3 ms·

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

by ip26 4y ago

mattkrause 4y ago
Eh, that number is misleading. SLAC National Accelerator, a National Lab that Stanford happens to run, employs about 1,600 people. They don't necessarily need to interact with students; other national labs are run by corporations (e.g., Sandia is run by Honeywell). Stanford has a massive medical system, including an adult and children's hospital. They are teaching hospitals, and so part of the point is to train medical students and residents, but they also need all the staff of a regular (actually, top-of-the-line) hospital: doctors, nurses, techs, porters, billing, payroll, etc. On top of that, Stanford also has a massive research program funded by grants from (e.g.,) the NIH, NSF, and DOD This requires people to actually do the research (heavily-funded profs rarely teach, plus postdocs and research scientists) and support it (animal health techs, machinists, etc). There is also a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting, doing, and accounting for that work. It certainly depends—in part—on grad student labor, but it's also not directly linked. All in all, big research-intensive universities do a lot more than classroom education and the staff sizes reflect that. I'm sure there's room for improvement (I work at one and purchasing is currently a nightmare), but staff/students is not a great metric.
- Animats 4y ago
  None of that is at Ark B in Redwood City. That location is entirely administration.
  - dbt00 4y ago
    From the original comment: > "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." Administration for the school of medicine is literally the first group cited. Stanford Medical is everywhere around here.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Some of that is administration. Medical research (legally) requires all kinds of oversight committees: DSMBs for clinical trials, IRBs for experiments involving humans and IACUCs for work with animals. The Sponsored Research folks help prepare proposals and make sure that work is done and money is spent in compliance with the sponsors' policies. I'd bet many of those forks are at Redwood City. The rest of it takes administration. The folks at SLAC need to get paid. Someone needs to check that the doctors and nurses at Stanford Medical are appropriately licensed; once they are, someone also needs to find somewhere for them to park. They list what's out there: https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory, which also includes Stanford University Press and the Tech Transfer Office.
whakim 4y ago
As a sibling commenter noted, these figures around "staff" employees are super misleading and tend to cherrypick the most egregious examples of administrative bloat. For example, I worked for several years as a staff researcher at Harvard; along with ~30 other "staff" employees and a few members of faculty we published papers and built open-source software. Firing 9 in 10 staff employees - as the author of the article wants to do - would completely gut a huge amount of the work that big research universities do.

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

by ip26 4y ago

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

Eh, that number is misleading. SLAC National Accelerator, a National Lab that Stanford happens to run, employs about 1,600 people. They don't necessarily need to interact with students; other national labs are run by corporations (e.g., Sandia is run by Honeywell). Stanford has a massive medical system, including an adult and children's hospital. They are teaching hospitals, and so part of the point is to train medical students and residents, but they also need all the staff of a regular (actually, top-of-the-line) hospital: doctors, nurses, techs, porters, billing, payroll, etc. On top of that, Stanford also has a massive research program funded by grants from (e.g.,) the NIH, NSF, and DOD This requires people to actually do the research (heavily-funded profs rarely teach, plus postdocs and research scientists) and support it (animal health techs, machinists, etc). There is also a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting, doing, and accounting for that work. It certainly depends—in part—on grad student labor, but it's also not directly linked. All in all, big research-intensive universities do a lot more than classroom education and the staff sizes reflect that. I'm sure there's room for improvement (I work at one and purchasing is currently a nightmare), but staff/students is not a great metric.

Animats 4y ago
None of that is at Ark B in Redwood City. That location is entirely administration.
- dbt00 4y ago
  From the original comment: > "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." Administration for the school of medicine is literally the first group cited. Stanford Medical is everywhere around here.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  Some of that is administration. Medical research (legally) requires all kinds of oversight committees: DSMBs for clinical trials, IRBs for experiments involving humans and IACUCs for work with animals. The Sponsored Research folks help prepare proposals and make sure that work is done and money is spent in compliance with the sponsors' policies. I'd bet many of those forks are at Redwood City. The rest of it takes administration. The folks at SLAC need to get paid. Someone needs to check that the doctors and nurses at Stanford Medical are appropriately licensed; once they are, someone also needs to find somewhere for them to park. They list what's out there: https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory, which also includes Stanford University Press and the Tech Transfer Office.

whakim 4y ago

As a sibling commenter noted, these figures around "staff" employees are super misleading and tend to cherrypick the most egregious examples of administrative bloat. For example, I worked for several years as a staff researcher at Harvard; along with ~30 other "staff" employees and a few members of faculty we published papers and built open-source software. Firing 9 in 10 staff employees - as the author of the article wants to do - would completely gut a huge amount of the work that big research universities do.