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Part of it is that, yes, the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have. I used to work in a support role at

Part of it is that, yes, the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have. I used to work in a support role at a university, and although many of the roles will inevitably be automated away, you'd be amazed at how much administration a student on a course requires (from room bookings for lectures, enrolment information, pastoral support, cleaning, cooking, supporting with IT systems, reviewing coursework and exams, QA-ing courses, assisting with research proposals, lining up interviews for PhD candidates...). It's not something that scales well, the more students you have, the more of these things you need to manage, and the less it makes sense for academic staff to do it (on top of their other publish or perish commitments). When you have a building that can hold 250 students, and 5 courses with 75 students each, each needing a lecture booking at around about the same time, but not the same time as some will overlap modules, so they can do practicals in the afternoon, whilst potentially needing to book in placement meetings throughout the day with the placements officer, and having the part-time staff in the academic office available for coursework hand-ins... this is where it gets messy. This will all be solved by technology in the future, but the "industry" is growing faster than the infrastructure allows. When you need to solve the problem now, and you're not a digitally-minded organisation, you throw bodies at it. That being said, I'm not in agreement that 50% of the school-leaving population should be forced into a traditional university setting just because we as a society only value that route as being rigorous enough.

iguy 9y ago
While the things you say certainly need doing, somehow they were all done in the past with vastly smaller non-academic staff. Say 50 years ago. What's changed? Obviously IT is one thing, but this doesn't seem huge. Or maybe, it's not obvious why it need be a lot bigger than everyone having gmail. "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big? How much falls under "pastoral support"?
- wastedhours 9y ago
  > What's changed? Student numbers. Massive, monumental growth in student numbers. And the red tape that comes with that kind of size (as ever). Labour's push for 50% of school leavers to go to university, large swathes of new courses approved that would otherwise have been taught through vocational routes, increase in student applications vs places (in the UK you can apply [or at least could] for up to 6 places, one of the major shifts in the last few years people don't talk about is the push to use all of those slots, whereas you used to only apply to 1 or 2 - this has increased application review and support burden massively). Also, with an insane growth in the use of Clearing/Adjustment to secure your final place, there's a lot of work put into situational modelling of expected numbers. The market has gone through a phase of only-slightly-organised chaos, and students are now calling the shots at most universities, and leaving things until the last possible moment. This has also meant unis have had to commit to staff numbers before knowing really what their cohorts will look like. With GApps for Education, most people have Gmail - it doesn't solve anything really. Collaborative software only works if the people required have the time and technical ability (or desire) needed to collaborate. If they don't (like academics), then you get bodies to do it. > "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big? Yep. University I worked at had a team in each faculty full time helping with this. The grants procedure, writing something actually comprehensible (something of a novelty with some academics, who don't appear to know what a requirement of "plain English description" is...), impact assessment and case study requirements, lining up interviews for candidates, fellows and assistants for the project team, setting up review panels etc... is a major administrative task now. Again, if there weren't support staff doing this, it'd add another bunch of hours onto each lecturer's 80 hour week. > How much falls under "pastoral support"? Most faculties will have several student support staff specifically to help with wellbeing during their time at uni. Having been a couple of doors down from someone who tried to commit suicide whilst in uni halls, remember rationalising away those support roles does have a human impact.
  - iguy 9y ago
    Thanks! > Student numbers I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much. Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make? Re complicated IT, again somehow needing to collaborate on departmental memos somehow wasn't an issue when we had typewriters. I suspect a lot is weird make-work. > grants procedure OK, good. I would not have refused such help, but have never had any! This however does seem orthogonal to students. It's part of the massive stuff-up that is research funding, where we've allowed the question of allocating these funds to eat up not only a majority of the time of the scientists being supported... but also apparently a huge number of other people. All ultimately paid out of the pot we're trying to distribute. Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum? > support staff specifically to help with wellbeing It's nice to do these things, certainly. But lavishing them on the best and brightest young adults while all the other ones with jobs fend for themselves doesn't seem so easy to defend. Why isn't this part of the NHS budget?
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      > I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much. As a hypothetical, if you were a Dean and you had a £100k to have the greatest impact in the department: Do you employ 2 lecturers at £50k each to teach lectures, do admin and sort out research, or 1 lecturer at £55k, and take a bunch of their tasks away and give them to a research coordinator for £20k (who can support maybe 10 lecturers) and a research assistant for £25k (who can sit on panels, do research, and teach some classes, and support maybe 2 lecturers)? Also, there are a finite number of world-class lecturers in any field - a lot of which would rather be researching than teaching, so making their time more efficient by basically taking away their "university" commitments to students (undergrads especially), give them more time to work on their projects, is almost the point. > Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make? There is a cap (which I believe is 6). The issue is, that students never really used that many before. You'd have your preferred course, and then maybe a back up (or two tops) - now, students play the market. They used to accept their offers immediately too, now they wait until the day before the UCAS deadline to give themselves the most time (fair enough, but has an impact on universities across the board). This will bed in in the next few years, but you'd be amazed at how sharply this changed. > Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum? One of the hidden effects of the university fees change was that a lot of the research funding was cut and expected to be derived from incoming students rather than distributed by government (hence why so much time now goes into external proposal writing and pandering to the last remaining government schemes with things like REF case studies). You now have to appeal to external funders more than internal ones, making the process more... processy. I've heard of some places not offering PhD places unless the subsidy was from an external source. Also (and this is a damning indictment of universities tbh), universities have increased the overhead they charge to their staff from their research grants, to spend on capital projects, meaning they need to apply for more money, potentially making the process even harder. > Why isn't this part of the NHS budget? Is that a serious question? :) mental health provision in the NHS is notoriously woeful, and "best and brightest young adults" (not especially true when you consider the aim is for 50% to go there, that's not the best and brightest, that's half the bell curve. Also, quite a few mental health professionals really want the age of being an adult recognised as 25 as social dynamics have changed to make it closer to that than 18) put under artificial pressure with little money and no support network, having to identify mental health issues themselves, and then admit themselves to treatment units over... missed coursework deadlines? True, having better mental health provision for students vs non-students is damning when you consider the social-economic issues behind university access, but as to my previous point about the Dean with cash to spend - at a university system level, the investment in students not killing themselves with dedicated support staff vs community or lecturer pastoral support is one they've balanced. EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that some of the roles I've mentioned don't always eat up a full FTE over the course of a year. Lots of people work part-time, or roles that have peaks and troughs throughout a season, are supported by teams with different remits. Those wellbeing support staff will help with enrolment during September madness, research staff will help with internal comms, programme admins will help with market research, everyone helps plan open days and applicant visit days.
skissane 9y ago
> the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have Sometimes the academics create lots of extra work for the non-academic staff with their sub-optimal decisions. I used to work for a university in their IT services, and as a developer I was exposed to a lot of the business rules around enrolment, course prerequisites, degree/major requirements, which we recorded and enforced through a mix of custom software and customised off-the-shelf software. Those rules were written by committees of senior academics. And, rather than keeping them nice and simple, they seemed to like to make them as complex as possible, with the result that the computer systems couldn't cope with the complexity. The student enrolment system could handle enforcing some simpler subject prerequisites, but for more complex ones the academics concocted – like "PQR101 or BCD142 plus 12 credit points at 200 level in ABC subjects (except for ABC219 and ABC220) plus at least two of DEF211 or DEF212 or GHI292 or JKL205" – we'd just display a warning message to the student "You can only enrol in this if XYZ. Click 'OK' to confirm you meet that prerequisite", followed up by custom reports which would be run to catch students who incorrectly clicked 'OK', who would then be manually forcibly unenrolled, and contacted by phone/post/email to be told to enrol in something else instead. Added to that, the complexity of the rules would confuse the students, and make the process of planning what to enrol in quite daunting and stressful. Sometimes students would enrol in the wrong subjects, and nobody would stop them, and only later they'd be told that some subject they just spent a semester studying didn't count towards the degree they were enrolled in. (Hopefully, ten plus years on, they've learnt their lesson and made the rules simpler now. Or maybe not. I wouldn't know.)
- iguy 9y ago
  All of which complexity used to be handled by printing a course guide with a sentence about prerequisites. And perhaps the professor would remind you on day one. This seems like an example of IT not saving anyone time.
- jmoss20 9y ago
  I would certainly hope they wouldn't dumb down their rules...for the sake of the computer system?

iguy 9y ago

While the things you say certainly need doing, somehow they were all done in the past with vastly smaller non-academic staff. Say 50 years ago. What's changed? Obviously IT is one thing, but this doesn't seem huge. Or maybe, it's not obvious why it need be a lot bigger than everyone having gmail. "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big? How much falls under "pastoral support"?

wastedhours 9y ago
> What's changed? Student numbers. Massive, monumental growth in student numbers. And the red tape that comes with that kind of size (as ever). Labour's push for 50% of school leavers to go to university, large swathes of new courses approved that would otherwise have been taught through vocational routes, increase in student applications vs places (in the UK you can apply [or at least could] for up to 6 places, one of the major shifts in the last few years people don't talk about is the push to use all of those slots, whereas you used to only apply to 1 or 2 - this has increased application review and support burden massively). Also, with an insane growth in the use of Clearing/Adjustment to secure your final place, there's a lot of work put into situational modelling of expected numbers. The market has gone through a phase of only-slightly-organised chaos, and students are now calling the shots at most universities, and leaving things until the last possible moment. This has also meant unis have had to commit to staff numbers before knowing really what their cohorts will look like. With GApps for Education, most people have Gmail - it doesn't solve anything really. Collaborative software only works if the people required have the time and technical ability (or desire) needed to collaborate. If they don't (like academics), then you get bodies to do it. > "assisting with research proposals" is certainly new. But is it big? Yep. University I worked at had a team in each faculty full time helping with this. The grants procedure, writing something actually comprehensible (something of a novelty with some academics, who don't appear to know what a requirement of "plain English description" is...), impact assessment and case study requirements, lining up interviews for candidates, fellows and assistants for the project team, setting up review panels etc... is a major administrative task now. Again, if there weren't support staff doing this, it'd add another bunch of hours onto each lecturer's 80 hour week. > How much falls under "pastoral support"? Most faculties will have several student support staff specifically to help with wellbeing during their time at uni. Having been a couple of doors down from someone who tried to commit suicide whilst in uni halls, remember rationalising away those support roles does have a human impact.
- iguy 9y ago
  Thanks! > Student numbers I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much. Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make? Re complicated IT, again somehow needing to collaborate on departmental memos somehow wasn't an issue when we had typewriters. I suspect a lot is weird make-work. > grants procedure OK, good. I would not have refused such help, but have never had any! This however does seem orthogonal to students. It's part of the massive stuff-up that is research funding, where we've allowed the question of allocating these funds to eat up not only a majority of the time of the scientists being supported... but also apparently a huge number of other people. All ultimately paid out of the pot we're trying to distribute. Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum? > support staff specifically to help with wellbeing It's nice to do these things, certainly. But lavishing them on the best and brightest young adults while all the other ones with jobs fend for themselves doesn't seem so easy to defend. Why isn't this part of the NHS budget?
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    > I still don't quite see why overall growth must change the proportion so much. As a hypothetical, if you were a Dean and you had a £100k to have the greatest impact in the department: Do you employ 2 lecturers at £50k each to teach lectures, do admin and sort out research, or 1 lecturer at £55k, and take a bunch of their tasks away and give them to a research coordinator for £20k (who can support maybe 10 lecturers) and a research assistant for £25k (who can sit on panels, do research, and teach some classes, and support maybe 2 lecturers)? Also, there are a finite number of world-class lecturers in any field - a lot of which would rather be researching than teaching, so making their time more efficient by basically taking away their "university" commitments to students (undergrads especially), give them more time to work on their projects, is almost the point. > Maybe the extra complication of everyone applying to 20 places is a factor which doesn't scale. I don't know exactly how you fix that. Perhaps you should cap the number of applications an individual can make? There is a cap (which I believe is 6). The issue is, that students never really used that many before. You'd have your preferred course, and then maybe a back up (or two tops) - now, students play the market. They used to accept their offers immediately too, now they wait until the day before the UCAS deadline to give themselves the most time (fair enough, but has an impact on universities across the board). This will bed in in the next few years, but you'd be amazed at how sharply this changed. > Can't we change the rules of the game so that more of the pot goes to things which aren't obviously zero-sum? One of the hidden effects of the university fees change was that a lot of the research funding was cut and expected to be derived from incoming students rather than distributed by government (hence why so much time now goes into external proposal writing and pandering to the last remaining government schemes with things like REF case studies). You now have to appeal to external funders more than internal ones, making the process more... processy. I've heard of some places not offering PhD places unless the subsidy was from an external source. Also (and this is a damning indictment of universities tbh), universities have increased the overhead they charge to their staff from their research grants, to spend on capital projects, meaning they need to apply for more money, potentially making the process even harder. > Why isn't this part of the NHS budget? Is that a serious question? :) mental health provision in the NHS is notoriously woeful, and "best and brightest young adults" (not especially true when you consider the aim is for 50% to go there, that's not the best and brightest, that's half the bell curve. Also, quite a few mental health professionals really want the age of being an adult recognised as 25 as social dynamics have changed to make it closer to that than 18) put under artificial pressure with little money and no support network, having to identify mental health issues themselves, and then admit themselves to treatment units over... missed coursework deadlines? True, having better mental health provision for students vs non-students is damning when you consider the social-economic issues behind university access, but as to my previous point about the Dean with cash to spend - at a university system level, the investment in students not killing themselves with dedicated support staff vs community or lecturer pastoral support is one they've balanced. EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that some of the roles I've mentioned don't always eat up a full FTE over the course of a year. Lots of people work part-time, or roles that have peaks and troughs throughout a season, are supported by teams with different remits. Those wellbeing support staff will help with enrolment during September madness, research staff will help with internal comms, programme admins will help with market research, everyone helps plan open days and applicant visit days.

skissane 9y ago

> the non-academic staff help with the mountain of non-academic work lecturers would otherwise have Sometimes the academics create lots of extra work for the non-academic staff with their sub-optimal decisions. I used to work for a university in their IT services, and as a developer I was exposed to a lot of the business rules around enrolment, course prerequisites, degree/major requirements, which we recorded and enforced through a mix of custom software and customised off-the-shelf software. Those rules were written by committees of senior academics. And, rather than keeping them nice and simple, they seemed to like to make them as complex as possible, with the result that the computer systems couldn't cope with the complexity. The student enrolment system could handle enforcing some simpler subject prerequisites, but for more complex ones the academics concocted – like "PQR101 or BCD142 plus 12 credit points at 200 level in ABC subjects (except for ABC219 and ABC220) plus at least two of DEF211 or DEF212 or GHI292 or JKL205" – we'd just display a warning message to the student "You can only enrol in this if XYZ. Click 'OK' to confirm you meet that prerequisite", followed up by custom reports which would be run to catch students who incorrectly clicked 'OK', who would then be manually forcibly unenrolled, and contacted by phone/post/email to be told to enrol in something else instead. Added to that, the complexity of the rules would confuse the students, and make the process of planning what to enrol in quite daunting and stressful. Sometimes students would enrol in the wrong subjects, and nobody would stop them, and only later they'd be told that some subject they just spent a semester studying didn't count towards the degree they were enrolled in. (Hopefully, ten plus years on, they've learnt their lesson and made the rules simpler now. Or maybe not. I wouldn't know.)

iguy 9y ago
All of which complexity used to be handled by printing a course guide with a sentence about prerequisites. And perhaps the professor would remind you on day one. This seems like an example of IT not saving anyone time.
jmoss20 9y ago
I would certainly hope they wouldn't dumb down their rules...for the sake of the computer system?