7 ms·

I work at one local university, and my wife works at another. One thing we've definitely noticed (and this is a widespread problem) is that the administration i

I work at one local university, and my wife works at another. One thing we've definitely noticed (and this is a widespread problem) is that the administration is becoming more top-heavy. There are cutbacks in faculty, support, and teaching staff, more reliance on adjuncts (academic temps, basically), and so on, while central administration grows. Expensive new buildings contribute, but less than people suppose. But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds.

big_chungus 7y ago
Ahh, the iron law of bureaucracy at work. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
wtvanhest 7y ago
Yes, admin is a problem, but its not just admin. If you are a professor making 150k+, you have to ask yourself how much of your salary is being funded by rampant, unsustainable borrowing. Colleges need dramatic, across the board cost cutting including professors, admins etc. Colleges are in for a world of pain in the next 50 years.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  >If you are a professor making 150k+, you have to ask yourself how much of your salary is being funded by rampant, unsustainable borrowing. Also, how much of your funding comes from unsavory sources like Jeffrey Epstein and the Saudi government.
- Bjartr 7y ago
  Why shouldn't a professor make 150k? I mean, from a societal point of view.
  - ahi 7y ago
    How much of that is skimming off what the grad students do? ...who get a poverty wage adjunct position
  - wtvanhest 7y ago
    If that is what they are earning without burdening thousands of students with unsustainable debt over their careers than I'd argue nothing is wrong with it. For example if the salary is 100% from NIH grants and the prof makes 500k, more power to them. If the prof makes 100k and all their salary is funded by student loans, then they should decide whether their livelihood is worth the externalities they are creating. Its a moral choice
    - lazypenguin 7y ago
      150k/year. Let’s assume the professor teaches 4 units per semester and maybe 2 in the summer (or research or some equivalent). Comes out to 15k/unit. Let’s say 15 students per unit just to represent smaller classes comes to $1k/unit/student/year. Each unit is like 3hrs/week for 12 weeks on average. So comes out to something like $28/hr. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Average course load for a student is like 6 units a semester so using the back-of-the napkin math above it should cost roughly $6k/per semester for students to have a full course load of $150k professors. $12k/year + other expenses is a far cry away from $100k that is being charged.
      - wtvanhest 7y ago
        $12k a year is completely unacceptable. Other costs are also unacceptable. Colleges charge $500+/month for shared rooms. And require freshman to stay in them. Nevermind the fact that your math misses several major cost categories like building maintenance, fringe benefits for professors (+30% of salaries at least). In your hypothetical example, students are paying $20k/year before getting ripped off on the cost of the dorm and meal plan. If a prof is making 150k, class sizes need to be 300+ and they need to teach 1,000 kids a semester
haberman 7y ago
Do colleges make their budgets public? When a program is taking too long to run the first step is to profile. What does the data say on college costs? > But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds. In the past I've felt quite motivated to give to scholarship funds. It resonates a lot if you yourself relied on scholarships to go to college. But I feel somewhat more cynical about this since I've seen costs spiraling out of control. The actual price of college can have anything bundled in there. I want to support students, but I feel less good about supporting ballooning costs that are twice inflation when I haven't heard a good reason for this.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Certainly public colleges have public budgets.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Alex Tabarrok disagrees: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bloat-does-not-explain-the-rising-cost-of-education.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...
- Finnucane 7y ago
  That data is only for public universities.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Arguably those are the only ones we should care about -- they're getting our state tax funds. Private Uni's are, well, private. They can charge what they want, and if the average Pell Grant or other DoE loans aren't enough that's not the Uni's problem.
moduspol 7y ago
I worked for five years at a private university a few years ago, and my experience is similar, although to add a little: It never felt like a plan or conspiracy to make administration costs bigger. It's just very easy to do when you have more money coming in, year after year. In another economic environment, you'd get a "hard no" because the money isn't there. But when there is, expenditures become just another bargaining chip. Maybe you get your seventh librarian this year, and I get my fifth network guy next year. New buildings (as you stated) aren't as big of a contributor as expected due to the convoluted role of donations, grants, etc. But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. And even then we were getting projections of our "debt capacity" and always riding that line, so it's debt on top of debt all the way down. I don't know about big schools, but for a smaller one like ours, there was no visible bad faith. These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors.
- supahfly_remix 7y ago
  Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?
  - moduspol 7y ago
    I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
o09rdk 7y ago
Former tenured professor. I think your impression is generally spot-on although there's nuances and it's more complicated than that. In general, universities are suffering from many of the same pressures as other fields. Nonprofits are being run as profit-generating centers, and the implicit promotion track goes from faculty to senior faculty to administration, if you're even on tenure track. The administration salaries are increasing, as are the number of administrative positions (deans, associate deans, vice associate deans, assistant deans, etc.), and the structures are becoming increasingly hierarchical. Things are very top-heavy and expensive to run because the salary budget is so disproportionately distributed. I don't think that's all of it, though. The rest of it is harder to quantify, but is the flip side of the educational bubble coin. Students are rushing to go to college in record numbers, which then puts pressure on colleges to stand out to attract more students and more high-paying students who become high-donating alumni. Institutions that should be getting public funding are not, which then trickles down to students; other private institutions then benefit from the increased tuition norms etc. It's a complicated problem that involves HR and administrative practices and norms, economic incentives within university funding structures, incentives coming from a broken employment system in the US, problematic incentives coming from federal grant structures, etc. etc. etc. etc.
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Can you expand on the broken employment system in the US? Honestly just curious.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    If I had to complain about things, it would be these: 1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete 2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead
    - paulddraper 7y ago
cmpolis 7y ago
This comment is sadly familiar to me - it sounds exactly how my friends in healthcare describe the state of their industry (more admin, fancy buildings, less focus or spending on patient care).
gnicholas 7y ago
An AEI report on 'administrative bloat' in higher education: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/diversity-and-other-administrative-monstrosities-in-higher-education/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/diversity-and-other-administr...
- setpatchaddress 7y ago
  AEI is a hard-rightish conservative think tank. I’d be wary of trusting anything they publish about money and schools.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    You're right that they're libertarian/conservative in this regard. But they've published a number of articles with relevant facts about the growth of administrative roles in higher ed, and the associated costs. I haven't seen those facts questioned anywhere — have you?

big_chungus 7y ago

Ahh, the iron law of bureaucracy at work. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

wtvanhest 7y ago

Yes, admin is a problem, but its not just admin. If you are a professor making 150k+, you have to ask yourself how much of your salary is being funded by rampant, unsustainable borrowing. Colleges need dramatic, across the board cost cutting including professors, admins etc. Colleges are in for a world of pain in the next 50 years.

Finnucane 7y ago
>If you are a professor making 150k+, you have to ask yourself how much of your salary is being funded by rampant, unsustainable borrowing. Also, how much of your funding comes from unsavory sources like Jeffrey Epstein and the Saudi government.
Bjartr 7y ago
Why shouldn't a professor make 150k? I mean, from a societal point of view.
- ahi 7y ago
  How much of that is skimming off what the grad students do? ...who get a poverty wage adjunct position
- wtvanhest 7y ago
  If that is what they are earning without burdening thousands of students with unsustainable debt over their careers than I'd argue nothing is wrong with it. For example if the salary is 100% from NIH grants and the prof makes 500k, more power to them. If the prof makes 100k and all their salary is funded by student loans, then they should decide whether their livelihood is worth the externalities they are creating. Its a moral choice
  - lazypenguin 7y ago
    150k/year. Let’s assume the professor teaches 4 units per semester and maybe 2 in the summer (or research or some equivalent). Comes out to 15k/unit. Let’s say 15 students per unit just to represent smaller classes comes to $1k/unit/student/year. Each unit is like 3hrs/week for 12 weeks on average. So comes out to something like $28/hr. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Average course load for a student is like 6 units a semester so using the back-of-the napkin math above it should cost roughly $6k/per semester for students to have a full course load of $150k professors. $12k/year + other expenses is a far cry away from $100k that is being charged.
    - wtvanhest 7y ago
      $12k a year is completely unacceptable. Other costs are also unacceptable. Colleges charge $500+/month for shared rooms. And require freshman to stay in them. Nevermind the fact that your math misses several major cost categories like building maintenance, fringe benefits for professors (+30% of salaries at least). In your hypothetical example, students are paying $20k/year before getting ripped off on the cost of the dorm and meal plan. If a prof is making 150k, class sizes need to be 300+ and they need to teach 1,000 kids a semester

haberman 7y ago

Do colleges make their budgets public? When a program is taking too long to run the first step is to profile. What does the data say on college costs? > But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds. In the past I've felt quite motivated to give to scholarship funds. It resonates a lot if you yourself relied on scholarships to go to college. But I feel somewhat more cynical about this since I've seen costs spiraling out of control. The actual price of college can have anything bundled in there. I want to support students, but I feel less good about supporting ballooning costs that are twice inflation when I haven't heard a good reason for this.

paulddraper 7y ago
Certainly public colleges have public budgets.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Alex Tabarrok disagrees: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bloat-does-not-explain-the-rising-cost-of-education.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...

Finnucane 7y ago
That data is only for public universities.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Arguably those are the only ones we should care about -- they're getting our state tax funds. Private Uni's are, well, private. They can charge what they want, and if the average Pell Grant or other DoE loans aren't enough that's not the Uni's problem.

moduspol 7y ago

I worked for five years at a private university a few years ago, and my experience is similar, although to add a little: It never felt like a plan or conspiracy to make administration costs bigger. It's just very easy to do when you have more money coming in, year after year. In another economic environment, you'd get a "hard no" because the money isn't there. But when there is, expenditures become just another bargaining chip. Maybe you get your seventh librarian this year, and I get my fifth network guy next year. New buildings (as you stated) aren't as big of a contributor as expected due to the convoluted role of donations, grants, etc. But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. And even then we were getting projections of our "debt capacity" and always riding that line, so it's debt on top of debt all the way down. I don't know about big schools, but for a smaller one like ours, there was no visible bad faith. These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors.

supahfly_remix 7y ago
Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?
- moduspol 7y ago
  I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport. I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so. And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side. But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.

o09rdk 7y ago

Former tenured professor. I think your impression is generally spot-on although there's nuances and it's more complicated than that. In general, universities are suffering from many of the same pressures as other fields. Nonprofits are being run as profit-generating centers, and the implicit promotion track goes from faculty to senior faculty to administration, if you're even on tenure track. The administration salaries are increasing, as are the number of administrative positions (deans, associate deans, vice associate deans, assistant deans, etc.), and the structures are becoming increasingly hierarchical. Things are very top-heavy and expensive to run because the salary budget is so disproportionately distributed. I don't think that's all of it, though. The rest of it is harder to quantify, but is the flip side of the educational bubble coin. Students are rushing to go to college in record numbers, which then puts pressure on colleges to stand out to attract more students and more high-paying students who become high-donating alumni. Institutions that should be getting public funding are not, which then trickles down to students; other private institutions then benefit from the increased tuition norms etc. It's a complicated problem that involves HR and administrative practices and norms, economic incentives within university funding structures, incentives coming from a broken employment system in the US, problematic incentives coming from federal grant structures, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Ancalagon 7y ago
Can you expand on the broken employment system in the US? Honestly just curious.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  If I had to complain about things, it would be these: 1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete 2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead
  - paulddraper 7y ago

cmpolis 7y ago

This comment is sadly familiar to me - it sounds exactly how my friends in healthcare describe the state of their industry (more admin, fancy buildings, less focus or spending on patient care).

gnicholas 7y ago

An AEI report on 'administrative bloat' in higher education: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/diversity-and-other-administrative-monstrosities-in-higher-education/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/diversity-and-other-administr...

setpatchaddress 7y ago
AEI is a hard-rightish conservative think tank. I’d be wary of trusting anything they publish about money and schools.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  You're right that they're libertarian/conservative in this regard. But they've published a number of articles with relevant facts about the growth of administrative roles in higher ed, and the associated costs. I haven't seen those facts questioned anywhere — have you?