15 ms·

Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own

• spencerflem 4y ago
  Bullshit Jobs by anthropology professor Graeber talks about this a lot, but comes to a different conclusion - that leadership for universities should be from Professors and that we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful.
  • amluto 4y ago
    This is not a good idea. Let people who are qualified to manage do the managing. There is very little about having a PhD or being tenured that makes one qualified to run a large institution.
    • nisegami 4y ago
      If they "Let people who are qualified to manage do the managing" then they wouldn't be in this position to begin with.
    • core-utility 4y ago
      Who says that any significant portion of these administrators are "running a large institution?" I'd be willing to be that the average professor manages more people than 99% of these administrators. This isn't about running an institution, these administrators are employees through and through. They are simply employees sharing 1 meaningless task with several other team members and taking eons to complete anything.
      • zdragnar 4y ago
        Most administrators aren't in leadership positions, which is what the recommendation from bullshit jobs was about- not general administration positions.
    • m000 4y ago
      To add to the siblings, academic leadership != management. An academic leader can easily be a bad manager. A manager cannot provide academic leadership.
    • caned 4y ago
      Professors need not administrate themselves, but school administration should, above all else, serve the needs of educators and those being educated.
      • spencerflem 4y ago
        exactly this, thank you
    • spencerflem 4y ago
      I was maybe too pithy, the book unsurprisingly goes into more depth (and is a good read!) - but if administration has all the control, they will unsurprising favor administration problems. Professors could hire good management if that was useful while keeping the goal in line with education and research and not administration and finance
    • QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
      I would like to introduce as evidence this email I just recieved: Dear Carolina Community: I am excited to announce that Michael Andreasen, senior vice president for university advancement at the University of Oregon, has been selected as Carolina’s next vice chancellor for development, beginning Jan. 23. A seasoned leader, Andreasen believes strongly in the mission of public universities, and I am confident he will continue to engage supporters and alumni and build on our recent fundraising success. He will succeed David Routh, who announced in April he would step down at the end of the year. For the past nine years, Andreasen has overseen all aspects of advancement at UO, including development; state, community and federal affairs; advancement operations; stewardship and public events and alumni relations. During his tenure, he consistently increased annual fundraising totals and secured some of the largest donations to any public flagship university. Among his accomplishments, Andreasen helped complete a $3 billion campaign at Oregon, raising $3.24 billion, including a final fiscal year fundraising performance of $867 million and maintained fundraising momentum through the transition of five university presidents. He worked in collaboration with campus leaders and a small team of faculty to secure two $500 million gifts to establish and build the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and helped garner a transformational $425 million gift to establish the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health. Andreasen began his time at UO as the vice president for development, leading efforts to establish campaign priorities, setting a working goal of $1.2 billion and developing a communications plan for the public launch in collaboration with the president, executive leadership and school deans. Over 12 years, he has served as a member of the University of Oregon Foundation Board, the Alumni Association Board, the Portland Business Alliance Board and the Greater Portland Chamber of Commerce. Prior to joining UO, Andreasen was at the University of Michigan for seven years – first as executive director and assistant dean for advancement for development and alumni relations and then as executive director and assistant dean for advancement at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. His more than 32 years of fundraising experience includes roles in major gifts and campaign leadership at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the American Film Institute. He began his career as the director of the annual fund for the University of California, Irvine, where he also earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science. I want to thank the search committee, chaired by Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment, and John Montgomery, executive director for The Rams Club, for the time and effort they have devoted to this search. I’m appreciative for their work in identifying multiple leading candidates for this important role. Andreasen joins University Development at an exciting time as the Campaign for Carolina comes to a close, and we look to what’s next in Carolina’s future. I’m grateful to David Routh for serving as an incredible leader and ambassador for Carolina throughout his tenure. Please join me in thanking David and offering your congratulations to Mike as we welcome him to Carolina. Sincerely, Kevin M. Guskiewicz Chancellor Tell me with a straight face that that's not a God of Grift among Gods of Grift
    • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      In tech we have the saying "we take our best engineers and turn them into our worst managers"
      • spencerflem 4y ago
        theres also the positive saying about engineering / product driven companies vs finance / marketing driven companies. Hard to get all nuance in a comment, but meant that ultimate control of direction is from the people doing the work, not that they necessarily were involved in the minutia of management
      • a4a4a4a4 4y ago
        Idk about you, but the worst managers I've had were _not_ engineers. They had no idea what the actual day-to-day of the projects looked like, would blindly promise deadlines, etc. I'm not saying that the best engineers make the best managers, but I don't think someone can be the best manager (in tech) without being at least a good engineer.
        • bluGill 4y ago
          Sure, but the best manages I've had have not been engineers. Engineers generally don't make the worst mistakes manages can make, but they often don't make the best choices all the time.
    • zajio1am 4y ago
      Public universities here in Czechia have academic senate, body of representatives elected by academics and students (with 1:1 - 2:1 ratio), which elects university president / rector and votes on university bylaws.
      • spencerflem 4y ago
        That's pretty sweet :) Here in Florida the governor chooses the university's president (and wouldn't you know it, they're a sitting Republican senator https://news.yahoo.com/incoming-uf-president-ben-sasse-223100344.html https://news.yahoo.com/incoming-uf-president-ben-sasse-22310...)
    • elgar1212 4y ago
      > people who are qualified to manage do the managing It's very convenient that those who are "qualified to manage" consistently come from the same stratum of society
  • Aunche 4y ago
    > we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful If the problem is that some people are being paid too much to do nothing, the exact opposite solution is to pay everyone too much to do nothing. I'd be 100% supportive of UBI if that meant paying everyone in the world $2 a day, but what UBI actually means is giving exclusive in-groups more money than the median global income for free. We see exactly what happens in the gulf oil nations like Qatar. The citizens outsource all their real work to an out-group that doesn't receive free money, so they have absolutely no incentive to improve working conditions.
    • torstenvl 4y ago
      I sort of agree with you, except that the problem isn't "that some people are being paid too much to do nothing." The problem is that some people are being paid too much to be meddlesome.
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
      There's a difference. If you have a bullshit job you are paid to do nothing. If you have UBI you are paid no matter what you do. Somebody who has to not get fired cannot do anything other than sit in their chair and do their bullshit job. They are actively removed from the pool of useful laborers. But somebody who is paid regardless can choose what to do. Yes, they can watch TV all day. But they can also do something that isn't bullshit.
      • Aunche 4y ago
        There is little difference between UBI and useless college administration jobs or useless gulf nation oil administration jobs. Both jobs have high autonomy and very little accountability, so they already have the option to not do bullshit if they really want to. Many Saudis got paid even if they didn't even bother to show up to work and protested when the higher ups demanded attendance. Demanding attendance is even worse than letting them do nothing, but it does go to show that they simply had no expectations to begin with, and that higher ups are also doing nothing all day. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/saudi-workers-enraged-five-times-day-attendance-checks#:~:text=Workers%20in%20the%20western%20Saudi,day%20to%20validate%20their%20attendance https://www.newarab.com/opinion/saudi-workers-enraged-five-t....
  • rhino369 4y ago
    >and that we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful. Or you could make able bodied people work to support themselves. It takes a ton of work to keep people alive and well. Society will find something useful for them to do.
    • spencerflem 4y ago
      Graeber's book talks about this in a much more interesting way that I can, and is very explicit about not trying to be a book about basic income. So me adding that was a little editorial. But the point is that for a large variety of cultural, political, and economic reasons there are a lot of jobs like university administrators that are simply not useful but get paid nonetheless, in many cases much better than the people doing the actual work. In both public and private spaces (eg. Harvard, a private university). Even in tech circles we see this argument, like, why does it take 10,000 developers to run a website etc. I think most people want to be useful to society and have a meaningful job but a lot of jobs that pay well are not that. With UBI those admins would be able to volunteer, teach children, make culture, or all the other useful things that pay terribly. Note that these admins are already working to support themselves but society is still failing to find something useful for them. I'm happy to talk abt this more of ya think it would be useful to you :) Got more to say but comments are hard to fit nuance into
  • etempleton 4y ago
    The truth is, and this will be hard for a lot of people to hear because it goes against their preconceived ideas and this authors claim, is both professors and the average arm-chair commentator have no idea what it takes to run a university. They have no idea the amount of work and logistics and everything else that goes into the day-to-day.
    • spencerflem 4y ago
      The book covers this by interviewing people working those roles - and by and large they consider their own jobs to be useless. Graeber is not making these claims as an armchair expert, decreeing whose jobs are useless. It's an anthropological study of the people who themselves think they have a bullshit job. I'd highly recommend reading the book! It's much more nuanced and reasonable than any 5 sentence comment can be
  • evanelias 4y ago
    In my direct experience, Harvard's faculty (professors) are a lot more involved in the leadership of the university than at most universities. There's a reason Harvard's arts & sciences school, including the undergraduate College, is called the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) -- the Faculty really do have a lot of power there. I worked in the FAS IT department for several years in the mid-to-late 00's. A huge chunk of my team's projects were custom software solutions, necessitated by top professors being extremely picky about random things, which prevented use of off-the-shelf software. Pretty much nothing in this Crimson article lines up with my experience. Maybe things have changed a lot since I worked there, but I'm skeptical.
• goatcode 4y ago
  After having spent far too long in an academic institution, whose administration was the most riddled with errors, incompetence, and bloat that I've ever encountered, this article makes me feel happy. It's not an easy problem, but at least someone notices.
• amluto 4y ago
  This does sound like a real problem, but what does taxation or a large endowment have to do with it? There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit. The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs. Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department. So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
  • colpabar 4y ago
    > There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit. How do you know? It seems like they’re “wasting” this money so they can point to the amount that they “had to spend” when it’s time to collect donations, similar to what wikimedia does. To them, the value all these jobs provide is inflating the operating expenses, which means they can ask for more tax-free money.
    • amluto 4y ago
      This makes no sense to me. If I were ran a university and wanted a good story to tell my donors, I would tell them that I want to spend $X million dollars on hiring professors, improving undergraduate education, offering financial aid, reducing tuition, building genuinely useful buildings, etc. I would also want to optimize the actual bottom line, not the tax-free donation revenue earned for the hell of it. There would be absolutely no need to spend money on useless things just to say I spent it.
• suchire 4y ago
  In SF, a similar problem in the public school district (the majority of the budget goes to administration, not teachers or schools) is in part due to tort-happy parents and a huge amount of regulation and compliance needs. Unfortunately, it sort of snowballs, because vital functions like payroll get starved of funding (and thus competence), and that exposes the district to legal troubles and liability, which further costs the district and starves funding from vital functions…
• dehrmann 4y ago
  > Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide. The common refrain about higher education costs is state governments have cut back on subsidies, so it's interesting seeing this stat for Harvard since it doesn't get the same level of state support, has an endowment, and still saw tuition double.
  • zdragnar 4y ago
    Harvard's status as a premium product might be harder to maintain if they didn't inflate their prices to stay above their "standard" competitors (state schools). They can maintain their elite status while heavily discounting tuition to those with financial need, since the very image of "premium product" means that there will always be people willing to pay for it. It is essentially a self-fulfilling idea. I recall visiting Harvard during a high school debate tournament, and being utterly unimpressed with the facilities compared to what I had seen at non-ivy-league schools. The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
    • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      I don't know, NYU Medical School went tuition-free and it doesn't seem to have hurt their prestige--quite the opposite, in fact.
    • jandrese 4y ago
      The flipside of this is that we are talking about goddamn Harvard. They don't need high prices to signal that they are an elite school, they have a reputation that literally goes back centuries. Besides, the reputation of a school isn't built on its tuition, it is built on the alumni. The only "positive" signal from a high tuition is that it is a filter to reduce the number of poor students that your child might have to interact with and increase their chances of falling in with some other elite rich kids to fast track their way up to the C suite or some lucrative board seats.
• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  The admission departments need to be leaner - much much leaner. Coming from India I find American admission process ridiculously bloated. I mean asking an undergraduate to do an essay of what excites them. Interviewing an 18 year old about their plans for life. Seriously, I’ve never seen a bigger fucking waste of time. Run standardized tests and admit based on actual knowledge and ability. The rest is bullshit.
  • throwaway23236 4y ago
    While you might be right on some of this. I think the colleges are looking for people not based on standardized tests alone. Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization. I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university. The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge. Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.
    • unmole 4y ago
      I was under the impression that elite universities first switched to holistic criteria for admissions because too many Jewish students made it through on academics.
    • gautamdivgi 4y ago
      You can make the tests harder. There can be IQ testing to estimate ability to handle out of box thinking. Fwiw - anyone able to fork out $52k/year for their child is wealthy enough so that the child has had enough flexibility for out of box thinking growing up. A lot of out of box thinking is conditioning to the environment. If you are taught not to have constraints your ability to think out of the box is much better.
    • kyrra 4y ago
      Can the universities prove that whatever process they have now (or is trying to do) is better than a pure meritocracy? Obviously we would need to agree on what "better" means here (ie: what outcomes they are measuring). The question to you is, how do you measure "needs to be more than that". If this isn't something that you can't quantify, it's just going to let administrators pick students to satisfy whatever the current cultural hot button issue is.
• arkj 4y ago
  I was wondering what the title was alluding to, a little _ducking_ pointed to this, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Domi....
• Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Reference for the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominus_qui_sunt_eius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominu....
• manv1 4y ago
  There seem to be at least three universal laws of bureaucracy: 1. it's easier to hire people than to fire people 2. more budget is better than less budget 3. performance is, for the most part, irrelevant as long as the process is followed These three simple laws can account for pretty much all the issues with bureaucracies in general.
  • paxys 4y ago
    4. if you don't use up your budget you will lose it next year
    • RajT88 4y ago
      I wonder what sort of structural change we'd see if there was executive level bounties for cost savings? For example: You get a bonus of 10% of whatever budget you manage to trim. You'd have to balance your greed against your desire to continue to have your organization function well.
      • margalabargala 4y ago
        That would look like the mass layoffs of the sorts of people whose job is general preventative maintenance, or who are employed at higher cost due to their knowledge. Generally the sorts of things that reduce short term costs immediately, while causing much larger pain in some not-right-now future. For real-life examples of this, see many private equity buyouts.
      • Analemma_ 4y ago
        That would be a disaster. People would earn those bonuses with things like cutting R&D, making people work more hours for the same pay, and neglecting maintenance/repair, which all show cost savings in the short term and run the organization into the ground in the long run. As attractive as it is to think there's a quick-and-easy solution here, there is not. It requires constant vigilance from quality leadership to fall into neither the trap of bloat nor the one of foolish cost-cutting.
  • 4y ago
• lsy 4y ago
  Is this article bringing any new perspective to the table? I suspect there is a quarterly Crimson tradition of superficial administration-bloat-decrying by Harvard sophomores with nearly-parodic bylines like (in this case) "Brooks B. Anderson, Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House". What's missing is a comparison to other schools, a comparison to corporate bloat or lack thereof, or any reflection on the causes of the cost increase beyond "bureaucracy is bad". I was actually quite surprised to learn that Harvard tuition costs have only doubled in real terms over 36 years. To me that doesn't seem like a lot when considering the increase in demand for college education (UC tuition has increased 4x in the same time period). Is 2x a lot compared to other things? The article doesn't say, choosing instead to quote Josh Hawley and deride easy targets like inclusive signage committees.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    I agree, I feel like I learned nothing from this. > As I made my way to the Parking Office, I had to ask myself: Where did all these people come from? And do we really need them here? Did you? Instead of yourself, couldn't you have asked someone who actually knows the answer to these questions, like the administrators themselves, or former college presidents or something? Do an actual investigation and write a real article, not a low effort opinion piece. This is not really specific to the Crimson though, I have this same issue with all opinion writing and I don't understand why newspapers do it. I've never met someone who pays for a publication but would stop if it didn't have op-eds. I don't think it's just about outrage clicks or something, editorials and op-eds have been around forever so there must be some population that loves them for some reason.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• gchallen 4y ago
  I suspect headcount actually makes the situation look better than it actually is. A lot of administrators also get paid a pretty large amount—more than many faculty, sometimes a lot more. So administrative spend may be at ratios even higher than the 3:1 administrator-to-faculty ratio quoted in the article. FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker
• cushychicken 4y ago
  Byline soon to read: "Brooks B. Anderson '25 (Yale)"
• Cupertino95014 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FwVfZAZZVhk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FwVfZAZZVhk This ends in Gov. Dutton saying "You're all fired." As the Crimson says: Harvard would keep running if all the administrators were fired and then 10% of those now-closed jobs were reopened to qualified applicants: the jobs that are actually needed.
• neilv 4y ago
  This piece raises points we've heard before, but I can't tell whether this particular act of expressing them is some kind of shrewd grandstanding maneuver, or a political blunder. An undergrad (first year?) Government student, fortunate enough to be at Harvard, writes an opinion piece, in Harvard's newspaper, saying that many administrators at Harvard shouldn't be there. If, at any point in the next three years, the student finds they need the assistance of an administrator, that could be awkward-or-worse for the student. And maybe they're not planning on trying to get accepted to grad/law school anywhere with administrators. > I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution. I'd expect that this level of rhetoric wouldn't play well at Harvard, and I'm surprised if a student there thinks it would. Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
  • rufus_foreman 4y ago
    Good point: "know your place".
  • chinchilla2020 4y ago
    > Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution. This line in particular betrays a lack of working experience. Anybody who has worked at all in their life - even a basic highschool carwash job, knows how hard it is to appropriately identify which employees to let go in an unbiased manner. It's not as simple as knocking on a door and asking them what they do (despite Elon Musk using this method recently at Twitter)
    • sidibe 4y ago
      Yeah that'll end up getting you the people who are good at bragging.
  • not-my-account 4y ago
    Ah yes, good ol’ bureaucratic retribution for questioning the bureaucracy. If Harvard administrators give this student a harder time because of the piece they wrote, aren’t they proving the students point, to a certain extent? Also, how would this be connected to conservative ideas? Theoretically, liberal ideas are the ideas that are critical of institutions. This all seems so backwards, no?
• inthewoods 4y ago
  I like the idea of there being some requirement on student spending for these educational institutions to maintain their tax-free status. Not dissimilar from requiring insurance plans to spend a set percentage (say 85%) on healthcare vs. administration. Having said that, I'd want to game it out to see how the institutions would react and what it would do to prices. The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.
• paxys 4y ago
  I don't know why the public conversation is always around "Harvard is doing xyz". Yes it is one of the top educational institutions in the country, but it is also private. The number of administrators they have should not be your concern. Putting political pressure on a single elite university (or group of universities) admitting a thousand students per year isn't going to solve the country's problems with higher education. Instead redirect that anger towards your state's public university system. Ask your elected politicians why funding was cut down to zero during the 2008 recession and never restarted. Ask why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state and they continue to spend billions on stadiums, despite the fact that the sports has a negative return in all but the top ~5 NCAA division I programs. Ask why enrollment and graduation rates continue to decline while administration costs keep going up. Fighting the Harvard boogeyman isn't going to fix any of this. Your hard working kid isn't entitled to Harvard or MIT, but they should be entitled to a seat at your local state school at a reasonable cost.
  • breischl 4y ago
    To be fair, this article is by a Harvard student, in a Harvard paper. It's very much relevant in that context. But fair to ask why everyone on HN (including the two of us...) are reading and talking about it.
    • paxys 4y ago
      Yes I don't have a problem with the article itself, but more with everyone here sitting and debating it like they have any skin in the game. Harvard is a century+ older than the USA and has a larger endowment than the reserves of most countries. They will be just fine. Spend that energy towards your local public school instead and you may see some actual positive change.
    • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Because it's emblematic of an issue (or reality, if you prefer) that is happening at many universities.
      • 4y ago
• japaloko 4y ago
  Senha
• elgar1212 4y ago
  > Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do? Why aren't people angry about this? Why hasn't this been regulated away by now? Anyone who's been through the university system knows about all the trash emails that these people sit around writing. It's like that's all they do (visibly): they either sit on their asses writing emails or they stand on the stage for graduation day. What are these people for? Just writing emails? Why don't we just automate their jobs away and slice the cost of tuition? Here's what we need: legislation to cap the percentage of administrative staff and cap their salaries to be no higher than the average salary of a professor at that university
  • LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    > What are these people for? I consider it unsurprising that a bureaucracy gets taken over by bureaucrats. The rest of the faculty is too busy doing research and teaching classes to bother with office politics, climbing the ladder, and increasing staff counts at levels of the ladder beneath themselves. The professors consider the importance of their research and teaching efforts to be self-evident, so there's no need to waste time justifying them, trying to convince people that they're important or that their department budget should be increased. You see a similar effect in tech companies, where engineers building the company's product get relegated to the sidelines after the technology is proven or the market is captured, and MBAs, management, and sales become the dominant forces within the organization...engineering is still focused on the product, with their careers an issue that they assume will resolve itself, while the MBAs are entirely focused on their careers.
  • evanelias 4y ago
    As a former administrative staff member at Harvard (web developer in the IT department) for several years, I can't think of a single coworker who spent their days "just writing emails". This is complete and utter nonsense. The administration is responsible for the entire operation of the university, outside of teaching. And it's a relatively large university with a lot of different divisions/schools. There's a LOT more to "administration" than writing emails and standing on stage at graduation!
• proee 4y ago
  Whenever my EE professor needed to draw a wire to a "current sink" he would refer to it as the "Administrator's Building" and then proceed with a long rant about all sorts of negative things they burden him with. Not sure how an institution can go about cleaning up such inefficiencies besides going out of business, which is usually not an option.
• martin1975 4y ago
  What justifies paying 53k a year for Harvard? I went to a state university for my undergrad in CS. Would I have learned anything different at Harvard?
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Likely the education would be similar or even worse at Harvard. But the main thing you get is graduating from Harvard, and knowing everyone from your class and school. Those connections are huge, depending on the field you're going into. An MBA from a state school might work if you're staying in-state, but an MBA from an elite school opens the world.
    • vecter 4y ago
      Why would their education be worse at Harvard?
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Either Harvard is the best possible college for all their majors or it is not. If it is, then it should be worth any reasonable amount. If it is not, then there is some other college somewhere that is better at at least one major.
        • vecter 4y ago
          I don’t understand this reasoning. Besides the fact that it just seems logically incorrect, it totally avoids the question of why a CS education from an unknown state school would be better than Harvard’s. Harvard’s undergraduate CS program is not in the top 10 (if you believe US News’s rankings, which I always take with a huge grain of salt), but that doesn’t mean that it’s worse that State U’s.
          • bombcar 4y ago
            Which is why I said "similar or even worse" - there's no guarantee it's better. And if University of California, Berkley is better than Harvard at CS, then there you go, a state school that is better. The possibility certainly exists.
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  I had a modest proposal, and then decided to fact-check myself. The proposal was "Charity Navigator should do a health check on Harvard." Then I found they already had! https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580 https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580 Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden? Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_2022071120199295.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_... If anyone wants to dig through all this, have a big time.
• runako 4y ago
  > In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. I'm assuming this calculation was run using a standard inflation adjustment. However, Harvard is in the Boston metro, which has experienced significantly more housing inflation than the country as a whole. (This matters because housing costs filter through the entire local economy.) Would be interesting to tease out how much of the price increase is a direct result of the increase in housing costs driven by the failure of housing policy. Edit: The St. Louis Fed has the Boston housing index increasing from 86.15 in January 1986 to 426.44 in July 2022. BLS's inflation calculator puts $86.15 of buying power in 1986 being equivalent to $232.88 in July 2022. So it would appear that housing alone could be responsible for roughly half of the increase. Given the increase in healthcare costs over the period, it would also be interesting to do a similar analysis around those numbers.
• projectazorian 4y ago
  These arguments would have a lot less traction if more people were aware of the mind-numbing levels of paperwork involved in applying for and managing federal research grants. Not to mention running a hedge fund...excuse me, endowment the size of Harvard's. And a lot of those diversity and student affairs jobs these writers especially love to hate on handle things like compliance and risk management. Kind of important when you're running a highly visible and deep-pocketed organization like Harvard!
  • spencerflem 4y ago
    This is exactly the point! Though I agree the article misses it slightly. A university shouldn't be a hedge fund with professors being essentially PR. Writing and being denied for grants is a huge waste of time and resources and is a problem. The solution proposed (add a tax???) doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but these administratiors are problematic on a societal level even if they make sense for the university.
    • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      I disagree with the comment about endowments, to an extent. Endowments are critical in allowing non-profits to pursue their purpose. Without them, there is no level of independence between the non-profit and their benefactors, turning them into a puppet which is tied to the whims of external forces. With an endowment, non-profits are able to reject "gifts" with too many strings attached, or at the very least possess sufficient leverage to not be yanked around. Now, whether a non-profit chooses to pursue their purpose (or if the purpose is even a good one to begin with) is another matter entirely, but it's largely orthogonal.
      • spencerflem 4y ago
        Endowments are fine, but the purpose of the university is not hedge fund finance. When it comes to tough decisions, imo. donors should not win but neither should financial people. The faculty should have the final say.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  This would be more interesting if it were a) a new position to take or in any way novel, b) free of overt right wing politics. The point is apolitical and paying homage to trump and desantis distracts from a meaningful point. Why has college administration become so enormous? And I think the issue extends well beyond private schools. Perhaps we need Elon to review the college administration staffs code.
• sklargh 4y ago
  Don't fire them all, but coming close probably wouldn't hurt. As evidence I offer the below. My rural college and surroundings depended on a student-staffed fire department to for emergency medical services, fire-prevention and protection. - Because many emergencies need a quick response, volunteering students lived behind the fire-department in a dilapidated college-owned building. ~30 meters door-to-door. - Housing on-campus attached us to an administrative process. Volunteers registered as a special interest group focused on community service. This was an administrative formality to house firefighters next to their fire station to protect life and property. - The special interest process occurred before the lottery to allocate block housing. I was confident that volunteers' 1K+ hours of combined community service and recent suppression of a small dorm fire served as proof positive that we were a bona fide community service organization. - According to the student housing administrator we were not! We did not adequately perform (paraphrasing) on-campus education related to our community service and were to be housed together in a building several minutes instead of seconds from the fire station. All attempts at rational resolution were pointless/ineffectual. - This standoff persisted for weeks until the mayor and a trustee got wind of it, putting the matter to bed. Net, a campus administrator wanted to endanger thousands of people by arbitrarily increasing a fire department's response times over a (deliberately?) misguided interpretation of our inadequate provision of on-campus services a few weeks after we put out a fire in a dorm. We also started burning a mock dorm room on the central quad's lawn after this to amply demonstrate our on-campus education efforts.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• noelsusman 4y ago
  Cute headline, though the author quickly concedes that the proposal in the headline is absurd so at least there's that. The intense focus on administrative employees in universities mostly comes from young people confronting old, large institutions for the first time in their lives. They're not really wrong, but it's important to note that very little of the bloat people complain about is unique to academia, at least in a broad sense. Large organizations waste a lot of money. If I were feeling cheeky I could even argue that university bloat is a feature since it better prepares students for dealing with institutions in the real world. A lean, mean, educating machine wouldn't provide students the opportunity to work out their angst about this in a relatively consequence-free environment. >I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution. It's that easy!
• AcerbicZero 4y ago
  I think the bureaucracy of high education (and education in general) mirrors the ever growing government bureaucracy bloat. If the government adds 500 new regulations and a new agency to manage certifications for your underwater basket weaving class, you'll probably need some extra admin staff to handle it. Not a huge problem by itself, but do that for ~100+ years without cleaning things up and having a mini internal-cold war between the decision making populations in your country. A great recipe for a kafkaesque nightmare, which usually will continue to get worse, as each new layer of bureaucrat exists to insulate the layers of bureaucracy around them - not to actually deliver on a specific organizational goal.
• anotheracctfo 4y ago
  I'm in a public university IT department on the administrative side. If the professors would like to do admissions, then I encourage them to do so. If the professors would like to do budgeting, then I encourage them to do so. If the professors would like to do HR, then I encourage them to do so. If the professors would like to run the ERP, then I encourage them to do so. If the professors would like to run the Learning Management System, then I encourage them to do so. etc etc Fortunately all of the profs I've spoken to have a brain and understand division of labour. Which is great because I love working with them to build fun IT solutions that make their lives, and the educational experience better! If I wanted to make professor level money I'd work literally anywhere else.
  • mbesto 4y ago
    None of which is the problem the author is characterizing. FTA: For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.” It's about the creation of administrative positions such as the "Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging"
    • readenough 4y ago
      The author brings up some important information that is not always easily noticed. The university should definitely setup a task force to look into the matter and give the author a paid position on the task force.
• jgalt212 4y ago
  Not just Harvard... > Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/ https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-...
• slt2021 4y ago
  Why cant harvard make all administrators contractors? Surely there could be a outstaffing vendor who can provide contractors and move all admin staff off of payroll.
• bArray 4y ago
  I cannot speak for Harvard, but I can speak for other academic institutions. The bloat is very real. The weirdest thing is that lecturers are paid _only_ in terms of teaching students, but not for any time doing any administration (which there is a lot). Meanwhile, you have buildings filled with administrative staff, whom are hidden away, hard to contact and get annoyed when a form they invented is not filled out correctly. I think generally, as long as things are working, there is no real incentive to reduce bloat. My hope is that during the recession these institutions look to reduce the operations overheads from the correct places.
  • ausbah 4y ago
    IIRC correctly college enrollment usually increases during economic downturn, so bloat will at worst just go up
• neonate 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_B%C3%A9ziers#%22Kill_them_all;_God_will_know_His_own%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_B%C3%A9ziers#%22Ki...
• chihuahua 4y ago
  Harvard keeps begging for donations from me. My policy is that as soon as my net worth (currently rounds to $0) is greater than theirs (currently > $50,000,000,000), I will start giving them money. But not before then.
• scrubs 4y ago
  Let me summarize the article another way: consumers are ill informed and don't have the power to leverage their spend like we do buying cars or groceries or tech. American healthcare is another one. If I was a US president I'd have five guys work full time to produce a consumer report on health and education so students and their families could assess: * Can I get a job to pay for my major at it's cost? * What am I really paying for? * What's right and wrong about the US news and report magazine report on university ranking which has seen several negative stories and notable quits lately. The first question isn't about money in the absolute sense. If you think you've got a Nobel prize story in you, hey, do a lit major and go for it. Nobody said corporate America or tech is for everyone. Just don't be played.
• borbulon 4y ago
  Okay, as someone whose wife once worked in grants administration at Harvard, and knows about 10 other people who currently work or have worked in administration at Harvard, I can offer a counterpoint (this quote comes directly from a friend who currently works in grants administration at Harvard): > These “fortunes” are mostly restricted for specific use because they’re endowments. The salaries that pay financial admins mostly come from grant overhead…not endowments. Also, I can safely say at the dental school that we don’t have enough administratiors…largely because higher ed doesn’t exactly pay well. The Kennedy school just axed all of its admissions and financial aid department. One trip to the Smith Bldg is not exactly what I call getting a birds eye view of a largely decentralized university. All schools are responsible for their own fundraising and financing. But someone has to turn that money into income. That’s what the Smith Bldgs occupants largely do.
• toss1 4y ago
  The solution may be to base the tax on the portion of spending on actual academic faculty, teaching, and research, and facilities, and a standard allowance for administration. any admin spending beyond that standard rate results in commensurate taxes for the endowment. There is a precedent in the insurance industry, where they are allotted something like 13% for administration, and everything else must go to actual patient care expenses. Surely it would be straightforward to figure out a reasonable core efficient administration figure.