the Ivys) compete on services and facilities. And because most students are young and using other people's money (their parents or their future selves) they will choose schools not because they have the best deal educationally but, because they beautiful grounds, newer, swankier dorms and all of the social clubs and facilities for those like sports fields, etc. It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things. It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.

celim307 9y ago
Yup. College is conspicuous consumption in a lot of ways
Applejinx 9y ago
Yes. It's not unreasonable to cite this as an example of capitalism functioning normally. Competition produces extra money for institutions that are covering their core missions (one hopes) and also virtue signaling that they're super successful and wealthy. You could call it greed, or simple self-interest: if the administrators have correctly perceived that the insanely wealthy will only make gifts to institutions plated in gold with peacock feathers, then their personal feelings about gold and peacock feathers are irrelevant: they can seduce the wealthy, or not, and they can win the gifts, or not. Definitely worth study, and definitely an interesting study in perverse incentives. After a point, nothing is valued BUT gold and peacock feathers because they're so inextricably a part of doing business. And it's certainly not aimed at the students. It's aimed at the impossibly wealthy, who wish their gifts to be associated with institutions that are absurdly swanky for the students. What the students want doesn't have anything to do with it, it's purely for donors.
Fej 9y ago
I have at least one good example...at my university there is an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Sounds pointless on its face, but it's not. It helps students start businesses and obtain patents, for example.

Animats 9y ago

Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City. 35 acres. 2,700 people on site. None are students. None are faculty. No teaching or research will occur there. It's all administrators.[1] "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development", says Stanford's FAQ. ("Development" in university-speak means fund-raising, not building construction.) Now that's management bloat. Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

zaphos 9y ago
The article is about UK Universities. Stanford is not broke. http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances
- maxerickson 9y ago
  It can still be the case that they are spending excessively on administrators. They can easily use any potential savings by adjusting the way their scholarships taper off versus income.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Apparently over the years they have reduced administration, at least in some areas. Maybe now they are just slightly less bloated. That said, some of the boat may have to do with government oversight for their research grants.
    - candiodari 9y ago
      But as engineers all of us over 25 know exactly what happens when managers "reduce" "administration". After said activity there is more administration and less of everything else.
  - 9y ago

meri_dian 9y ago

I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over-employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3 could realistically be done by 1. However it's also important to recognize that not all of the runaway growth of University bureaucracy is due to poor management or redundant workers; expansion of IT infrastructure and increased regulatory requirements - especially for public institutions - demand more labor. These are the obvious culprits, but beyond these, because the modern University has become far more than just a place of higher education and has come to resemble a miniature city, it is expected to serve the diverse non-academic needs of tens of thousands of students, in addition to more traditional academic needs. Counseling and advisory services, recreational activities, food service, engagement and diversity programs, ubiquitous computing, etc. all add to the University's bottom line. Universities fear that if they were to stamp their feet and refuse to supply these amenities in the name of keeping down tuition, matriculation rates would decline as students would seek greener pastures elsewhere. Add to this the fact that Universities receive no penalty from the market for continually increasing their prices. Because student loans are available to service ever increasing tuition costs, and students pretty much need to go to college to succeed in the 21st century, demand for college education is highly inelastic. What economic entity wouldn't raise its prices if it knew demand for its product wouldn't suffer? In a traditional market, as one supplier increases price, competitors enter the market offering lower prices. This doesn't happen in the market for higher education because the value of a University is largely tied to its prestige, and prestige cannot be easily generated by competitors. We bemoan the high cost of University education then mock the University of Phoenix and similar offerings. Market dynamics are the guilty party here.

secabeen 9y ago
This is a good answer. The price increase is not uniform across the academy, and much of it is signaling-based. At many state schools, the amount spent per student has actually gone down over the last 30 years: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-educational-expenses-lower-today-20-years-ago-report-finds https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-educational-e... College is more expensive for the student because state funding for students has dropped precipitously. That means an increase in tuition, but that increase pretty linearly-maps to the decrease in state funding. Now. many private schools have increased their nameplate cost. This is the signaling issue I mentioned before. When StateU tuition rises from $5k/yr to $10/yr over 5 years, the private universities use that increase to justify an increase in their nameplate cost from $25k/yr to $40k/yr, because they can. Of course, few people actually pay that. Increases in the actual amount people pay for college (other than at 4-year state funded schools, due to the changes in state funding) are much tamer than the headlines say: http://www.businessinsider.com/college-cost-changes-over-25-years-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/college-cost-changes-over-25-...

rfdub 9y ago

I work in post secondary administration, so I think I have some perspective here. Part of the problem, at least in the US & Canada (Where I live) is that post secondary institutions are positioning themselves less and less and places to get an education and more and more as places to go for an "experience." Its no longer enough to provide a quality education, universities now are selling themselves on their facilities, their "student life" and all the other intangibles that are secondary to actual education. This leads to all the administrative bloat we're seeing as now that many schools are functioning more like glorified 4 years spas they have to have departments filled with staff to plan events, throw parties, Snapchat sports games, provide "save spaces," etc. I haven't been in the sector long enough to have a real handle on when or why this shift happened, but from my perspective its the primary driver of the increasing administrative bloat. Schools are competing more on the intangibles, and so they need to invest more into these areas, which means more staff and more overhead. Personally I think the whole university model isn't long for this world though as there are plenty of ways competency can be signaled apart from a fancy foil-stamped piece of paper and eventually when the costs of university education don't provide a positive return over any reasonable time horizon students are going to start looking for alternatives en masse and the market will innovate to meet that demand.

2017Dude 9y ago
Not sure about student party life experience given the recent rise of "no-fault" false rape allegations. Cannot be as careless anymore.
- ams6110 9y ago
  There is a huge new "student ethics" bureaucracy to handle that stuff that never used to exist. In the past, if you got drunk and did something you later regretted, that was your problem, as it is for any adult in the real world.
  - epaulson 9y ago
    That's not true at all. Universities used to be much more involved in student life. Read up on 'In Loco Parentis' in higher education.

bluetwo 9y ago

As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of: (Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) ) And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.

jimbokun 9y ago
Now that's a business model screaming for disruption.
- analog31 9y ago
  Ironically, adjuncts are a disruption of a previous business model.
- fooker 9y ago
  http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Start/235121 http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Sta...
- cousin_it 9y ago
  When people talk about "disruption of education", they usually mean either online courses or boot camps. I think that's unfortunate. There are huge benefits to learning stuff the traditional way, by taking a class in person, on a schedule, with a curriculum and a teacher and an exam at the end. There are also huge benefits to hanging out with working scientists and picking up their enthusiasm. These are the important things about attending a university, and they aren't even that difficult or expensive to set up! Can we get that kind of "disruption", please?
  - gravypod 9y ago
    The only benefit I see is the piece of paper I'm going to get from the university at the end of my wild ride.
justadeveloper2 9y ago

lspears 9y ago

Just use Udacity or Coursera

santaclaus 9y ago

Is this true in the US, in general? My alma mater has a circa 9 billion dollar endowment... yet it still sends me sob story letters soliciting donations.

tapatio 9y ago
Mine too. They should be issuing us dividend checks, not asking for donations!

c517402 9y ago

Administrative bloat isn't just a problem at the University level, but across all levels of education in the US.

igravious 9y ago
The article is about British universities.

pragmar 9y ago

Probably the best deep dive I've read on the cost of higher ed was published a few years ago by Robert Hiltonsmith. This addresses US universities and colleges as opposed to UK, so the issues may not be one to one and the data is a little dated (published in 2015). Still, a worthwhile read. http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-myth-and-reality-crisis-college-affordability http://www.demos.org/publication/pulling-higher-ed-ladder-my...

dmix 9y ago

Obligatory: > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. > Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. > The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm

astrange 9y ago
Why do SF writers like putting their names on what's basically an office coffee mug joke?
- evanb 9y ago
  I doubt Pournelle named it that himself. But it gets awkward to discuss something when somebody else has named it after you---I spent an hour as an undergraduate watching Shor simply call it "the factoring algorithm", trying to avoid the word "I".
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    Even Richard Hamming, who was famous for having said that greatness is having your name spelled in thelower-case, didn't name hamming distance; that was someone else at AT&T (Shannon, IIRC).
analog31 9y ago
All I remember of Jerry Pournelle was his monthly piece in Byte Magazine, describing his adventures with a computer that never seemed to completely work.

mrslave 9y ago

In addition to this article, from the vlog "Plunging Enrollment at Mizzou" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7CHd-w02lc>: They can't pay all of the administrators that they need. need Also consider that the bennies at de facto government jobs are also higher than market rates (e.g. contribution to retirement schemes, insane types of paid leave) and it's funded with your taxes or government debt (future taxes). The FA also addresses the politicization of college education which wasn't my point but interesting nonetheless.

cperciva 9y ago

About five years ago, the president of my university proudly announced at a Senate meeting that they had appointed a new Director of Sustainability, to help ensure that the university's operations were sustainable. I asked if, in light of the increasing administration headcount, they thought appointing a Director of Sustainability was financially sustainable. They clearly didn't get the message; while that particular Director has moved on to other things, there is now an Office of Sustainability with about a dozen people.

scythe 9y ago

How? I've been hearing variations of "universities have too much administration" for at least a decade. I still haven't heard any solutions that aren't ridiculously expensive or already being implemented (and failing). Except, of course, for the solutions like "make it impossible for most of the people who currently attend college to go to college" which are approximately as politically viable as making French fries illegal and which furthermore do not really seem to have any mechanism to fix administrative costs other than "market voodoo". One thing that tends to come up repeatedly when these discussions do reach a modicum of depth is the persistent gaming of the university rankings system. Universities game the ranking system by e.g. encouraging students to apply who are not likely to get in so that they will appear to be more exclusive. It would be nice to improve university rankings so they can't be so easily gamed, but will this actually make a significant difference? I'm not convinced yet that rankings actually have that large of an influence on university policy, in the first place. The need for universities to police student behavior is another unfortunate situation. It's my understanding that federal cost-cutting is basically behind the moves on the government's part to implement policy by way of schools' enforcement of student misconduct. An honest politician should be able to fix this by allocating money for the government to do what it should have been doing in the first place, but increasing spending is very hard these days...

dmix 9y ago

In an administrative heavy organization every problem seems to be answered with "how can we add more administrative layers, processes, and backroom deals to satisfy x group (management, media, special interest groups, voters, etc) that something appears to be being done?" rather than asking "looking at all available options what is the best way to resolve this problem (inside and out of government)?". Basically a "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" type of thing. This is the difference between group A (admins) and group B (engineers, teachers, etc) in Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. The former is often presented as a clever talented group of smart people who savvily work the system in TV shows like House of Cards but I question the utility it really offers the world when the ROI is so often questionable. I'm curious how much of this modern dysfunction in modern governments (not just in the US) is due to the fact politicians are now almost entirely career politicians who spend their formative years in this insular world. The majority coming from the same private schools and 90% of them with law degrees. Rather than in the past, such as the founding fathers, who were businessmen, writers, and intellectuals first embedded in the real world who then went into public service. The same analogy applies to Universities with administrators being raised within the system rather than the teaching staff intimately familiar with the front-line realities of the organization. [1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm

corpMaverick 9y ago
This is what happens to software development within large corporations. Developers are being managed by a bureaucracy that doesn't have a clue about software development.

norswap 9y ago

It seems increasingly likely to me that the whole academic model is on the verge of existential crisis, and headed towards profound transformations. I'm curious to see where this leads. Hopefully someplace better than before. (I shoul mention I'm a PhD student)

randyrand 9y ago

The admin is not useless. It's tasked with gobbling up as much cash for the endowment as possible.

4bpp 9y ago

People are happy to claim they want to downsize university administrations when the appeal is voiced like this, but another kind of editorial that pops up just as frequently in the opinion press later, they will be just as enthusiastically demanding more counseling for students in emotional quandaries, more university-mediated internship opportunities, more officials providing sexual assault prevention training, more recourse to resolve student-advisor disputes in a way that shifts the power balance towards the student, more varied dining options and a plethora of other goodies that can mostly only be realised with more and/or more powerful admin staff.

taksintikk 9y ago

Maybe they can start by getting getting rid of the NCAA (private corporation) siphoning billions from colleges and universities.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
The article is about British universities.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Kind of unrelated, but I am extremely disappointed in how much 'giving back to local communities' has been abandoned by modern universities, in favor of their massive administrative payrolls. What used to be a core tenant of thought, is now a dollar figure. If you live in the state, you get a discount. End of story, obligations fulfilled, full stop. But it's not a commitment or a central belief. No university will open its facilities to community members. No stage will be available for public performances, no instruments or machines will be made available for inquiring minds, no local organizations will spend more than a few hours on campus for a field trip. Providing those things would cost money, sure enough. But they used to be part of a university's mission. Some of the older ones still enshrine the ideal in their mottos. That should mean something. It doesn't.

sackofmugs 9y ago
Do you have evidence of this? I'm just curious because I see all sorts of university events open to the public. Both in public and private universities. There's musical performances, special events (like physics students hosting solar eclipse day and providing hundreds of glasses to the public), theater performances, sporting events (for a low cost), donations to local charities and events, etc.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Just anecdotal evidence - I guess I see what you're describing as part of the student experience. Other people are allowed in, which is nice, but those things are done for the students' benefit. I mean that no university I've dealt with in any capacity, (which, okay, is only about a half-dozen,) has shown even the slightest interest in educating their local communities. That 'commitment' begins and ends with a discount given to a handful of people.

tqi 9y ago

"For instance, before introducing a new procedure they would need to eliminate an old one." If someone wrote a tech article suggesting that companies should require removal of a line of code for every new line introduced, do you think that article would make it to front page of HN?

savanaly 9y ago
For the analogy you're drawing to really hold, we have to picture a computer where the bytes get a lot of work done on their own and our code merely exists to slow down and redirect their efforts (in other words, a negative and a possible positive). If you were concerned with the fast, efficient operation of the computer then you might indeed want a rule like "one in, one out" for lines of code.
- RugnirViking 9y ago
  When space was limited in game cartridges in the past I can imagine such a rule actually existing in a real buisness setting. One line of code in, one line of code out. That would lead to some really weird software, and it would take longer, but it would probably improve the software in some metrics like performance

exabrial 9y ago

I agree. We could start by dropping Politcal Correctness, safe spaces, etc and embrace Free speech, with the assumption that truth will always win in the long term (ex: heliocentrism). This means the painful process of letting the opposition speak, which is lost on the current generation.

SoMisanthrope 9y ago

Cut the ease of lending via U.S. Student Loans. There's a clear and direct correlation between "easy money" and the bloated cost of a baccalaureate degree. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/09/08/student_loans_drive_up_college_costs_what_should_we_do_about_it.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/09/08/student_loans...

Fej 9y ago

The university I go to is now run more like a business, with top-down leadership. Questioning the higher-ups is apparently grounds for firing. The disgust with the administration has gotten to the point that few recent graduates plan to donate, ever. Tuition is so high that it feels like they already got all the money they deserve.

rahimnathwani 9y ago

This article is purportedly about UK universities, but half of the evidence quoted is from studies of _US_ universities. So no matter how strong the evidence, it's irrelevant. The second half of the article is prescriptive but short on details. What does it mean to require "people to fully carry out their own fanciful ideas"? Does it mean that someone who decides the trash should be collected every other day rather than every day, should actually collect the trash? Like many people, I'm attracted by headlines which align with my own biases. But my level of bias here is unchanged after reading the article!

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

The problem in the UK is there is no significant competitive pressure. What would help is separating the teaching from grading, just as it is in schools. Right now an employer has to consider a degree from Oxford Brookes in a completely different light to one from Oxford University. If they knew the students were graded in exactly the same way then it could really shake the system up.

IanCal 9y ago
I'm not a fan of that, it's adds huge drag to any change. Want to add a module on deep learning that you also want to test? Now it needs to be added by a country-wide exam board. Want to add something on cognitive neuroscience to the standard "AI" degree? Only if everyone can teach it. Given how regularly things are messed up by the boards on simple GSCE level questions covering far fewer subjects, I'd not like to have that applied across everyone.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I'd be interested to know how much variation there really is, when visiting universities with my children the options looked remarkably similar. There might be some drag on creating new courses but there could be huge savings as well. One thing I'm sure is the academic community wouldn't like it, it would need to be forced on them.

forsakenkraken 9y ago

As one of the 'pointless' admin staff at a British Russell group university, the article seems to be overly hammering home the authors point which has to be partly to do with the book 'Bullshit Business' that he's trying to sell. I don't deny that there are issues in the university system here in the 'United' Kingdom, but I feel he's overhyping issues to get clicks and sell his book. As several previous commenters have noted, we have a some what dysfunctional market, where most universities charge the same fees. For students you're still picking based on courses and reputation. You can't really pick a cheaper 'no-frills' university. This marketisation has leeched into the central university services, where we're turning everything into a product to sell. Not much of a market when academics have to use us. We are very cheap, it's not like we've got to make money. Obviously if you got rid of that, you'd be able to remove some staff. You'd still need quite a few to meet the legislative demands which are required of universities these days. There are definitely some truths in the article. Not everyone needs to go to university. Certainly there are some students who are getting massive amounts of debt for very little gain. Universities do chase various league tables and other such measures (some imposed centrally) which does require lots of data gathering. Large amounts of data require staff to deal with that data. Students do really like shiny new buildings, so universities go on building sprees. Again a poor NSS (national student survey) can potentially reduce students and thus income. But to be fair, you'd want things to be nice when you're paying £9k per year for your fees alone. REF and TEF aren't well liked by academics, so I'm quite sure a lot of them would be happy if they were dropped. It's unsurprising that the article is penned by an academic and one of his main suggestions is the dropping of REF. The USS pension scheme deficit is probably misleading. If you want some detailed reading around that, then Mike Otsuka's articles are good - https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka

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perseus323 9y ago

I worked at my university after graduation for 2 months (as an employee; well funded project). A project that should have had no more than 4 developers had 3x that many. Tool 2.5x as long to finish (I left in the middle). Crippling, dysfunctional politics, lunch meetings with stake holders, useless field trips. I think everyone involved knew what was going on and didn't care.

PeachPlum 9y ago

My University, Huddersfield, isn't broke and is debt free to boot. > In addition to the Creative Arts Building which opened in 2008, a new £17 million Business School opened in 2010, followed by the £3 million Buckley Innovation Centre in 2012, the £22.5 million Student Central building in 2014, and the £27.5 million Oastler Building for Law and the School of Music, Humanities and Media, in 2017. £5.5 million invested in University Campus Barnsley. > The University now attracts students from more than 130 countries. With an annual turnover of approximately £150m each year, it estimates it is worth £300m annually to the local economy. And yet there is rabble rousing concerning the Vice Chancellor's £337,000 salary http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/university-huddersfield-vice-chancellor-sees-10775384 http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/universit...

auggierose 9y ago

> In some courses, like business administration, students’ capacity to think got worse for the first few years. That's what I suspected for quite some time now :D

ana_1337 9y ago

What part of this is due to over-regulation and grant requirements? Seems huge.

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DimeFoolish 9y ago

The tenure system allows strange, awkward, and awful people to hold lifetime jobs. This is one of the most stupid concepts ever devised by "smart people." Further, get rid of "easy money" visa vie the U.S. Federal Student Loan program. If you're stupid, you don't belong in a higher education setting. Boom. Problem solved. And yes, you PhD morons, I'm talking about you.

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