20 ms·

I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia... "Academic staff: 2,219 Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC Students: 16,430" Oh how fa

by stirlo 8y ago

I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia... "Academic staff: 2,219 Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC Students: 16,430" Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

emptyfile 8y ago
How in the hell??? Is this considered extreme even in america?
- kathe-rine 8y ago
  My university is comparable to Stanford (Princeton) but has a roughly 1:1 faculty: administrator ratio (1200: to 1100).
  - emptyfile 8y ago
    That seems reasonable for an expensive US university, especially when compared to the post above. I live in eastern europe and I was trying to remember what kind of administrative staff I encountered in my 6 years of university. Apart from the people who handle the paperwork for admissions and cleaning ladies I honestly can't think any.
    - vkou 8y ago
      Your librarians are administrative staff. Your research assistants are administrative staff. The people who do inventory are administrative staff. The people who do purchases are administrative staff. The people who work in the cafeteria are administrative staff. The people who install, maintain, and fix the computers used by all of the people in the list above are administrative staff. The people who fix a broken door are administrative staff. The people who are managing student housing are administrative staff. On-site campus security that busts freshmen parties are administrative staff. Pretty much everyone who is drawing a salary, and is not a lecturing professor is administrative staff. If your university consists of a dozen lecture halls, and a storage closet, you don't need any administrative staff. The more facilities and services you have, the more administrative staff you will have. Stanford probably has a lot more facilities then your university did. If you just want to lecture to people, education can be incredibly cheap. If you want to lecture to people, and have them use expensive lab equipment, and have them live on campus, and have hundreds of people, with teams of assistants doing research... It's going to be expensive.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    FWIW that can be reasonable depending on the size of the district. Ours has ~4k+ non-admin employees and 15+ physical plants. That's: * a large enough headcount that you need an HR department, * a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants, * a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space), * a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff, * a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.), * a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools, * a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities), * and several other functions. For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases. FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.
  - grimjack00 8y ago
    This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.
    - 8y ago
nameisu 8y ago
admin to student ratio is critical
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
How much does a university do outside of giving classes to students? Don't they also operate a huge research endeavour, patent administration, and operate numerous businesses all at once?
- leetcrew 8y ago
  universities duplicate many services offered by businesses (and even the government, to an extent) in the surrounding area. i certainly found this convenient as a student, but i always found it a bit silly. wouldn't it be more efficient to just offer an expansive shuttle service to take the students to important places? you could even give stipends to the poorest students. institutions tend to be pretty wasteful when they implement a ton of different out of band stuff in house.
  - gowld 8y ago
    What kind of services are extraneous? The problem is that once a campus gets big enough (a few thousand people or more at a residential university), it is the neighborhood, so you have to either provide the community services, or outsource to vendors to provide services on campus. And handing out monopolies to vendors is a bad idea.
wastedhours 8y ago
How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go? Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there. The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away. I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".
- kamaal 8y ago
  Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption. 12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff. EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
jillesvangurp 8y ago
It's worse, basically students are taking loans to pay for this. This requires even more admin work so they hire even more administrators.
- pastor_elm 8y ago
  This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford. They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0] [0}https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financial-aid/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financi...
  - slezakattack 8y ago
    But what part of that 77% represent the students receiving free tuition based on the 125k family income? I would think that 77% is also lumping students who a) have a free ride from scholarships, academic and/or sports. b) have the financial means to pay their way through.
  - seppin 8y ago
    > They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0] How many of them have their parents paying anyways?
majewsky 8y ago
WTF. My alma mater (Dresden University of Technology) has 6000 academic staff and 2500 administrative staff for 35000 students, which sort of matches the expectation that I had before checking.
- Sujan 8y ago
  I like mine as well: > Administrative staff: 452 > Students: 8000(approx) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applied_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applie...
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    I don’t think you’ve really internalized how completely fucked the American education system is. Always assume the worst about it.
baby 8y ago
Well, universities in the US do make a shit ton of money per students they have
Dayshine 8y ago
Not sure this means what you think it means. My unit in the university has: Academic staff: 10 Administrative staff: 70 Students: 0 Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  You call researchers administrators?
  - roel_v 8y ago
    Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.
    - kamaal 8y ago
      The question is do you call work from lab techs, programmers etc 'administrative stuff'? Also I doubt if it is a case where researchers just perform the main rituals and others do all the remaining work. If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc. If we have to do this, lets put the saddle on the right horse.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc. That's often how it works these days. Means the university can keep most of the workers on lower pay scales and avoid having to grant them tenure.
      - roel_v 8y ago
        "If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc." Well yeah. Professors are like business unit leaders/managers, acquiring funding for research and setting the main outline of what to do. Then the others (usually, although not always, designated 'administrative staff', or grad students/post docs) execute the work. I'm not sure I would call them 'real workers', that implies that others (i.e., managers) don't do 'real work'. I mean I understand what you say - you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
imgabe 8y ago
I wonder how many of the administrative staff are in fundraising. That should at least be net-profitable to the university.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  I'm always extremely skeptical of this. Fundraising departments tend to claim responsibility for all but the very largest donations when in reality a lot of that money would've come to the school no matter what.
chrisBob 8y ago
I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growth in university administration? Maybe, but I would like to think that despite contributing to the "Admin" headcount you despise I am doing valuable work facilitating scientific research. Universities have two roles: Teaching and Research. You are welcome to your own thoughts about whether or not they should be grouped together the way they are, but that is the current situation, and it turns out that Stanford is a big research university.
- Spakman 8y ago
  That sounds like an interesting and varied role. Are you enjoying it and getting much from it? Anything you don't like about it?
  - Kalium 8y ago
    Working in the maze that is East Hall is usually a big minus.
  - neuromantik8086 8y ago
    > That sounds like an interesting and varied role. It is, and it doesn't get as much formal recognition in the research world. Some folks are trying to change this [0], but unfortunately for the moment research software engineers often end up more of a happy accident than a deliberate decision on the part of labs. Part of this is due to weirdness in how funding is allocated for research positions at universities- instead of research programmers being funded through operating expenses like a secretary, administrator or many (but not all) librarians, most lab positions are dependent upon soft money (i.e., grants) that could potentially evaporate unexpectedly. I had a friend at ${BAY_AREA_UNIVERSITY} who almost had this happen to him recently, but fortunately his PI got another grant so he didn't need to get furloughed/laid off. When I was living in Ithaca, I noticed a similar trend of non-faculty taking sabbaticals due to funding issues and then returning 6 months to a year or so later in a different department [1]. That sort of instability in employment is part of what scared me into moving to a major metropolitan area- I still work for a university, but I know I have options (although I'm currently not funded by soft money- last job was though). [0] https://rse.ac.uk/who/ https://rse.ac.uk/who/ [1] Possibly more of a perception than a reality.
Kluny 8y ago
Seriously, I thought computers were supposed to replace all those administrators.
- vkou 8y ago
  Will a computer fix a broken door? Wash out glassware? Cook 5,000 meals every lunch hour? Knock on a dorm door, when there's a 3 am party going on? Trim the hedges? Roll the AV projector out to the lecture hall that needs it? Ticket someone for parking without a permit? Wash the windows? Or would you prefer tenured professors doing all that work, instead of teaching, or research?
  - Kluny 8y ago
    Well, I think custodians fix broken doors, kitchen staff clean the dishwasher and cook meals, RAs (who are normally students as well) knock on the doors, landscapers trim the hedges, and AV techs roll out the projectors. If that's what "administrators" means, then fair enough - but my understanding of the title "administrator" is people who organize the curriculum, schedule staff, students and classrooms, maintain the website, conduct student intake, that kind of thing. And those are the jobs that I would expect to be streamlined via computers.
benmaraschino 8y ago
If you actually go to the source behind that figure (http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/ http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/) and scroll down, you'll find that it actually doesn't refer to the number of administrators--far from it--but rather just the total number of non-academic (i.e., not faculty) staff. Indeed, that figure includes service and maintenance staff, clerical workers, and employees of SLAC, in addition to "managerial and professional" staff, which includes research technicians, of which there are surely hundreds in the SOM alone, librarians, biostatisticians, accountants, lawyers, engineers, grants specialists, programmers, and yes, of course, administrators, among many other titles, but it's just downright wrong to say that Stanford has 12,508 administrators.
- hinkley 8y ago
  At my university the graduate students (in the engineering college, at least) were frequently research assistants. In that case you would probably be counted as an employee of the university. That data point could change the student-employee ratio from 1:1 to 2:1
pmiller2 8y ago
And here I thought it was bad that the university I went to grad school at had a 1:1 administratior:faculty ratio.

by stirlo 8y ago

emptyfile 8y ago

How in the hell??? Is this considered extreme even in america?

kathe-rine 8y ago
My university is comparable to Stanford (Princeton) but has a roughly 1:1 faculty: administrator ratio (1200: to 1100).
- emptyfile 8y ago
  That seems reasonable for an expensive US university, especially when compared to the post above. I live in eastern europe and I was trying to remember what kind of administrative staff I encountered in my 6 years of university. Apart from the people who handle the paperwork for admissions and cleaning ladies I honestly can't think any.
  - vkou 8y ago
    Your librarians are administrative staff. Your research assistants are administrative staff. The people who do inventory are administrative staff. The people who do purchases are administrative staff. The people who work in the cafeteria are administrative staff. The people who install, maintain, and fix the computers used by all of the people in the list above are administrative staff. The people who fix a broken door are administrative staff. The people who are managing student housing are administrative staff. On-site campus security that busts freshmen parties are administrative staff. Pretty much everyone who is drawing a salary, and is not a lecturing professor is administrative staff. If your university consists of a dozen lecture halls, and a storage closet, you don't need any administrative staff. The more facilities and services you have, the more administrative staff you will have. Stanford probably has a lot more facilities then your university did. If you just want to lecture to people, education can be incredibly cheap. If you want to lecture to people, and have them use expensive lab equipment, and have them live on campus, and have hundreds of people, with teams of assistants doing research... It's going to be expensive.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  FWIW that can be reasonable depending on the size of the district. Ours has ~4k+ non-admin employees and 15+ physical plants. That's: * a large enough headcount that you need an HR department, * a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants, * a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space), * a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff, * a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.), * a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools, * a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities), * and several other functions. For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases. FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.
- grimjack00 8y ago
  This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.
  - 8y ago

nameisu 8y ago

admin to student ratio is critical

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

How much does a university do outside of giving classes to students? Don't they also operate a huge research endeavour, patent administration, and operate numerous businesses all at once?

leetcrew 8y ago
universities duplicate many services offered by businesses (and even the government, to an extent) in the surrounding area. i certainly found this convenient as a student, but i always found it a bit silly. wouldn't it be more efficient to just offer an expansive shuttle service to take the students to important places? you could even give stipends to the poorest students. institutions tend to be pretty wasteful when they implement a ton of different out of band stuff in house.
- gowld 8y ago
  What kind of services are extraneous? The problem is that once a campus gets big enough (a few thousand people or more at a residential university), it is the neighborhood, so you have to either provide the community services, or outsource to vendors to provide services on campus. And handing out monopolies to vendors is a bad idea.

wastedhours 8y ago

How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go? Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there. The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away. I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".

kamaal 8y ago
Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption. 12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff. EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).

jillesvangurp 8y ago

It's worse, basically students are taking loans to pay for this. This requires even more admin work so they hire even more administrators.

pastor_elm 8y ago
This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford. They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0] [0}https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financial-aid/ https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financi...
- slezakattack 8y ago
  But what part of that 77% represent the students receiving free tuition based on the 125k family income? I would think that 77% is also lumping students who a) have a free ride from scholarships, academic and/or sports. b) have the financial means to pay their way through.
- seppin 8y ago
  > They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0] How many of them have their parents paying anyways?

majewsky 8y ago

WTF. My alma mater (Dresden University of Technology) has 6000 academic staff and 2500 administrative staff for 35000 students, which sort of matches the expectation that I had before checking.

Sujan 8y ago
I like mine as well: > Administrative staff: 452 > Students: 8000(approx) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applied_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applie...
- village-idiot 8y ago
  I don’t think you’ve really internalized how completely fucked the American education system is. Always assume the worst about it.

baby 8y ago

Well, universities in the US do make a shit ton of money per students they have

Dayshine 8y ago

Not sure this means what you think it means. My unit in the university has: Academic staff: 10 Administrative staff: 70 Students: 0 Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.

akvadrako 8y ago
You call researchers administrators?
- roel_v 8y ago
  Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.
  - kamaal 8y ago
    The question is do you call work from lab techs, programmers etc 'administrative stuff'? Also I doubt if it is a case where researchers just perform the main rituals and others do all the remaining work. If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc. If we have to do this, lets put the saddle on the right horse.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc. That's often how it works these days. Means the university can keep most of the workers on lower pay scales and avoid having to grant them tenure.
    - roel_v 8y ago
      "If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc." Well yeah. Professors are like business unit leaders/managers, acquiring funding for research and setting the main outline of what to do. Then the others (usually, although not always, designated 'administrative staff', or grad students/post docs) execute the work. I'm not sure I would call them 'real workers', that implies that others (i.e., managers) don't do 'real work'. I mean I understand what you say - you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.

imgabe 8y ago

I wonder how many of the administrative staff are in fundraising. That should at least be net-profitable to the university.

throwawayjava 8y ago
I'm always extremely skeptical of this. Fundraising departments tend to claim responsibility for all but the very largest donations when in reality a lot of that money would've come to the school no matter what.

chrisBob 8y ago

I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growth in university administration? Maybe, but I would like to think that despite contributing to the "Admin" headcount you despise I am doing valuable work facilitating scientific research. Universities have two roles: Teaching and Research. You are welcome to your own thoughts about whether or not they should be grouped together the way they are, but that is the current situation, and it turns out that Stanford is a big research university.

Spakman 8y ago
That sounds like an interesting and varied role. Are you enjoying it and getting much from it? Anything you don't like about it?
- Kalium 8y ago
  Working in the maze that is East Hall is usually a big minus.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > That sounds like an interesting and varied role. It is, and it doesn't get as much formal recognition in the research world. Some folks are trying to change this [0], but unfortunately for the moment research software engineers often end up more of a happy accident than a deliberate decision on the part of labs. Part of this is due to weirdness in how funding is allocated for research positions at universities- instead of research programmers being funded through operating expenses like a secretary, administrator or many (but not all) librarians, most lab positions are dependent upon soft money (i.e., grants) that could potentially evaporate unexpectedly. I had a friend at ${BAY_AREA_UNIVERSITY} who almost had this happen to him recently, but fortunately his PI got another grant so he didn't need to get furloughed/laid off. When I was living in Ithaca, I noticed a similar trend of non-faculty taking sabbaticals due to funding issues and then returning 6 months to a year or so later in a different department [1]. That sort of instability in employment is part of what scared me into moving to a major metropolitan area- I still work for a university, but I know I have options (although I'm currently not funded by soft money- last job was though). [0] https://rse.ac.uk/who/ https://rse.ac.uk/who/ [1] Possibly more of a perception than a reality.

Kluny 8y ago

Seriously, I thought computers were supposed to replace all those administrators.

vkou 8y ago
Will a computer fix a broken door? Wash out glassware? Cook 5,000 meals every lunch hour? Knock on a dorm door, when there's a 3 am party going on? Trim the hedges? Roll the AV projector out to the lecture hall that needs it? Ticket someone for parking without a permit? Wash the windows? Or would you prefer tenured professors doing all that work, instead of teaching, or research?
- Kluny 8y ago
  Well, I think custodians fix broken doors, kitchen staff clean the dishwasher and cook meals, RAs (who are normally students as well) knock on the doors, landscapers trim the hedges, and AV techs roll out the projectors. If that's what "administrators" means, then fair enough - but my understanding of the title "administrator" is people who organize the curriculum, schedule staff, students and classrooms, maintain the website, conduct student intake, that kind of thing. And those are the jobs that I would expect to be streamlined via computers.

benmaraschino 8y ago

If you actually go to the source behind that figure (http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/ http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/) and scroll down, you'll find that it actually doesn't refer to the number of administrators--far from it--but rather just the total number of non-academic (i.e., not faculty) staff. Indeed, that figure includes service and maintenance staff, clerical workers, and employees of SLAC, in addition to "managerial and professional" staff, which includes research technicians, of which there are surely hundreds in the SOM alone, librarians, biostatisticians, accountants, lawyers, engineers, grants specialists, programmers, and yes, of course, administrators, among many other titles, but it's just downright wrong to say that Stanford has 12,508 administrators.

hinkley 8y ago
At my university the graduate students (in the engineering college, at least) were frequently research assistants. In that case you would probably be counted as an employee of the university. That data point could change the student-employee ratio from 1:1 to 2:1

pmiller2 8y ago

And here I thought it was bad that the university I went to grad school at had a 1:1 administratior:faculty ratio.