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The bizarre thing with higher education costs that no one's really explained to me is why schools simultaneously spend more and more on administrators (who are

• skrbjc 5y ago
  It’s interesting because universities over-produce academics for the number of tenure-track jobs available, so they then hire those phds back into adjunct positions, which is often the only academic job available to them, especially if they don’t want to move across the country to some small college in the middle of nowhere. So many phds just suck it up and take the adjunct jobs teaching undergrads. Actual professors at research universities aren’t really even doing teaching as their primary job. Their primary job is to do research and publish, which is how they progress in their career. But universities need people to teach so they hire adjuncts to teach undergrads, especially the entry level courses. In regards to admin costs, just look at UC Berkeley, they now have a $25 million dollar diversity department that hires nearly a hundred staff, all making over $50k and getting access to the pension system. Lots of people will say departments like this are a good thing, but there’s no question these departments cost a lot of money and inflate administrative costs. Berkeley has 1 staff member for every 2 students at this point. Look at this: “ Establishment of a Supplier Diversity Program at an institution is required when an organization is receiving federal funding for contracts or subcontracts as dictated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARS). The delegation of authority to manage the program is issued through the Office of the President (UCOP) policy.” Talk about regulation causing bloat, to take federal contracts you need to establish an office that tracks and reports the diversity of your contractors. No wonder costs have skyrocketed. https://supplychain.berkeley.edu/supplier-diversity-faqs https://supplychain.berkeley.edu/supplier-diversity-faqs
  • abeppu 5y ago
    But, isn't there a huge gap between: A) tracking and reporting the diversity of your contractors (which I think a techie might accomplish with a google form and a spreadsheet), B) "establish an office" that performs A, C) a "$25 million dollar diversity department that hires nearly a hundred staff"?
  • danny_codes 5y ago
    It does make you wonder though whether this spending is actually bad though. IE, does admin bloat improve university outcomes? If a PI has better resources, is their research output improved? IMO the discussion focuses entirely on cost-to-student, which is of course important, but is possibly missing some important details. A doubling of productivity among research staff at a university like Cal would no doubt correspond to some insane GDP multiplier 20 years down the road.
  • acchow 5y ago
    > Berkeley has 1 staff member for every 2 students at this point. Fascinating. Got a citation for this?
• mabub24 5y ago
  A lot of universities are openly hostile to tenured professors, unless those professors are gigantic names in the field they can use for marketing. Many Universities would be a-okay with ditching tenure all together. The reality is many universities have gotten out of the game of offering quality education. They still offer education, but they are largely indifferent to the quality of the education, so adjuncts will do just as well as any professor. Instead, universities have spent enormous money and effort to protect and emphasize the college/university "experience." Thus you get an enormous amount of handholding and bureaucratization in higher-ed because they're functioning like giant weird resorts with health services, legal services, financial services, extra curricular services, and a whole lot of other crap with education as only the implied "reason" the students are there. > But no school is judged on their regulatory compliance. To a certain degree this is untrue. Student complaints and/or payee (parent) complaints for things like Title IX violations, as one example, mean a potential loss in federal/state funding and negative press. So institutions seek to bureaucratize the whole process from the tip of the root to the highest leaf. Higher-ed in the US has become a kind of ride into adulthood.
  • LeanderK 5y ago
    but aren't "good" universities (also) judged by their research output? Or formulated in another way...isn't the majority of the budget of a good university research where tenured staff matters?
• randomsearch 5y ago
  Well, the most obvious answer is that the administrators are the ones that hire the adjuncts, if you follow. All uni’s I know of in the U.K. have hired hordes of admin staff. I think this is largely due to centralisation, eg rather than have an exam admin in each department, you have a team in a central building. This sounds like it will be more efficient, deduplicate effort etc, and also has the added imagined benefit of presenting all the courses in a similar way, so you can have a “uniform” and “unified” student experience. But this is a fantasy. The reality is that different departments and different courses need to be run according to their specific needs. So the central administration then either fails to address this or hires more people to compensate. And once you remove people from their actual job (ie take them out of the department and change the job from “helping lecturer X get this exam done” to “execute processes A B C” then the potential for bloat and empire building skyrockets. You end up with all sorts of strange initiatives, buildings, and job positions, that seem far removed from simply administering teaching and research. At the same time the U.K. gov slashed funding, moved to a reliance on tuition fees, and pushed universities to run like businesses. Their ostensible purpose and the incentives they face are now dramatically misaligned, so it’s no surprise that the outcomes we see make no apparent sense. It’s far more important to bring in grant funding than provide good education, for example, when you know students will keep paying regardless.