7 ms·

The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.

by qaq 9y ago

xythian 9y ago
I'm not sure why you're downvoted. This is a real problem that is palpable for anyone that has worked in higher ed since the 1980s as most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. The reasons for this move are complex, and one result is a rise in well-paid administrators and low-paid adjuncts with a decline in tenured faculty. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-bureaucracy-rise-managers-higher-education https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-b... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu... https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforce https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-wor...
- pm24601 9y ago
  > most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. At my alum mater, the state cut support to the state universities to practically nothing. Voters saw how much money the big universities were making on college football. They consistently voted to cut the money to the university system. Only problem? Most state supported universities did not have a football program. My university: * turned to Chinese/Indian nationals (no financial aid/full price) * raised everyone's tuition (went from low-cost school to higher-end) * raised other fees My university is in a part of the US that has low cost of living. So at the very least, the profs are unlikely to be homeless - yes even at the wages specified.
  - xythian 9y ago
    You basically typed out what I would have typed, but got lazy and just said "reasons are complex." There's something of a joke/quote in university circles about how universities went from "state funded to state supported to state located." When you get <= 5% of your budget from the state, the state support means nothing and this is the situation for most big state unis. Also, you forgot the Saudi Arabian nationals whose govt fully funds their US education (though this program is becoming more restrictive in recent years with the Saudi govt selecting specific eligible degrees). I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but my personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply, this fact was known by the administration, but the giant full-price checks were essential to keeping the lights on. Other Fees: Yes, the rise of fees that are starting to rival tuition. Fees are a convenient way to lower the sticker shock of tuition while keeping the total cost the same. My former uni made a big promise about "freezing" tuition for years at a time, but all they ended up doing was jacking up the fees to compensate.
    - asenna 9y ago
      > My personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply. I'm just curious, could you elaborate on this? Are you referring to them not being able to cope up academically? Or the cultural difference or racism. I've known a couple of these students back from my college and they seemed to be doing alright.
  - brightball 9y ago
    This sounds like something people could perceive about Clemson so I'll use them as an example. In SC funding went down while tuition went up and lottery scholarships went up. The university budget is around $800 million / year and the athletic department across all sports is about $80 million / year. Of that budget, it's entirely self sustained but it's also almost entirely spent. It's performance has no impact on the rest of the university except for alumni engagement/excitement. Even if it were making a $20 million dollar profit it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the total university budget. At the same time, applications are through the roof and there's not enough room to take everybody (but they are investing in new buildings to increase capacity). The ratio of in state to out of state has always remained close to 60/30 though. Admin costs have increased but the prestige factor has gone up significantly as well. Clemson went from being the #70 something PUBLIC university to a top 20 in the span of 2 decades.
  - guelo 9y ago
    The cut in state support coincides with a successful propaganda campaign that turned the public against academics and science.
    - pm24601 9y ago
      I didn't think of that ... but not surprising. The cuts in my state started in the Bush era under a Democratic governor. Very sad that a Dem aided and abetted this.
- gerbilly 9y ago
  > most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. I think this reflects a larger trend. Most institutions are taking on the rituals of the dominant organizing principle in society: the corporation. I believe this is why church groups are having "annual general meetings" and that formerly not for profit institutions are mimicking the organizational structure of corporations: meetings, hierarchical teams, layers of administrators etc...
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Well, naturally. Your organization has a revenue stream (donations). It has expenditures (church upkeep). To avoid embezzlement, wasteful spending, & getting scalped by necessary services, you conduct group review of budget goals & the books.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?
    - losteric 9y ago
      Competent self-managing sub-organizations. Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.
      - cortesoft 9y ago
        A 'sub-organization' is just an alternative description of a heirarchy. Those sub-organizations will have to come together to make macro decisions, like which departments need more funding, how to handle building expansion and shared facility use, etc.
        losteric 9y ago
        In my experience, smaller flatter organizations rarely require a synchronous large meeting for those issues.
spectrum1234 9y ago
Exactly! http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-... "...some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance."
yardie 9y ago
I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals. I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget. I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.
- xythian 9y ago
  In my experience (former PhD student and instructor and my spouse is a full-time faculty and program director), if you're a tenured faculty member at a R1 university, then grant writing is your job. You're expected to be self-funding and the only way to do this is to grind out grants and pass the work onto graduate students and staff. And, you pay a ~50% tax on your grant award as 'overhead' to the university, so you have a lot less money to work with than the sticker value that gets awarded. At the university level, arguably the second most important person in the administration is the President of the Foundation and they don't even technically work for the university as the foundation is a separate legal entity. This person has a massive private army of fund-raising staff that shakes the alumni money tree looking for gifts large and small. But, that doesn't mean that universities don't also have money chasers. My former uni had a special division in the recruiting/admission office that focused on high-value future alumni, aka, children of rich and famous parents. These kids were brought in for tailored events, private meetings with faculty and admins, and received a general red carpet treatment to try and lure them to the university. Related, Malcom Gladwell has done some great work dissecting the money making machines of the administrator class who go after $100M+ gifts (far more money than 99.99% of researchers could acquire in a lifetime of grants). And, how this gift giving continues to pile on at elite schools while starving everyone else of gifts. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
empath75 9y ago
It seems like there should be a market for low overhead small schools with high paid teaching staff.
- moduspol 9y ago
  They were looking at doing this at my last job (small private university). We already outsourced custodial and food service. Do student accounts and financial aid really define us as a university? Are they part of our core competency? Do we do them particularly well relative to competitors? Of course not. So why not outsource them?
- gipp 9y ago
  For the university "market", the only game in town is prestige, which teaching quality plays into very little, if at all.
  - criddell 9y ago
    That's especially true for some professions (like law) but less true for most others. For other fields, school prestige can help you get that first job, but the value of being able to say you were educated at X drops quickly once you start working. Once you've been working for a while, your portfolio, social skills, professional network, and track record are far more important than the issuer of your degree.
- chibg10 9y ago
  Right? I've thought about this as well. My guess is that: 1) Nearly all university students are making their decision when they're 18, so a lot of them are mostly interested in non-academic aspects of their school 2) It seems really hard to actually start a new university. Anecdotally, every university I can think of is quite old. 3) This is probably related to (2). The benefits of universities aren't really dependent on good professors. The advantage of top schools in both educational progress and student outcomes can probably mostly explained by signalling, filtering out weak students before they arrive, university culture, and networking. None of this has much to do with professors.
leggomylibro 9y ago
"Don't worry, we can have an adjunct professor do it on the cheap." And then they come to us for tax dollars, while also slashing their involvement with local communities. Why should education tax money go to universities that are so woefully inefficient and bloated with money when it could be spent on primary and secondary education, or better access to preschooling?
hashberry 9y ago
I dated someone who worked an administrative position... she would complain of coworkers who would do nothing all day. She said her job was being done by three people when only one was needed. The lack of oversight and actual work being done was alarming. Who administrates the administrators? No one.
jseliger 9y ago
The admin staff is a problem but does not seem to be the main problem: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m....
Glyptodon 9y ago
I work for a university and while I think there's some justification for increases in some roles - many universities desperately need internal equivalents of an 18F/US Digital service type entity among other things. Other situations are complex - grants/external funding impose substantial administration requirements (while being larger and larger shares of revenue) or require substantial administrative expertise, often require things like outreach programs which PIs don't want to deal with, etc. But at the same time, I think administrative salaries are frequently unconscionable.
asabjorn 9y ago
Universities are like dictatorships where only staff has a vote on if the top executives should stay in their job. Since professors are tenured and are therefore not beholden to anyone, the top executives are highly incentivised to increase the pool of voters that they have leverage over in order to create a stable coalition. This pool is administrative staff. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that students often choose Universities based upon reputation and are therefore rather insensitive to price increases, so extra spend on administrative staff is easy to find. In addition to this the government gives away student loans that matches rising tuition costs and because you can't get rid of student loans in bankruptcy it is an attractive asset class even for private lenders.

The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.

by qaq 9y ago

The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted. This is a real problem that is palpable for anyone that has worked in higher ed since the 1980s as most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. The reasons for this move are complex, and one result is a rise in well-paid administrators and low-paid adjuncts with a decline in tenured faculty. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-bureaucracy-rise-managers-higher-education https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-b... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu... https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforce https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-wor...

pm24601 9y ago
> most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. At my alum mater, the state cut support to the state universities to practically nothing. Voters saw how much money the big universities were making on college football. They consistently voted to cut the money to the university system. Only problem? Most state supported universities did not have a football program. My university: * turned to Chinese/Indian nationals (no financial aid/full price) * raised everyone's tuition (went from low-cost school to higher-end) * raised other fees My university is in a part of the US that has low cost of living. So at the very least, the profs are unlikely to be homeless - yes even at the wages specified.
- xythian 9y ago
  You basically typed out what I would have typed, but got lazy and just said "reasons are complex." There's something of a joke/quote in university circles about how universities went from "state funded to state supported to state located." When you get <= 5% of your budget from the state, the state support means nothing and this is the situation for most big state unis. Also, you forgot the Saudi Arabian nationals whose govt fully funds their US education (though this program is becoming more restrictive in recent years with the Saudi govt selecting specific eligible degrees). I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but my personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply, this fact was known by the administration, but the giant full-price checks were essential to keeping the lights on. Other Fees: Yes, the rise of fees that are starting to rival tuition. Fees are a convenient way to lower the sticker shock of tuition while keeping the total cost the same. My former uni made a big promise about "freezing" tuition for years at a time, but all they ended up doing was jacking up the fees to compensate.
  - asenna 9y ago
    > My personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply. I'm just curious, could you elaborate on this? Are you referring to them not being able to cope up academically? Or the cultural difference or racism. I've known a couple of these students back from my college and they seemed to be doing alright.
- brightball 9y ago
  This sounds like something people could perceive about Clemson so I'll use them as an example. In SC funding went down while tuition went up and lottery scholarships went up. The university budget is around $800 million / year and the athletic department across all sports is about $80 million / year. Of that budget, it's entirely self sustained but it's also almost entirely spent. It's performance has no impact on the rest of the university except for alumni engagement/excitement. Even if it were making a $20 million dollar profit it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the total university budget. At the same time, applications are through the roof and there's not enough room to take everybody (but they are investing in new buildings to increase capacity). The ratio of in state to out of state has always remained close to 60/30 though. Admin costs have increased but the prestige factor has gone up significantly as well. Clemson went from being the #70 something PUBLIC university to a top 20 in the span of 2 decades.
- guelo 9y ago
  The cut in state support coincides with a successful propaganda campaign that turned the public against academics and science.
  - pm24601 9y ago
    I didn't think of that ... but not surprising. The cuts in my state started in the Bush era under a Democratic governor. Very sad that a Dem aided and abetted this.
gerbilly 9y ago
> most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. I think this reflects a larger trend. Most institutions are taking on the rituals of the dominant organizing principle in society: the corporation. I believe this is why church groups are having "annual general meetings" and that formerly not for profit institutions are mimicking the organizational structure of corporations: meetings, hierarchical teams, layers of administrators etc...
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Well, naturally. Your organization has a revenue stream (donations). It has expenditures (church upkeep). To avoid embezzlement, wasteful spending, & getting scalped by necessary services, you conduct group review of budget goals & the books.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?
  - losteric 9y ago
    Competent self-managing sub-organizations. Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.
    - cortesoft 9y ago
      A 'sub-organization' is just an alternative description of a heirarchy. Those sub-organizations will have to come together to make macro decisions, like which departments need more funding, how to handle building expansion and shared facility use, etc.
      - losteric 9y ago
        In my experience, smaller flatter organizations rarely require a synchronous large meeting for those issues.

spectrum1234 9y ago

Exactly! http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-... "...some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance."

yardie 9y ago

I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals. I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget. I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.

xythian 9y ago
In my experience (former PhD student and instructor and my spouse is a full-time faculty and program director), if you're a tenured faculty member at a R1 university, then grant writing is your job. You're expected to be self-funding and the only way to do this is to grind out grants and pass the work onto graduate students and staff. And, you pay a ~50% tax on your grant award as 'overhead' to the university, so you have a lot less money to work with than the sticker value that gets awarded. At the university level, arguably the second most important person in the administration is the President of the Foundation and they don't even technically work for the university as the foundation is a separate legal entity. This person has a massive private army of fund-raising staff that shakes the alumni money tree looking for gifts large and small. But, that doesn't mean that universities don't also have money chasers. My former uni had a special division in the recruiting/admission office that focused on high-value future alumni, aka, children of rich and famous parents. These kids were brought in for tailored events, private meetings with faculty and admins, and received a general red carpet treatment to try and lure them to the university. Related, Malcom Gladwell has done some great work dissecting the money making machines of the administrator class who go after $100M+ gifts (far more money than 99.99% of researchers could acquire in a lifetime of grants). And, how this gift giving continues to pile on at elite schools while starving everyone else of gifts. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

empath75 9y ago

It seems like there should be a market for low overhead small schools with high paid teaching staff.

moduspol 9y ago
They were looking at doing this at my last job (small private university). We already outsourced custodial and food service. Do student accounts and financial aid really define us as a university? Are they part of our core competency? Do we do them particularly well relative to competitors? Of course not. So why not outsource them?
gipp 9y ago
For the university "market", the only game in town is prestige, which teaching quality plays into very little, if at all.
- criddell 9y ago
  That's especially true for some professions (like law) but less true for most others. For other fields, school prestige can help you get that first job, but the value of being able to say you were educated at X drops quickly once you start working. Once you've been working for a while, your portfolio, social skills, professional network, and track record are far more important than the issuer of your degree.
chibg10 9y ago
Right? I've thought about this as well. My guess is that: 1) Nearly all university students are making their decision when they're 18, so a lot of them are mostly interested in non-academic aspects of their school 2) It seems really hard to actually start a new university. Anecdotally, every university I can think of is quite old. 3) This is probably related to (2). The benefits of universities aren't really dependent on good professors. The advantage of top schools in both educational progress and student outcomes can probably mostly explained by signalling, filtering out weak students before they arrive, university culture, and networking. None of this has much to do with professors.

leggomylibro 9y ago

"Don't worry, we can have an adjunct professor do it on the cheap." And then they come to us for tax dollars, while also slashing their involvement with local communities. Why should education tax money go to universities that are so woefully inefficient and bloated with money when it could be spent on primary and secondary education, or better access to preschooling?

hashberry 9y ago

I dated someone who worked an administrative position... she would complain of coworkers who would do nothing all day. She said her job was being done by three people when only one was needed. The lack of oversight and actual work being done was alarming. Who administrates the administrators? No one.

jseliger 9y ago

The admin staff is a problem but does not seem to be the main problem: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m....

Glyptodon 9y ago

I work for a university and while I think there's some justification for increases in some roles - many universities desperately need internal equivalents of an 18F/US Digital service type entity among other things. Other situations are complex - grants/external funding impose substantial administration requirements (while being larger and larger shares of revenue) or require substantial administrative expertise, often require things like outreach programs which PIs don't want to deal with, etc. But at the same time, I think administrative salaries are frequently unconscionable.

asabjorn 9y ago

Universities are like dictatorships where only staff has a vote on if the top executives should stay in their job. Since professors are tenured and are therefore not beholden to anyone, the top executives are highly incentivised to increase the pool of voters that they have leverage over in order to create a stable coalition. This pool is administrative staff. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that students often choose Universities based upon reputation and are therefore rather insensitive to price increases, so extra spend on administrative staff is easy to find. In addition to this the government gives away student loans that matches rising tuition costs and because you can't get rid of student loans in bankruptcy it is an attractive asset class even for private lenders.