8 ms·

It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge salaries for a

It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge salaries for administrators.

bilbo0s 6y ago
Just to point out what may not be so obvious, the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators". For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on. These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20. Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  > These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different. I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    It would be a combination. The "household name" universities would just be different. Hundreds, like my alma mater, would probably cease to exist.
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      Yeah I think it's true that some institution are reliant on incredibly high tuition costs, and wouldn't be able to survive. But I don't think that's true of the majority, especially when weighted by number of students. ( Imagine it's smaller colleges that are more expensive to operate per student due to a lack of efficiencies of scale. )
- Animats 6y ago
  the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators". Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing. This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff. Stanford has only 2,276 faculty. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/departments https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/departments
  - slavik81 6y ago
    I asked a friend about this stat last year. He was a graduate student at Stanford, and was surprised. A few days later, he came back saying that it appears that a big chunk of the non-faculty staff are researchers. I'm not sure I believe that's the whole story, but I kind of want to see a more detailed breakdown to be sure it's not just a matter of silly categories for reasonable jobs.
  - GregarianChild 6y ago
    Your link [1] seems to suggest that the campus does not just house administration but also clinical departments of the School of Medicine. This may be School of Medicine administration, I am not sure.
    - Animats 6y ago
      It seems to be administration. The School of Medicine and Stanford Hospitals are miles away.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  Many of those departments are not necessary, at least not at their current sizes. Not everything university admin has tasked itself to do needs done.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  > campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20 8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number. Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well. But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class. Edit: University College London has 7700 academic staff and 5375 non-academic staff. (it's a bit annoying but the data is there) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he#provider https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he...
  - sct202 6y ago
    Most large US university have large medical centers attached to them, so at my school our staffing numbers were 1/3 for the university (teaching + admin) and 2/3 medical center. These are not small hospitals.
trianglem 6y ago
It also subsidizes the tuition you have to pay.
- xenihn 6y ago
  You mean the tuition that has increased in order to keep pace with administrator salaries?
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    No, the point was that administrator salaries are not the primary reason for tuition increases. Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).
    - ido 6y ago
      I teach part-time in a private for-profit college in Germany (in which German-citizen students get up to half their tuition paid by the government) & tuition is comparable to the least expensive public state universities in the US. I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.
      - greedo 6y ago
        But then the school would be ranked as a low cost institution, and carry a stigma that many parents and students would want to avoid. There's a reason USC is raising tuition right now. Signaling that it's worth it... My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half. This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit? Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid relative to what they could command in the private sector. If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace? If we compare their relative level of education with your average San Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high? Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage. This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation. Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to, say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source of income. Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more (subsidised) US students to attend. This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case. It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up, or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection between the two. But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't have much support to offer each other.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  You wrote a lot of text, but I think you are speaking from a position of ignorance or emotion, to be honest, on the topic of high salaries. You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system. But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality. As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.
OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
I read my public university's annual finance reports, and there's been a shift away from steady general funds towards less secure non-general funds. My take-away is that as the formerly safe and relatively simple general state funds dried up, universities invested more in securing funding through various creative means. Which requires more and better administration. International student tuition is a big source of general funds. But attracting and supporting them takes some investment. So universities grow and they pay more for people who can better balance the books. University finance is very diversified now. You can't directly see most of it. But you can see a bunch of foreigners walking around campus, and you can look up state employee salaries online. They're symptoms. The problem is that finance is getting more complicated. I think. This is just my layman's understanding.
chrisin2d 6y ago
My alma mater, the University of Illinois, made a uniquely astute and prophetic move in 2017: it purchased a 3-year $60m policy to insure against a drop in Chinese student enrolment in case of a political or health event. They foresaw trouble and hubris from the current administration. Lo and behold...
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  Wow. Great move for U of I, poor move on the insurance company's part.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    I'd disagree. That's exactly what an insurance company is for. If they did their underwriting correctly, both sides are fine.
- axxl 6y ago
  So, slightly more specifically it was the College of Business and College of Engineering only that did this. And since the policy expires June 1st of 2020 unless it got extended (couldn’t find any announcement that it did), I don’t know if the impact will have hit yet.

It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge salaries for administrators.

bilbo0s 6y ago

Just to point out what may not be so obvious, the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators". For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on. These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20. Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.

JamesBarney 6y ago
> These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different. I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  It would be a combination. The "household name" universities would just be different. Hundreds, like my alma mater, would probably cease to exist.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    Yeah I think it's true that some institution are reliant on incredibly high tuition costs, and wouldn't be able to survive. But I don't think that's true of the majority, especially when weighted by number of students. ( Imagine it's smaller colleges that are more expensive to operate per student due to a lack of efficiencies of scale. )
Animats 6y ago
the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators". Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing. This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff. Stanford has only 2,276 faculty. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/departments https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/departments
- slavik81 6y ago
  I asked a friend about this stat last year. He was a graduate student at Stanford, and was surprised. A few days later, he came back saying that it appears that a big chunk of the non-faculty staff are researchers. I'm not sure I believe that's the whole story, but I kind of want to see a more detailed breakdown to be sure it's not just a matter of silly categories for reasonable jobs.
- GregarianChild 6y ago
  Your link [1] seems to suggest that the campus does not just house administration but also clinical departments of the School of Medicine. This may be School of Medicine administration, I am not sure.
  - Animats 6y ago
    It seems to be administration. The School of Medicine and Stanford Hospitals are miles away.
1123581321 6y ago
Many of those departments are not necessary, at least not at their current sizes. Not everything university admin has tasked itself to do needs done.
raverbashing 6y ago
> campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20 8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number. Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well. But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class. Edit: University College London has 7700 academic staff and 5375 non-academic staff. (it's a bit annoying but the data is there) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he#provider https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he...
- sct202 6y ago
  Most large US university have large medical centers attached to them, so at my school our staffing numbers were 1/3 for the university (teaching + admin) and 2/3 medical center. These are not small hospitals.

trianglem 6y ago

It also subsidizes the tuition you have to pay.

xenihn 6y ago
You mean the tuition that has increased in order to keep pace with administrator salaries?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  No, the point was that administrator salaries are not the primary reason for tuition increases. Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).
  - ido 6y ago
    I teach part-time in a private for-profit college in Germany (in which German-citizen students get up to half their tuition paid by the government) & tuition is comparable to the least expensive public state universities in the US. I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.
    - greedo 6y ago
      But then the school would be ranked as a low cost institution, and carry a stigma that many parents and students would want to avoid. There's a reason USC is raising tuition right now. Signaling that it's worth it... My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half. This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit? Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid relative to what they could command in the private sector. If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace? If we compare their relative level of education with your average San Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high? Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage. This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation. Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to, say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source of income. Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more (subsidised) US students to attend. This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case. It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up, or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection between the two. But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't have much support to offer each other.

ggggtez 6y ago
You wrote a lot of text, but I think you are speaking from a position of ignorance or emotion, to be honest, on the topic of high salaries. You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system. But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality. As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.

OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago

I read my public university's annual finance reports, and there's been a shift away from steady general funds towards less secure non-general funds. My take-away is that as the formerly safe and relatively simple general state funds dried up, universities invested more in securing funding through various creative means. Which requires more and better administration. International student tuition is a big source of general funds. But attracting and supporting them takes some investment. So universities grow and they pay more for people who can better balance the books. University finance is very diversified now. You can't directly see most of it. But you can see a bunch of foreigners walking around campus, and you can look up state employee salaries online. They're symptoms. The problem is that finance is getting more complicated. I think. This is just my layman's understanding.

chrisin2d 6y ago

My alma mater, the University of Illinois, made a uniquely astute and prophetic move in 2017: it purchased a 3-year $60m policy to insure against a drop in Chinese student enrolment in case of a political or health event. They foresaw trouble and hubris from the current administration. Lo and behold...

RickJWagner 6y ago
Wow. Great move for U of I, poor move on the insurance company's part.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  I'd disagree. That's exactly what an insurance company is for. If they did their underwriting correctly, both sides are fine.
axxl 6y ago
So, slightly more specifically it was the College of Business and College of Engineering only that did this. And since the policy expires June 1st of 2020 unless it got extended (couldn’t find any announcement that it did), I don’t know if the impact will have hit yet.