24 ms·

Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

378 points by tomohawk 4y ago

rocket_surgeron 4y ago
Given that this is quillette one would think they would be hesitant to question the wise and steady hand of the free market. Surely the rationally-acting rational actors at all of these institutions are acting rationally in accordance with rationality? After all, we live in a time when any "entrepreneur" can affix his name to a suburban sprawl wasteland strip mall storefront, open a University, and get accredited by at least SOMEONE and drive all of the wasteful and bloated (and liberal sissy-manchild-- their words not mine) institutions out of business, using the holy and righteous motive of PROFIT to deliver a better, cheaper, more rationally rational product to all of the young impressionable minds out there, right?
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  University education in the US is very far from a free market. They’re kinda the worst of both worlds: massively subsidized by the state and federal governments, with very little government oversight.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    What man or law or king can stop me from opening a university and getting it accredited? None. Several open every year. All you need is the capital and that’s what we’re all about, baby! And then you can get the same subsidies and low levels of oversight as the big boys!
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      The supply is still constrained, though. Despite massive population growth and a simultaneous increase in the percentage of people choosing to go to college, new institutions are accredited at a lower rate now than they were in the mid 20th century. It would be interesting to see the trends in the costs of getting accredited over the decades.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      Yes, you can open a college/university without being accredited, but you might find it's not such a good idea. Direct subsidies will be out. Most kinds of student loans and other aid will be out. You're going to have a bit of trouble attracting faculty or students, except those who are desperate. And if your students are demonstrably not getting any benefit from attending you'll be shut down as a fraud. People really lost patience with that crap after Corinthian, Capella, etc. so there are a lot of new limits and regulations. Basically the only non-accredited colleges that can make a go of it are those that have some other kind of rich sponsor - most often a religious one.
- HKH2 4y ago
  I didn't realize that guaranteed loans and government subsidies are part of the free market.
  - rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    If every player gets them, they could be.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      No, they could not; that is either wealth redistribution or pointless. You can't make risk disappear magically.
lob_it 4y ago
The irony of educators not being able to do math was..... Elementary.. It starts in kindergarten. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/underfunded-teacher-pension-plans-its-worse-you-think-5843.html https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/underfunded-teacher... Just grabbed a random link for the above, but underfunded retirement accounts and underfunded pensions explain math in 2022 quite well. Any inferior integer is good enough /s A few links that date back to 1993 (pulled at random): https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-ge-not-alone-25-companies-owe-trillion-pension-payments/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-ge-no... https://www.deseret.com/1993/12/12/19081151/list-of-underfunded-pension-plans-called-unfair https://www.deseret.com/1993/12/12/19081151/list-of-underfun... https://nrtwc.org/underfunded-union-pensions/ https://nrtwc.org/underfunded-union-pensions/ Many industries are "beyond a crisis", its not a permacrisis :p The public employee pensions are their own mess too
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Imo it is the bloated general education requirements, squeezing as much money from students as possible. It should only take 2 years to earn a bachelor’s. I believe if these classes were optional, they would not survive in the curriculum. University should not be in the business of propping up classes that no one wants, or professors who don’t have classes to teach.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > It should only take 2 years to earn a bachelor’s Only if you assume that the purpose of a bachelor's is to provide job training in one specific profession. Not so much if you believe in the value of a well-rounded education, for people who are likely to change careers multiple times, maybe also be civic leaders, etc. I'm not saying you're wrong, but the debate between these two visions has been going on for centuries and IMO it's not very useful to assume one answer (especially without recognizing the assumption as such).
  - feet 4y ago
    Good thing 2 year associates and vocational training is a thing. Is the OP complaining that bachelors are not those?
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      No. They’re complaining that they’re not a deep study of a particular academic field, like they are in most countries.
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    I thought elementary/middle/high school was for general purpose and moral education while college was for specialization. I guess you could argue that the amount of general purpose knowledge you need nowadays has increased but I agree with OP that ~50% of your college education being unrelated to your specialization seems unnecessary.
    - 4y ago
SilverBirch 4y ago
This is... strange. The issue of a price would seem to me to be an issue of supply and demand. Yet, this article talks about a weirdly tangential topic. This article seems to put forward the idea that the administration of colleges has become bloated and this has led to higher fees. But that's simply not the causal chain. No one in any administration is thinking "better put that tuition up, and accept the loss in candidates to justify this new diversity officer". Demand is through the roof - there are 20 candidates for every 1 place, and those candidates have almost unlimited access to loans. So the price is immaterial, if you get a place, you pay whatever they ask. So sure, there's going to be administrative bloat - because there's literally no limit to the purse strings. And this is exacerbated by university rankings which will literally list staff:student ratio as a metric. But none of this has anything to do with Quillette's racist agenda.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  And yet education costs were exponentially lower until about 1-2 decades ago where they exploded. Despite demand being ridiculously high even in the past.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Reduced state funding is a significant component of rapidly rising higher ed costs in the US. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-education-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryan93 4y ago
      Doesn’t explain why a bostonU accounting degree costs 50k a year. Also doesnt answer why I should pay for someone else’s useless umass Boston econ or psych degree
    - fallingknife 4y ago
gaoshan 4y ago
States cut funding to public schools, costs rise to accommodate those cuts which spills over into every part of the education market. At the same time schools increase spending on non-academic upgrades to appeal to prospective students bringing higher costs (and more administrators). I think that may account for the bulk of the increases.
- kxyvr 4y ago
  To add to this, Pew has an article that talks about a variety of topics including funding of higher education: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-education-funding https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri... If you look at Figure 4, within the last 10 years, and for the first time ever, the amount of federal money flowing into state universities exceeded state money. There are all sorts of consequences for this. Mostly, I mention this to echo that state contributions to higher education have gone down consistently and the editorial's assertion that the high cost of a university education can be reduced to a bloated administration is a simplified argument of a complex issue that is likely made in bad faith.
- tomohawk 4y ago
  Can you provide any evidence of these cuts? > In 2018, the United States spent $14,400 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 34 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $10,800 (in constant 2020 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $35,100 per FTE student, which was double the average of OECD countries ($17,600). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd How much spending is enough?
  - Nihilartikel 4y ago
    A data point of USA exceptionality is that a significant portion of such money that pays employees must necessarily be allocated to the parasitic healthcare complex.
- 4y ago
dave333 4y ago
Education should be recast as a sort of MMORPG instead of a physical campus. Would be 100th or 1000th the cost and achieve 80% of the results. Kahn Academy and the like are a start.
- HKH2 4y ago
  Lectures could be, but tutorials are nowhere near as good online.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Rather the issue is that there is a lot of garbage tutorials out there. It takes a lot of effort the find out the correct tutorials
    - dave333 4y ago
      Rating and continuous improvement can obviously fix this.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      I meant talking face to face is way better than Zoom. If you can find a group willing to talk in person about whatever it is you want to study, it should work.
  - dave333 4y ago
    Tutorials don't really need paid tutors if peer to peer Q+A like a discussion forum is available. Another concept that could improve things is team education - you get marked on your own achievements but also partially on how your whole team does - so you have incentive to help others along.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      Yeah I don't think tutors do all that much if everyone is motivated. What I meant was that conversations in person are often more productive, especially when you're trying to get motivated.
erdos4d 4y ago
Administration is one component but another is student life/amenities. Lots of schools borrow to keep up in the arms race for new swanky dorms, gyms, aquatic centers, climbing centers, you name it. Then they need dough, so they shake down their clients, the students. Oftentimes standards are viewed as less important than continuing the student loans that pay for the school's loans. Going back to simpler times when you got a little bullshit dorm room or shacked up in a greek house and made your own fun might be an answer here too. But I agree that admin bloat is real and most of these positions seem to be some mix of bullshit job or student entertainment coordinator.
lob_it 4y ago
I've passed several articles years back when I used to read forbes about poor conditions for adjunct professors: https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more-than-half-of-college-faculty-are-adjuncts-should-you-care/?sh=460a80091600 https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more... The evolution of education has already been diluted (die looted :p). I just saw a video on California's education system in the middle of the 20th century, compared to where it is today (actually thier ecomony). Not the finest of the bunch in the 21st century. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho... Economic evolution happens :)
md_ 4y ago
There are compelling alternative explanations for the rising cost of education (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease#Education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease#Educ...). If the underlying cause were primarily administrative overhead, that should be readily apparent in the (public) budget of any public university. I’m not going to go do Silvergate’s research for him, but I’m surprised he doesn’t cite such a readily available piece of compelling evidence, which at best suggests he’s too lazy to track it down, and at worst that reality does not support his hypothesis.
- graeme 4y ago
  The admin staff are also subject to Baumol's cost disease.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Some are, some aren't. If some function required the same ratio of admin to students to perform, it would be. But many things have been made more productive. Most schools have fully automated the course selection process except for the academic advisor. Schools can take advantage of automations in admissions, bursar, financial aid, etc. I think Baumol's cost disease explains a lot of the increase. I find it suspicious that it's not mentioned in TFA. But there are other drivers, of which much higher student expectations play a part. A school patterned after a typical university in the 60s would have some charm but probably students would not enjoy the Spartan living environment or the lack of support services.
    - graeme 4y ago
      Yes, and teachers can grade some assignments electronically with a click. But generally speaking admin work has not kept up with the productivity of manufacturing positions. In fact given that the numbers of admin staff per student and per graduate has increased, you could credibly argue admin productivity has declined.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yieldcrv 4y ago
Is that a winning campaign strategy?
etempleton 4y ago
Double edged sword. What the author proposes can be found. Go to some small low endowment private or public school for less money. Oh wait, you say, I don’t want to go there! The buildings aren’t as nice, the dorms are cramped and drab, there aren’t as many resources, the food sucks, the Wi-Fi is spotty, heck even the website sucks. Why is this? Because they don’t have the human or financial resources to do so. You get what you pay for. Student and parent expectations have changed and so have college and universities. If you want what colleges used to be like 50 years ago go to a small private or public school that is just barely staying afloat, it will be more or less similar to the so called halcyon days of low cost, no frills college. The thing is—people don’t want this as voted for by their choice in school. The biggest drops in enrollment are at community colleges, state schools, and small private schools. If people were price sensitive cheap schools would have people busting down the doors to get in. They don’t. In fact, when a college lowers their tuition, they paradoxically often see a dip in enrollments. Why? Because human brains are broken. We connate price with prestige and prestige with quality. Colleges get punished if they lower the price, so what do they do instead? They increase the discount rate. Rarely do families pay the sticker price. Google any college tuition and you will see average price paid. It is typically anywhere from 50-75% of sticker price.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I don't think Colorado State is a top-tier college - in a pretty quiet place - no big names - but when I visited it from the UK for a conference I could not believe how nice and polished everything was. Beautiful buildings and spaces. I did some coding in a kind of forum with a large open fire and two-storey glass walls looking out over the snow. Very inspirational. I guess it costs though.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  Then why is this only mainly a US problem?
  - kragen 4y ago
    Student loans make tuition-payers cost-insensitive.
D13Fd 4y ago
I think the article misses the root cause here. Drastically increased availability of loan-based financial aid means far more more money in the system, which means the prices go up. The article nails the cause of more administrators--the schools have more money to spend and need to spend it--but completely misses the reason schools are able to charge so much more these days.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  > which means the prices go up. Yeah, but you're ignoring the mechanics of that happening. > completely misses the reason schools are able to charge so much more these days. I don't think it misses it. I think it just ignores it as a matter of practicality. It would take an act of god to get money removed from the system, but there is a very real chance he could cut some cost and bloat from single, incredibly influential, school.
- Retric 4y ago
  More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Instead you get very expensive options for people with more money and cheap options for the cost cautious. Collage is largely an exception to that as elite schools don’t charge 100+x the average the way say watches, clothing, etc do, and most people aren’t going with the low cost options.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    > More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Do you have an example? Supply and demand is exactly what drives the prices up. People have a huge supply of dollars due to financial aid loans, and cannot spend those dollars on anything but education. With more money available, schools charge more. It’s the same mechanism as inflation.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Manufactured goods generally follow this trend of increasing total money being spent resulting in a lower cost per unit. Microwaves, toasters, dishwashers, flatscreen TV’s, etc are all vastly cheaper today than when they first hit the shelves. The best example bing transistors, we are dumping vastly more money into them and getting ever lower prices. Commodities often follow a similar trend with global Steel production resulting in lower prices per pound over long stretches of time. The trend is less obvious over short periods of time but compare steel prices every 50 years say 1820, 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2020. Some things like beachfront property are inherently in short supply, but it’s hard to argue that applies to collages across decades.
legitster 4y ago
I think this relationship might be a bit backwards. Easy credit made it so demand for degrees outstripped capacity. Schools raised prices to meter demand. At these increased prices, schools felt compelled to invest in programs and administration. Also, as I understand it, the accreditation process is pretty broken in the country. Whatever the top programs are doing becomes the benchmark for everyone else to match. So it's a never ending treadmill to keep up.
- bumby 4y ago
  Don’t employers have a contribution to this as well? There’s many positions that don’t really need college degrees yet list them as a requirement. I feel if people could get gainful employment without college, demand would fall.
  - pas 4y ago
    human resources (and the labor market, and the whole employment culture in general) in the US is very suboptimal :/ a lot of cultural differences (and other historic path dependencies) led to using degrees and other signals for hiring instead of actual performance. even by-definition woke (and I'm not using it pejoratively here) employers have trouble letting go of their mindless credentialism. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1539188973553299457 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1539188973553299457 [audio version seems non-paywalled https://curio.io/publications/matthew-yglesias/matthew-yglesias/why-progressive-organizations-have-become-so-vulnerable-to-staff-meltdowns https://curio.io/publications/matthew-yglesias/matthew-ygles... see also https://www.slowboring.com/p/crt-school https://www.slowboring.com/p/crt-school ]
- hollandheese 4y ago
  Why aren't prices falling then due to decreased demand?
1270018080 4y ago
Supply and demand is making education unaffordable. The government subsidizes student loans which increases demand of course, but they subsidize at such an irrational rate it also gives colleges a blank check to charge whatever they want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
emmelaich 4y ago
Probably the demand is too high because the degrees are too easy to get. Save for most STEM and subjects that have an external certification (bar exams).
hamiltonians 4y ago
It has to do with the wage premium. it is still widdening for college grads. This needs to change for demand and thus prices and aid to fall. governments subsidize college so much because of the high roi.
greenthrow 4y ago
PRO TIP: Don't pontificate about things you are not an expert on. You usually are missing a lot of context and detail and if you are right it will only be by accident. College is too expensive, but it's not because people who work at universities are overpaid.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Isn't the whole point of Web 2.0 that random people who aren't journalists or experts can post comments? The website operator then gets the users to provide their own content without the expense of hiring journalists, actors, writers. (That and rounded corners).
- newsclues 4y ago
  If it isn't overpaid bloated admin, what is the cause? I worked in EDU.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    Businesses that use a bachelor's degree requirement as blunt hiring filter. Loose credit that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Colleges are in a rankings arms race instead of prioritizing affordability.
    - newsclues 4y ago
      So there is an issue with the lending system, that allows the bloated admin to continue to exist. Colleges are investing in amenities instead of quality, affordable education, because the bloated admin is useless and corrupt, so they spend on big ticket sports facilities and buildings (where does the money go?) to justify the administrative excesses (if you build a $100 million stadium it's easier to justify a few million to renovate the presidents office). The root of the problem is the terrible leadership, that is enabled by the broken funding model. Fixing the funding model won't resolve the leadership problems.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Let's see those credentials.
thexumaker 4y ago
I will say there for sure is a certain percentage of administration at most public colleges that should be cut. Coming from the UC system, there are wayyyy too much bureaucratic bloat. But at the same time they do provide a lot of support even if it's for smaller niche groups of people on campus, which without them would make going there a much worse experience. There should be a middle ground in reducing costs of overpaid bureaucratic bloat while also providing everyone on campus enough support, from undergrads to grad students to professors, etc. The best solution here is just to start enforcing pip quotas lol.
testfoobar 4y ago
In the US, both college education and healthcare have become enormous taxpayer wealth extraction schemes. Everyone has a "right" to education and healthcare, therefore we should subsidize it with taxpayer money. That is as far as the politics go. We have stupidly funded the demand side of the equation to where both education and healthcare are incredibly bloated behemoths capable of absorbing all the money thrown at them. All perfectly justified. Where the taxpayer money should have gone: on the supply side. For example, the number of UC campuses in California should have doubled as the population doubled. The last UC campus to open was Merced in 2005. Before that was Irvine and Santa Cruz in 1965. And we wonder why tuition keeps increasing? 1) Demand increases with population increase. 2) Demand increase with more people seeking 4 yr degrees. 3) Demand increases with the US subsidizing the ever living shit out of college tuition. 4) Supply stays relatively constant. Similarly Obamacare drove the demand side by subsidizing health insurance and onboarding millions of new members. It did almost nothing on the supply side - same number of hospital beds and doctors. Insurers and medical groups made a killing as the price of their services grew dramatically. In both cases, political stability was achieved in shoveling taxpayer money at education and healthcare without increasing competition. This is a very clever way for existing vendors in healthcare and education to soak the government. Solution: drive prices down by investing in supply of education and healthcare.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Drive the price down by increasing seats and then fostering competition between schools." The seats have increased dramatically. You won't be able to create efficient competition. The value shoppers already go to state schools. The other people are looking for a specific "quality" or just plain emotion (my family went here, this school is prestigious, etc). Supply isn't the real issue in most disciplines. The problem is the demand side individuals making economically dumb choices (sometimes semi-forced by the larger societal situation).
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Handing out bales of money in the form of guaranteed loans enables this price insensitivity and accelerates price increases.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Even in Canada it’s getting worse. I finished undergrad in 2010. Back then I paid about $3000CAD per term. Someone in my program I met recently is paying $4800. The program is the same. Admin keeps growing.
Animats 4y ago
Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators.[1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human resources, development and Land, Buildings & Real Estate. Stanford will be the city’s third-largest employer in Redwood City." Amenities: * Cardinal Café -- Located on the first floor of Cardinal Hall, serving globally- and regionally-inspired cuisine for breakfast and lunch. * Recreation & Wellness Center -- The 28,000 square foot facility includes a six-lane rooftop pool, indoor basketball court, state-of-the-art fitness equipment, locker rooms, showers and an outdoor fitness courtyard. * Stanford Transportation * Digital Media Production Studio * Wellness and Lactation Rooms * Dry Cleaning * Pine Cone Children's Center * Stanford Catering & Conferences * Stanford Federal Credit Union [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/
- kbenson 4y ago
  From what I'm seeing online Stanford has about 22k students in 2022. 2700 does seem like a large number compared to the student population, and given it seems like it isn't meant to house all the administrative staff, that does seem like a lot. That said, Stanford is private, so I'm not sure they're a good example. Various state universities seem like they would be a more apt target to look at to see what this is like in reality.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    According to the internet: Stanford University has 24,916 employees.Jul 11, 2022
    - ohnonotyouagain 4y ago
      That might include grad students? See below from https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ In 2021 15,750 staff members supported teaching, learning, research and core operations at Stanford ...This includes ... 1,603 staff at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory .. Includes clinical educator and research staff.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
Here's an idea: Public, government-owned (but not operated) colleges. Fueled by taxpayers and completely free for students. Students who wish to pursue higher education shouldn't even have to think about finances for that education, aside from maybe the travel and food expenses (although now with remote work/learning that also is going down)
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  I think many Americans imagine the above to be infeasible and that university is somehow inherently expensive. However, university can be very cheap. Here in Sweden university education, which is here funded in the way proposed above (i.e. the government pays for it all, for those students who get in) costs the state less than high school education costs the state (72 000 SEK/a for university, 124 300 SEK/a for high school). I imagine that it could be the same way in the US.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    College football isn't a cultural pillar in Sweden.
    - impossiblefork 4y ago
      Yes, but it's not like you can't just drop it. Quite few people play it anyway.
      - boppo1 4y ago
        >it's not like you can't just drop it In the US? No we absolutely can't. College football is practically a religion. Its cultural importance cannot be overstated. I don't care about it at all and never have but oh biy do other people ever. People's lives revolve around it.
        impossiblefork 4y ago
        But surely the goal of university is letting people get a university level education-- become mathematicians, physicians, engineers, teachers etcetera, serving the need of society for diverse types of semi-experts. Furthermore, surely there is no need for additional facilities; and surely they don't need to be fancy.
fredgrott 4y ago
It should be pointed out that research universities were always ill-equipped to deal with a high demand of university classes. What is better is the hub approach of key-research public universities, say five per state and then ten commuter campuses that re-use courseware from the research facalities. In fact in the USA several states are moving to this model, including such states as Indiana.
EricE 4y ago
They can only get away with this crap due to government subsidized student loans. Remove the artificial inflation of cheap government money and this crap would self-correct overnight. Even better - make colleges guarantee loans. If people can't get a job after 2 years of graduation make the schools start making the loan payments until they do get a job. BS degrees would dry up overnight too.
- boppo1 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more with your second point. But we'd need some sort of safety net for the humanities or else basically all but a few hollywood-feeding schools would drop them. Right now they're bloated and giving worthless credentials to kids for intersectional harry potter phd theses, but it would be good to keep the cores of the departments alive (if there's anything left).
  - Siira 4y ago
    The same humanities who championed that it’s in our Iranian culture to beat our people to death for having “improper” hijab? The sooner these leeches get defunded the better.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      No, not those humanities. I mean the ones teaching philosophy, art, music, history, etc.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Subsidized loans cap out at $23,000 for all four years. After that you're taking private loans at high rates. A relative was quoted 9.9% for most of his loans with a strong-credit adult co-signer, and that was well before the recent interest rate hikes. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized...
cratermoon 4y ago
Greed and the profit motive is making education unaffordable. The size of the college administrative office is just a side effect.
bgro 4y ago
I think everyone is in agreement that college admins are the cause of the problem. Does anyone know why colleges keep adding to the admin staff? Presumably, they're adding to the profits. I'm curious how this constant bloat growth is increasing profits though. When we get down to the actual minute specifics... What is happening?
- clintonb 4y ago
  > I think everyone is in agreement that college admins are the cause of the problem. No, we do not agree that this is a problem, or the cause of a problem.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Empire building?
cloudsec9 4y ago
Duplicate from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460650
UberFly 4y ago
Alternative options for education or trade schools is the natural outcome of this over-priced bloat. Let's hope they keep trending up in popularity like they have.
clintonb 4y ago
This is the equivalent of asking, “Why does <tech company> need so many people? It’s just a website!” You cannot blindly cut 90% of staff. Administrative salaries aren’t necessarily the driver of increased tuition costs. They may be one of many factors. My wife wrote five articles on the myths behind rising education costs, including administrative bloat: https://michellelessly.com/2016/08/08/5-myths-behind-the-rising-cost-of-college-in-america-part-i/ https://michellelessly.com/2016/08/08/5-myths-behind-the-ris....
- csa 4y ago
  > My wife wrote five articles on the myths behind rising education costs, including administrative bloat She casually mentions Title IX and “high touch services”, and then calls those expenses a “necessary cost of doing business”. I think most of the folks who end up paying the bills would rather them not be.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  > Critics often fail to consider is that a college campus is essentially a city housed within a municipality And why should they be? Why can't students partake of the services that the rest of the population does? This is how it typically works at European schools which seem to cost much less. Why can't schools just be schools?
heisenbit 4y ago
The US universities are too focused on increasing funding. This has major externalities: Marketing and premium salaries for sales staff. Marketing expenses include spending on buildings and programs (sports) which have no impact on academic output. Sales costs are related to lobbying and outreach staff - some of them extremely expensive as - unlike boring admin staff - can command premium salaries in industry. US universities have become optimized to chase after marginal dollars of additional income at the expense of cost efficiency of education. The financial incentives of the vast majority of non-academic staff are not aligned with education and this part has been in control since the ’90.
opentokix 4y ago
This is true for every reasonable sized company out there. A lot of unskilled lazy people want to have a salary being in-between those who actually produce value.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Even decades ago when the financial costs were not nearly as unaffordable, the bloat was still quite unbearable for those who wanted to avoid un-necessary obstacles to educational & research progress.
jamesfisher 4y ago
The article implies that the admin:student ratio has grown, but does not demonstrate this. The chart should show the growth in that ratio, alongside the growth in tuition cost.
robaato 4y ago
Good twitter comment re Purdue bucking the trend. https://twitter.com/ElberfeldTom/status/1588366784045817856?t=dGwnkbvwKUIlEaQWp0RyYg&s=19 https://twitter.com/ElberfeldTom/status/1588366784045817856?...
akagusu 4y ago
What makes education unaffordable are profit margins, not costs.
m0llusk 4y ago
Administration is a factor, but higher education is a stark example of cost disease even without that. Gathering to listen to presentations is an extremely inefficient way of transferring knowledge.
LatteLazy 4y ago
The whole "bloated administration" claim stinks of an easy, painless, simple and wrong solution to a complex problem. If the Author has some hard evidence to support the claim then I am all ears. But what he does present is weak. For instance, he claims that the Uni of Michigan spent 10m USD on 76 Diversity officers. Assuming that's true and they're all totally useless (I am sympathetic), that's still less than 5% of the budget, less than half the average year on year increase for one year. And that is assuming they are all completely useless, and that students have zero interest in paying for such services...
egberts1 4y ago
Bloated college administrators are a byproduct of hiring former state legislators who have enacted bills on the college's behalf. It is a reward puppy mill scheme and a triple-dippy pension scheme ... all at taxpayers' expense.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
The general education requirements are redundant and drive up costs, along with unnecessary labs and classes intended to supplement graduate income. American public universities are almost predatory in their excessive costs.

378 points by tomohawk 4y ago

Given that this is quillette one would think they would be hesitant to question the wise and steady hand of the free market. Surely the rationally-acting rational actors at all of these institutions are acting rationally in accordance with rationality? After all, we live in a time when any "entrepreneur" can affix his name to a suburban sprawl wasteland strip mall storefront, open a University, and get accredited by at least SOMEONE and drive all of the wasteful and bloated (and liberal sissy-manchild-- their words not mine) institutions out of business, using the holy and righteous motive of PROFIT to deliver a better, cheaper, more rationally rational product to all of the young impressionable minds out there, right?

School-Cotton 4y ago
University education in the US is very far from a free market. They’re kinda the worst of both worlds: massively subsidized by the state and federal governments, with very little government oversight.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  What man or law or king can stop me from opening a university and getting it accredited? None. Several open every year. All you need is the capital and that’s what we’re all about, baby! And then you can get the same subsidies and low levels of oversight as the big boys!
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    The supply is still constrained, though. Despite massive population growth and a simultaneous increase in the percentage of people choosing to go to college, new institutions are accredited at a lower rate now than they were in the mid 20th century. It would be interesting to see the trends in the costs of getting accredited over the decades.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    Yes, you can open a college/university without being accredited, but you might find it's not such a good idea. Direct subsidies will be out. Most kinds of student loans and other aid will be out. You're going to have a bit of trouble attracting faculty or students, except those who are desperate. And if your students are demonstrably not getting any benefit from attending you'll be shut down as a fraud. People really lost patience with that crap after Corinthian, Capella, etc. so there are a lot of new limits and regulations. Basically the only non-accredited colleges that can make a go of it are those that have some other kind of rich sponsor - most often a religious one.
HKH2 4y ago
I didn't realize that guaranteed loans and government subsidies are part of the free market.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  If every player gets them, they could be.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    No, they could not; that is either wealth redistribution or pointless. You can't make risk disappear magically.

lob_it 4y ago

The irony of educators not being able to do math was..... Elementary.. It starts in kindergarten. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/underfunded-teacher-pension-plans-its-worse-you-think-5843.html https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/underfunded-teacher... Just grabbed a random link for the above, but underfunded retirement accounts and underfunded pensions explain math in 2022 quite well. Any inferior integer is good enough /s A few links that date back to 1993 (pulled at random): https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-ge-not-alone-25-companies-owe-trillion-pension-payments/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-ge-no... https://www.deseret.com/1993/12/12/19081151/list-of-underfunded-pension-plans-called-unfair https://www.deseret.com/1993/12/12/19081151/list-of-underfun... https://nrtwc.org/underfunded-union-pensions/ https://nrtwc.org/underfunded-union-pensions/ Many industries are "beyond a crisis", its not a permacrisis :p The public employee pensions are their own mess too

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Imo it is the bloated general education requirements, squeezing as much money from students as possible. It should only take 2 years to earn a bachelor’s. I believe if these classes were optional, they would not survive in the curriculum. University should not be in the business of propping up classes that no one wants, or professors who don’t have classes to teach.

notacoward 4y ago
> It should only take 2 years to earn a bachelor’s Only if you assume that the purpose of a bachelor's is to provide job training in one specific profession. Not so much if you believe in the value of a well-rounded education, for people who are likely to change careers multiple times, maybe also be civic leaders, etc. I'm not saying you're wrong, but the debate between these two visions has been going on for centuries and IMO it's not very useful to assume one answer (especially without recognizing the assumption as such).
- feet 4y ago
  Good thing 2 year associates and vocational training is a thing. Is the OP complaining that bachelors are not those?
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    No. They’re complaining that they’re not a deep study of a particular academic field, like they are in most countries.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  I thought elementary/middle/high school was for general purpose and moral education while college was for specialization. I guess you could argue that the amount of general purpose knowledge you need nowadays has increased but I agree with OP that ~50% of your college education being unrelated to your specialization seems unnecessary.
  - 4y ago

SilverBirch 4y ago

This is... strange. The issue of a price would seem to me to be an issue of supply and demand. Yet, this article talks about a weirdly tangential topic. This article seems to put forward the idea that the administration of colleges has become bloated and this has led to higher fees. But that's simply not the causal chain. No one in any administration is thinking "better put that tuition up, and accept the loss in candidates to justify this new diversity officer". Demand is through the roof - there are 20 candidates for every 1 place, and those candidates have almost unlimited access to loans. So the price is immaterial, if you get a place, you pay whatever they ask. So sure, there's going to be administrative bloat - because there's literally no limit to the purse strings. And this is exacerbated by university rankings which will literally list staff:student ratio as a metric. But none of this has anything to do with Quillette's racist agenda.

rhaway84773 4y ago
And yet education costs were exponentially lower until about 1-2 decades ago where they exploded. Despite demand being ridiculously high even in the past.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Reduced state funding is a significant component of rapidly rising higher ed costs in the US. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-education-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryan93 4y ago
    Doesn’t explain why a bostonU accounting degree costs 50k a year. Also doesnt answer why I should pay for someone else’s useless umass Boston econ or psych degree
  - fallingknife 4y ago

gaoshan 4y ago

States cut funding to public schools, costs rise to accommodate those cuts which spills over into every part of the education market. At the same time schools increase spending on non-academic upgrades to appeal to prospective students bringing higher costs (and more administrators). I think that may account for the bulk of the increases.

kxyvr 4y ago
To add to this, Pew has an article that talks about a variety of topics including funding of higher education: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-education-funding https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri... If you look at Figure 4, within the last 10 years, and for the first time ever, the amount of federal money flowing into state universities exceeded state money. There are all sorts of consequences for this. Mostly, I mention this to echo that state contributions to higher education have gone down consistently and the editorial's assertion that the high cost of a university education can be reduced to a bloated administration is a simplified argument of a complex issue that is likely made in bad faith.
tomohawk 4y ago
Can you provide any evidence of these cuts? > In 2018, the United States spent $14,400 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 34 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $10,800 (in constant 2020 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $35,100 per FTE student, which was double the average of OECD countries ($17,600). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd How much spending is enough?
- Nihilartikel 4y ago
  A data point of USA exceptionality is that a significant portion of such money that pays employees must necessarily be allocated to the parasitic healthcare complex.
4y ago

dave333 4y ago

Education should be recast as a sort of MMORPG instead of a physical campus. Would be 100th or 1000th the cost and achieve 80% of the results. Kahn Academy and the like are a start.

HKH2 4y ago
Lectures could be, but tutorials are nowhere near as good online.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Rather the issue is that there is a lot of garbage tutorials out there. It takes a lot of effort the find out the correct tutorials
  - dave333 4y ago
    Rating and continuous improvement can obviously fix this.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    I meant talking face to face is way better than Zoom. If you can find a group willing to talk in person about whatever it is you want to study, it should work.
- dave333 4y ago
  Tutorials don't really need paid tutors if peer to peer Q+A like a discussion forum is available. Another concept that could improve things is team education - you get marked on your own achievements but also partially on how your whole team does - so you have incentive to help others along.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    Yeah I don't think tutors do all that much if everyone is motivated. What I meant was that conversations in person are often more productive, especially when you're trying to get motivated.

erdos4d 4y ago

Administration is one component but another is student life/amenities. Lots of schools borrow to keep up in the arms race for new swanky dorms, gyms, aquatic centers, climbing centers, you name it. Then they need dough, so they shake down their clients, the students. Oftentimes standards are viewed as less important than continuing the student loans that pay for the school's loans. Going back to simpler times when you got a little bullshit dorm room or shacked up in a greek house and made your own fun might be an answer here too. But I agree that admin bloat is real and most of these positions seem to be some mix of bullshit job or student entertainment coordinator.

lob_it 4y ago

I've passed several articles years back when I used to read forbes about poor conditions for adjunct professors: https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more-than-half-of-college-faculty-are-adjuncts-should-you-care/?sh=460a80091600 https://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more... The evolution of education has already been diluted (die looted :p). I just saw a video on California's education system in the middle of the 20th century, compared to where it is today (actually thier ecomony). Not the finest of the bunch in the 21st century. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho... Economic evolution happens :)

md_ 4y ago

There are compelling alternative explanations for the rising cost of education (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease#Education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease#Educ...). If the underlying cause were primarily administrative overhead, that should be readily apparent in the (public) budget of any public university. I’m not going to go do Silvergate’s research for him, but I’m surprised he doesn’t cite such a readily available piece of compelling evidence, which at best suggests he’s too lazy to track it down, and at worst that reality does not support his hypothesis.

graeme 4y ago
The admin staff are also subject to Baumol's cost disease.
- projektfu 4y ago
  Some are, some aren't. If some function required the same ratio of admin to students to perform, it would be. But many things have been made more productive. Most schools have fully automated the course selection process except for the academic advisor. Schools can take advantage of automations in admissions, bursar, financial aid, etc. I think Baumol's cost disease explains a lot of the increase. I find it suspicious that it's not mentioned in TFA. But there are other drivers, of which much higher student expectations play a part. A school patterned after a typical university in the 60s would have some charm but probably students would not enjoy the Spartan living environment or the lack of support services.
  - graeme 4y ago
    Yes, and teachers can grade some assignments electronically with a click. But generally speaking admin work has not kept up with the productivity of manufacturing positions. In fact given that the numbers of admin staff per student and per graduate has increased, you could credibly argue admin productivity has declined.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

yieldcrv 4y ago

Is that a winning campaign strategy?

etempleton 4y ago

Double edged sword. What the author proposes can be found. Go to some small low endowment private or public school for less money. Oh wait, you say, I don’t want to go there! The buildings aren’t as nice, the dorms are cramped and drab, there aren’t as many resources, the food sucks, the Wi-Fi is spotty, heck even the website sucks. Why is this? Because they don’t have the human or financial resources to do so. You get what you pay for. Student and parent expectations have changed and so have college and universities. If you want what colleges used to be like 50 years ago go to a small private or public school that is just barely staying afloat, it will be more or less similar to the so called halcyon days of low cost, no frills college. The thing is—people don’t want this as voted for by their choice in school. The biggest drops in enrollment are at community colleges, state schools, and small private schools. If people were price sensitive cheap schools would have people busting down the doors to get in. They don’t. In fact, when a college lowers their tuition, they paradoxically often see a dip in enrollments. Why? Because human brains are broken. We connate price with prestige and prestige with quality. Colleges get punished if they lower the price, so what do they do instead? They increase the discount rate. Rarely do families pay the sticker price. Google any college tuition and you will see average price paid. It is typically anywhere from 50-75% of sticker price.

chrisseaton 4y ago
I don't think Colorado State is a top-tier college - in a pretty quiet place - no big names - but when I visited it from the UK for a conference I could not believe how nice and polished everything was. Beautiful buildings and spaces. I did some coding in a kind of forum with a large open fire and two-storey glass walls looking out over the snow. Very inspirational. I guess it costs though.
aaomidi 4y ago
Then why is this only mainly a US problem?
- kragen 4y ago
  Student loans make tuition-payers cost-insensitive.

D13Fd 4y ago

I think the article misses the root cause here. Drastically increased availability of loan-based financial aid means far more more money in the system, which means the prices go up. The article nails the cause of more administrators--the schools have more money to spend and need to spend it--but completely misses the reason schools are able to charge so much more these days.

BobbyJo 4y ago
> which means the prices go up. Yeah, but you're ignoring the mechanics of that happening. > completely misses the reason schools are able to charge so much more these days. I don't think it misses it. I think it just ignores it as a matter of practicality. It would take an act of god to get money removed from the system, but there is a very real chance he could cut some cost and bloat from single, incredibly influential, school.
Retric 4y ago
More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Instead you get very expensive options for people with more money and cheap options for the cost cautious. Collage is largely an exception to that as elite schools don’t charge 100+x the average the way say watches, clothing, etc do, and most people aren’t going with the low cost options.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  > More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Do you have an example? Supply and demand is exactly what drives the prices up. People have a huge supply of dollars due to financial aid loans, and cannot spend those dollars on anything but education. With more money available, schools charge more. It’s the same mechanism as inflation.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Manufactured goods generally follow this trend of increasing total money being spent resulting in a lower cost per unit. Microwaves, toasters, dishwashers, flatscreen TV’s, etc are all vastly cheaper today than when they first hit the shelves. The best example bing transistors, we are dumping vastly more money into them and getting ever lower prices. Commodities often follow a similar trend with global Steel production resulting in lower prices per pound over long stretches of time. The trend is less obvious over short periods of time but compare steel prices every 50 years say 1820, 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2020. Some things like beachfront property are inherently in short supply, but it’s hard to argue that applies to collages across decades.

legitster 4y ago

I think this relationship might be a bit backwards. Easy credit made it so demand for degrees outstripped capacity. Schools raised prices to meter demand. At these increased prices, schools felt compelled to invest in programs and administration. Also, as I understand it, the accreditation process is pretty broken in the country. Whatever the top programs are doing becomes the benchmark for everyone else to match. So it's a never ending treadmill to keep up.

bumby 4y ago
Don’t employers have a contribution to this as well? There’s many positions that don’t really need college degrees yet list them as a requirement. I feel if people could get gainful employment without college, demand would fall.
- pas 4y ago
  human resources (and the labor market, and the whole employment culture in general) in the US is very suboptimal :/ a lot of cultural differences (and other historic path dependencies) led to using degrees and other signals for hiring instead of actual performance. even by-definition woke (and I'm not using it pejoratively here) employers have trouble letting go of their mindless credentialism. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1539188973553299457 https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1539188973553299457 [audio version seems non-paywalled https://curio.io/publications/matthew-yglesias/matthew-yglesias/why-progressive-organizations-have-become-so-vulnerable-to-staff-meltdowns https://curio.io/publications/matthew-yglesias/matthew-ygles... see also https://www.slowboring.com/p/crt-school https://www.slowboring.com/p/crt-school ]
hollandheese 4y ago
Why aren't prices falling then due to decreased demand?

1270018080 4y ago

Supply and demand is making education unaffordable. The government subsidizes student loans which increases demand of course, but they subsidize at such an irrational rate it also gives colleges a blank check to charge whatever they want.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

emmelaich 4y ago

Probably the demand is too high because the degrees are too easy to get. Save for most STEM and subjects that have an external certification (bar exams).

hamiltonians 4y ago

It has to do with the wage premium. it is still widdening for college grads. This needs to change for demand and thus prices and aid to fall. governments subsidize college so much because of the high roi.

greenthrow 4y ago

PRO TIP: Don't pontificate about things you are not an expert on. You usually are missing a lot of context and detail and if you are right it will only be by accident. College is too expensive, but it's not because people who work at universities are overpaid.

supertrope 4y ago
Isn't the whole point of Web 2.0 that random people who aren't journalists or experts can post comments? The website operator then gets the users to provide their own content without the expense of hiring journalists, actors, writers. (That and rounded corners).
newsclues 4y ago
If it isn't overpaid bloated admin, what is the cause? I worked in EDU.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Businesses that use a bachelor's degree requirement as blunt hiring filter. Loose credit that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Colleges are in a rankings arms race instead of prioritizing affordability.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    So there is an issue with the lending system, that allows the bloated admin to continue to exist. Colleges are investing in amenities instead of quality, affordable education, because the bloated admin is useless and corrupt, so they spend on big ticket sports facilities and buildings (where does the money go?) to justify the administrative excesses (if you build a $100 million stadium it's easier to justify a few million to renovate the presidents office). The root of the problem is the terrible leadership, that is enabled by the broken funding model. Fixing the funding model won't resolve the leadership problems.
brnaftr361 4y ago
Let's see those credentials.

thexumaker 4y ago

I will say there for sure is a certain percentage of administration at most public colleges that should be cut. Coming from the UC system, there are wayyyy too much bureaucratic bloat. But at the same time they do provide a lot of support even if it's for smaller niche groups of people on campus, which without them would make going there a much worse experience. There should be a middle ground in reducing costs of overpaid bureaucratic bloat while also providing everyone on campus enough support, from undergrads to grad students to professors, etc. The best solution here is just to start enforcing pip quotas lol.

testfoobar 4y ago

In the US, both college education and healthcare have become enormous taxpayer wealth extraction schemes. Everyone has a "right" to education and healthcare, therefore we should subsidize it with taxpayer money. That is as far as the politics go. We have stupidly funded the demand side of the equation to where both education and healthcare are incredibly bloated behemoths capable of absorbing all the money thrown at them. All perfectly justified. Where the taxpayer money should have gone: on the supply side. For example, the number of UC campuses in California should have doubled as the population doubled. The last UC campus to open was Merced in 2005. Before that was Irvine and Santa Cruz in 1965. And we wonder why tuition keeps increasing? 1) Demand increases with population increase. 2) Demand increase with more people seeking 4 yr degrees. 3) Demand increases with the US subsidizing the ever living shit out of college tuition. 4) Supply stays relatively constant. Similarly Obamacare drove the demand side by subsidizing health insurance and onboarding millions of new members. It did almost nothing on the supply side - same number of hospital beds and doctors. Insurers and medical groups made a killing as the price of their services grew dramatically. In both cases, political stability was achieved in shoveling taxpayer money at education and healthcare without increasing competition. This is a very clever way for existing vendors in healthcare and education to soak the government. Solution: drive prices down by investing in supply of education and healthcare.

giantg2 4y ago
"Drive the price down by increasing seats and then fostering competition between schools." The seats have increased dramatically. You won't be able to create efficient competition. The value shoppers already go to state schools. The other people are looking for a specific "quality" or just plain emotion (my family went here, this school is prestigious, etc). Supply isn't the real issue in most disciplines. The problem is the demand side individuals making economically dumb choices (sometimes semi-forced by the larger societal situation).
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Handing out bales of money in the form of guaranteed loans enables this price insensitivity and accelerates price increases.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Even in Canada it’s getting worse. I finished undergrad in 2010. Back then I paid about $3000CAD per term. Someone in my program I met recently is paying $4800. The program is the same. Admin keeps growing.

Animats 4y ago

Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators.[1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human resources, development and Land, Buildings & Real Estate. Stanford will be the city’s third-largest employer in Redwood City." Amenities: * Cardinal Café -- Located on the first floor of Cardinal Hall, serving globally- and regionally-inspired cuisine for breakfast and lunch. * Recreation & Wellness Center -- The 28,000 square foot facility includes a six-lane rooftop pool, indoor basketball court, state-of-the-art fitness equipment, locker rooms, showers and an outdoor fitness courtyard. * Stanford Transportation * Digital Media Production Studio * Wellness and Lactation Rooms * Dry Cleaning * Pine Cone Children's Center * Stanford Catering & Conferences * Stanford Federal Credit Union [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

kbenson 4y ago
From what I'm seeing online Stanford has about 22k students in 2022. 2700 does seem like a large number compared to the student population, and given it seems like it isn't meant to house all the administrative staff, that does seem like a lot. That said, Stanford is private, so I'm not sure they're a good example. Various state universities seem like they would be a more apt target to look at to see what this is like in reality.
- bluedino 4y ago
  According to the internet: Stanford University has 24,916 employees.Jul 11, 2022
  - ohnonotyouagain 4y ago
    That might include grad students? See below from https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/ In 2021 15,750 staff members supported teaching, learning, research and core operations at Stanford ...This includes ... 1,603 staff at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory .. Includes clinical educator and research staff.

EMIRELADERO 4y ago

Here's an idea: Public, government-owned (but not operated) colleges. Fueled by taxpayers and completely free for students. Students who wish to pursue higher education shouldn't even have to think about finances for that education, aside from maybe the travel and food expenses (although now with remote work/learning that also is going down)

impossiblefork 4y ago
I think many Americans imagine the above to be infeasible and that university is somehow inherently expensive. However, university can be very cheap. Here in Sweden university education, which is here funded in the way proposed above (i.e. the government pays for it all, for those students who get in) costs the state less than high school education costs the state (72 000 SEK/a for university, 124 300 SEK/a for high school). I imagine that it could be the same way in the US.
- boppo1 4y ago
  College football isn't a cultural pillar in Sweden.
  - impossiblefork 4y ago
    Yes, but it's not like you can't just drop it. Quite few people play it anyway.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      >it's not like you can't just drop it In the US? No we absolutely can't. College football is practically a religion. Its cultural importance cannot be overstated. I don't care about it at all and never have but oh biy do other people ever. People's lives revolve around it.
      - impossiblefork 4y ago
        But surely the goal of university is letting people get a university level education-- become mathematicians, physicians, engineers, teachers etcetera, serving the need of society for diverse types of semi-experts. Furthermore, surely there is no need for additional facilities; and surely they don't need to be fancy.

fredgrott 4y ago

It should be pointed out that research universities were always ill-equipped to deal with a high demand of university classes. What is better is the hub approach of key-research public universities, say five per state and then ten commuter campuses that re-use courseware from the research facalities. In fact in the USA several states are moving to this model, including such states as Indiana.

EricE 4y ago

They can only get away with this crap due to government subsidized student loans. Remove the artificial inflation of cheap government money and this crap would self-correct overnight. Even better - make colleges guarantee loans. If people can't get a job after 2 years of graduation make the schools start making the loan payments until they do get a job. BS degrees would dry up overnight too.

boppo1 4y ago
I couldn't agree more with your second point. But we'd need some sort of safety net for the humanities or else basically all but a few hollywood-feeding schools would drop them. Right now they're bloated and giving worthless credentials to kids for intersectional harry potter phd theses, but it would be good to keep the cores of the departments alive (if there's anything left).
- Siira 4y ago
  The same humanities who championed that it’s in our Iranian culture to beat our people to death for having “improper” hijab? The sooner these leeches get defunded the better.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    No, not those humanities. I mean the ones teaching philosophy, art, music, history, etc.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Subsidized loans cap out at $23,000 for all four years. After that you're taking private loans at high rates. A relative was quoted 9.9% for most of his loans with a strong-credit adult co-signer, and that was well before the recent interest rate hikes. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized...

cratermoon 4y ago

Greed and the profit motive is making education unaffordable. The size of the college administrative office is just a side effect.

bgro 4y ago

I think everyone is in agreement that college admins are the cause of the problem. Does anyone know why colleges keep adding to the admin staff? Presumably, they're adding to the profits. I'm curious how this constant bloat growth is increasing profits though. When we get down to the actual minute specifics... What is happening?

clintonb 4y ago
> I think everyone is in agreement that college admins are the cause of the problem. No, we do not agree that this is a problem, or the cause of a problem.
peanuty1 4y ago
Empire building?

cloudsec9 4y ago

Duplicate from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460650

UberFly 4y ago

Alternative options for education or trade schools is the natural outcome of this over-priced bloat. Let's hope they keep trending up in popularity like they have.

clintonb 4y ago

This is the equivalent of asking, “Why does <tech company> need so many people? It’s just a website!” You cannot blindly cut 90% of staff. Administrative salaries aren’t necessarily the driver of increased tuition costs. They may be one of many factors. My wife wrote five articles on the myths behind rising education costs, including administrative bloat: https://michellelessly.com/2016/08/08/5-myths-behind-the-rising-cost-of-college-in-america-part-i/ https://michellelessly.com/2016/08/08/5-myths-behind-the-ris....

csa 4y ago
> My wife wrote five articles on the myths behind rising education costs, including administrative bloat She casually mentions Title IX and “high touch services”, and then calls those expenses a “necessary cost of doing business”. I think most of the folks who end up paying the bills would rather them not be.
fallingknife 4y ago
> Critics often fail to consider is that a college campus is essentially a city housed within a municipality And why should they be? Why can't students partake of the services that the rest of the population does? This is how it typically works at European schools which seem to cost much less. Why can't schools just be schools?

heisenbit 4y ago

The US universities are too focused on increasing funding. This has major externalities: Marketing and premium salaries for sales staff. Marketing expenses include spending on buildings and programs (sports) which have no impact on academic output. Sales costs are related to lobbying and outreach staff - some of them extremely expensive as - unlike boring admin staff - can command premium salaries in industry. US universities have become optimized to chase after marginal dollars of additional income at the expense of cost efficiency of education. The financial incentives of the vast majority of non-academic staff are not aligned with education and this part has been in control since the ’90.

opentokix 4y ago

This is true for every reasonable sized company out there. A lot of unskilled lazy people want to have a salary being in-between those who actually produce value.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
Even decades ago when the financial costs were not nearly as unaffordable, the bloat was still quite unbearable for those who wanted to avoid un-necessary obstacles to educational & research progress.

jamesfisher 4y ago

The article implies that the admin:student ratio has grown, but does not demonstrate this. The chart should show the growth in that ratio, alongside the growth in tuition cost.

robaato 4y ago

Good twitter comment re Purdue bucking the trend. https://twitter.com/ElberfeldTom/status/1588366784045817856?t=dGwnkbvwKUIlEaQWp0RyYg&s=19 https://twitter.com/ElberfeldTom/status/1588366784045817856?...

akagusu 4y ago

What makes education unaffordable are profit margins, not costs.

m0llusk 4y ago

Administration is a factor, but higher education is a stark example of cost disease even without that. Gathering to listen to presentations is an extremely inefficient way of transferring knowledge.

LatteLazy 4y ago

The whole "bloated administration" claim stinks of an easy, painless, simple and wrong solution to a complex problem. If the Author has some hard evidence to support the claim then I am all ears. But what he does present is weak. For instance, he claims that the Uni of Michigan spent 10m USD on 76 Diversity officers. Assuming that's true and they're all totally useless (I am sympathetic), that's still less than 5% of the budget, less than half the average year on year increase for one year. And that is assuming they are all completely useless, and that students have zero interest in paying for such services...

egberts1 4y ago

Bloated college administrators are a byproduct of hiring former state legislators who have enacted bills on the college's behalf. It is a reward puppy mill scheme and a triple-dippy pension scheme ... all at taxpayers' expense.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

The general education requirements are redundant and drive up costs, along with unnecessary labs and classes intended to supplement graduate income. American public universities are almost predatory in their excessive costs.