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I think many will agree the largest problem with colleges today is the price. I’d like to point out the immense growth in US college administration personnel si

I think many will agree the largest problem with colleges today is the price. I’d like to point out the immense growth in US college administration personnel size over the last few decades versus the growth of the student body and/or tuition: “The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 year” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ModernMech 4y ago
I think an understated point in your linked article is the following: “I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.” There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.” A lot of people want to treat universities like corporations and apply a corporate model to academia, but that's not quite right; universities are more like cities, the concerns are very broad. Sometimes universities are cities (e.g. State College PA, which doesn't really exist separate and apart from PSU). Cities need bureaucracy. These discussions usually talk about "nonacademic employees" as if they are not contributing to the academic process, but that couldn't be further from the truth. For instance, the office of student affairs will handle student emotional issues so that I don't have to. I'm not trained in that, I'm an academic, so I prefer that they handle these things. If they didn't exist, I'd have to handle every single medical issue my students have, and I have hundreds of students. Better to standardize the process for everyone, which saves times but creates a bureaucracy that takes personnel and costs money. I think the programmers can appreciate the rationale, we do it all the time in designing code. Or take the office of research, which has a whole department to help me with my grant writing. It costs a lot to run that office but it saves us all a lot of time and makes our grants more successful, which benefits everyone including students. Get rid of that office and maybe you'd have more budget for academics employees, but they would each be stretch thinner than they would with the office of research. Taken as a whole I appreciate the support that our non-academic administrative and professional employees provide us. Sure it can be a pain sometimes but my job is easier on balance.
- MaxLeiter 4y ago
  I appreciate your insight. In general I agree, I’m just skeptical at the massive growth (which I felt the article downplayed). Especially when combined with what you said about universities acting like corporations: I believe corps also have a trend of managers hiring people to expand their team and increase their perceived importance.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though. The issue is that resources are flowing to ever increasing full-time administrative staff, while teaching staff are cut and reduced to adjuncts making $28k a year.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    > Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though I don't think you intended to imply this, but just to be clear, adjuncts are educators as much as any other faculty. I work with adjuncts and they are in fact underpaid. I agree it's a position that should be used less, although adjuncts are useful in filling in gaps during the year (e.g. a professor has to take a leave for a semester. It's not worth hiring a full faculty member on a 3 year contract; it's better just to hire an adjunct to cover the class one time). At the same time some universities are going in the other direction, creating well-paid full-time teaching positions, some of them even on a tenure track. We are hiring for one such position now (and actually have been continually hiring for this position for 5 years now)
- skrbjc 4y ago
  As an example, here is an org chart at UC Berkeley for their "Division of Equity and Inclusion". There are 14 positions here that are just at the director level. There are many more people that work under these people. Dania, the vice chancellor, gets paid $277,027 a year. Universities are chock full of administrators like these that they never had prior and all of these departments will continually strive to grow their budgets and employee counts in an effort to expand and prove their importance and value.
paulpauper 4y ago
I don't think price is the problem even though there is tons of debt. The problem rather is the high dropout rate. Students nowadays have so much financial aid. Unless you come from a rich family, scholarships and aid are abundant. Students very seldom pay the quoted sticker price. But I agree that there is probably also a lot of waste too.
banannaise 4y ago
This is part of the aggressive financialization of everything. The most direct example is that there are whole departments for handling loans, and the cost of those departments are figured into the price of education!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ModernMech 4y ago

I think an understated point in your linked article is the following: “I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.” There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.” A lot of people want to treat universities like corporations and apply a corporate model to academia, but that's not quite right; universities are more like cities, the concerns are very broad. Sometimes universities are cities (e.g. State College PA, which doesn't really exist separate and apart from PSU). Cities need bureaucracy. These discussions usually talk about "nonacademic employees" as if they are not contributing to the academic process, but that couldn't be further from the truth. For instance, the office of student affairs will handle student emotional issues so that I don't have to. I'm not trained in that, I'm an academic, so I prefer that they handle these things. If they didn't exist, I'd have to handle every single medical issue my students have, and I have hundreds of students. Better to standardize the process for everyone, which saves times but creates a bureaucracy that takes personnel and costs money. I think the programmers can appreciate the rationale, we do it all the time in designing code. Or take the office of research, which has a whole department to help me with my grant writing. It costs a lot to run that office but it saves us all a lot of time and makes our grants more successful, which benefits everyone including students. Get rid of that office and maybe you'd have more budget for academics employees, but they would each be stretch thinner than they would with the office of research. Taken as a whole I appreciate the support that our non-academic administrative and professional employees provide us. Sure it can be a pain sometimes but my job is easier on balance.

MaxLeiter 4y ago
I appreciate your insight. In general I agree, I’m just skeptical at the massive growth (which I felt the article downplayed). Especially when combined with what you said about universities acting like corporations: I believe corps also have a trend of managers hiring people to expand their team and increase their perceived importance.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though. The issue is that resources are flowing to ever increasing full-time administrative staff, while teaching staff are cut and reduced to adjuncts making $28k a year.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though I don't think you intended to imply this, but just to be clear, adjuncts are educators as much as any other faculty. I work with adjuncts and they are in fact underpaid. I agree it's a position that should be used less, although adjuncts are useful in filling in gaps during the year (e.g. a professor has to take a leave for a semester. It's not worth hiring a full faculty member on a 3 year contract; it's better just to hire an adjunct to cover the class one time). At the same time some universities are going in the other direction, creating well-paid full-time teaching positions, some of them even on a tenure track. We are hiring for one such position now (and actually have been continually hiring for this position for 5 years now)
skrbjc 4y ago
As an example, here is an org chart at UC Berkeley for their "Division of Equity and Inclusion". There are 14 positions here that are just at the director level. There are many more people that work under these people. Dania, the vice chancellor, gets paid $277,027 a year. Universities are chock full of administrators like these that they never had prior and all of these departments will continually strive to grow their budgets and employee counts in an effort to expand and prove their importance and value.

paulpauper 4y ago

I don't think price is the problem even though there is tons of debt. The problem rather is the high dropout rate. Students nowadays have so much financial aid. Unless you come from a rich family, scholarships and aid are abundant. Students very seldom pay the quoted sticker price. But I agree that there is probably also a lot of waste too.

banannaise 4y ago

This is part of the aggressive financialization of everything. The most direct example is that there are whole departments for handling loans, and the cost of those departments are figured into the price of education!