31 ms·

The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)

257 points by dgs_sgd 4y ago

lr4444lr 4y ago
Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s. It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Because the job of schools as a business is to teach.
  - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    (With exceptions…) universities aren’t businesses though. Academic idealism does still exist.
    - mountainb 4y ago
      This is the kind of rigid formalism that obscures accurate analysis of universities as economic entities responding rationally to the infinite money spigot that the government has inserted into them. Just because their formal tax status says one thing does not mean that it's not better to analyze them as businesses just like any other.
      - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
        Right, right - I just don’t want people to forget that there are fundamental differences - despite their similarities.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.
    - bitwize 4y ago
      > It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach? Astronaut 2: Never has been. Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  So the more income, from student tuition and higher enrollment numbers, that a university has then it just hires more bureaucrats instead of... more faculty to teach more students?
- rmason 4y ago
  If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-my-tuition/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-...
  - whitemary 4y ago
    It's at least as much related to government subsidies and financial programs that exist as band-aids over the accreditation crises in the American labor market, a result of elite overproduction. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it. But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product. We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment. The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.
    - flenserboy 4y ago
      If the money was to go somewhere, any sane institution would be pouring it into either facilities or the school's endowment. Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away. Trustees need to put their foot on the neck of this beast before it grows even more.
- ecshafer 4y ago
  I don't really see why schools should need most of their bureaucrats personally. I know a few people who work in admin at schools and it seems their jobs mostly revolve around writing a few emails a day. A school need some groundskeepers sure, a small IT department, a secretary for a department probably, and a small general admissions / bursars / financial aid department. I would warrant all other departments could be cut as they are not within the primary scope of teaching.
  - kkylin 4y ago
    This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp. This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.
  - mapierce2 4y ago
    I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement. https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history
    - mindslight 4y ago
      in loco parentis writ large.
  - chongli 4y ago
    They need more bureaucrats because they’ve grown dramatically in scope. Schools used to be primarily about education. Now they’ve become Club Ed. A 4-year vacation paid for with unsecured loans. Full of gyms and climbing walls and aquatics complexes, libraries and recreation centers and football stadiums. Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs. This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.
- analog31 4y ago
  Do adjuncts count as faculty?
  - gallopingcomp 4y ago
    This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically. Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places. (And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  At a minimum you should expect the bureaucrat/teacher ratio to be the same with increasing student numbers.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Because professors directly add value to the education. Quite relevant as tuition costs rise.
mapierce2 4y ago
It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf
- dudul 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - mapierce2 4y ago
    It's more complicated than you describe. Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place, they just lack focus, and are ineffective and solving the problems that they see. They see large-scale social problems of inequity, but are trying to solve it with equity-focused policy at universities, which most folks would already consider "the top." They aren't just for show, but the optics of a well-funded diversity departments is irresistably good.
    - ryan93 4y ago
      Equity is not a social problem. Do you think African women with five children would rather work 60 hrs a week in a cubicle and have .8 kids like Korean women?
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      > these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place I don't think they are, in most instances. I try never to attribute to malice, but it has been years of giving them undue, novel power. This is corruptive and they demonstrate this corruption in every case. Any normal person would be corrupted given the same power, all of a sudden, and a mandate to use it. To a diversity hammer everything looks like a seminar / written statement / fired for cause nail.
everdrive 4y ago
DEI is all the rage right now. My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough." Which is a pretty unfortunate set of blinders to have on. DEI is probably one of the more narrow reasons these days that someone might not feel that they can be themselves at work.
- version_five 4y ago
  I would say that the existence of those DEI programs is probably one of the biggest reasons people can't be themselves at work
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    It's striking how much tech workers decry DEI on anonymous forums like Blind compared to the complete lack of dissent on workplace communications channels like Slack.
    - version_five 4y ago
      It's a prisoner's dilemma situation. Most people think it's BS, but the incentive to push back on it individually is almost nonexistent (because of the big downside) and so collectively we reach a shitty local minimum that could be overcome if everybody acted together.
    - ramphastidae 4y ago
      You first?
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      At Dropbox in 2015 we had a diversity all hands in the fall or winter (November IIRC). Arden (head of HR at the time) flipped out when someone posted the question about more permissive hiring standards for women and URM. Then we conducted and anonymous survey asking people if our hiring process favored women and URM candidate and 83% said yes. Very awkward for leadership.
twoifbyseat 4y ago
> Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.
- mapierce2 4y ago
  Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.
  - amateuring 4y ago
    any proof for your assertions?
    - mapierce2 4y ago
      Personal observation
    - nextos 4y ago
      Lots of Dutch universities only hire women now, for instance. They lost a case in court but they still do this covertly [1]. In other places, it's not official but de facto there's a huge bias. [1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/eindhoven-university-loses-sex-discrimination-case-over-women-only-job-ads/ https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/eindhoven-university-l...
  - twoifbyseat 4y ago
    > Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      There is no "over-representation" of protected categories, only of oppressor categories. A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women". They are totally blind to the fact that e.g. veterinary sciences and social "sciences" are ~95% women while being laser-focused on some areas where women are (still?) in the minority. This attitude gives lie to their claim of striving for equality and shows it to be nothing more than an ideologically driven activist organisation. [1] https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/ https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/
Animats 4y ago
"Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay." Ah, there's the problem.
- mapierce2 4y ago
  That line was a flag for me. I doubt it's that simple, that admins are that corrupt. I think they're just basic: "Hire a new person to promote equity and inclusivity? That sounds great!" The good optics are irresistible.
  - opportune 4y ago
    This is a common argument for why many projects get bloated, not just JEDI. It has been mentioned as a contributing factor behind tech “over-hiring” in the past few years too. I think that in large bureaucracies this will always happen. As a manager looking for career growth, the more headcount you get and the more scope you “manage”, the easier it is to make the argument you should be a Director/VP/whatever - or to get hired in your next job as such. Managing 10 people is being a line manager. Managing 50 people is being a director. If you can make the case for hiring more people to support all the initiatives you are working on, you may have just doubled your income. In a smaller organization, people are usually more directly involved in the organization’s efforts and there is a more limited amount of funding for new things, so the only way you can empire build is by doing something that is very organizationally valuable (like making more money). In government, academia, and huge corporations, you have massive amounts of money coming in, and most people’s work is far removed from why that money is coming in. Advancement and growth is mostly about being able to secure as much of that money for your department as possible.
    - lumost 4y ago
      I suspect this is part of the reason that dual ic/manager ladder shops outperform management only shops. An IC can grow by delivering impact, over time you can move them around to reshape the org to deliver more impact. A manager is relatively fixed unless you decide to eliminate the department. Likewise, having everyone compete for more headcount doesn't bode well for the future.
toiletfuneral 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jordigh 4y ago
> By B.S. [...] > The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected. This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn't just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrat" plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It's obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors. Don't get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- at-w 4y ago
  The Economist has a policy of not using authors' names for any of their articles.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  The Economist has used anonymous writing since the start.
crackercrews 4y ago
I get a lot of surveys these days where the first questions are about identity. This sends the message that the thing they care about most is your racial and gender identity. But it may also bias the rest of the survey outcome. This possibility is why surveys used to only ask these questions at the end. But now it's more important to virtue signal up front, even if it means introducing bias.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  Or it could be that they don't want incomplete demographic info that also biases results. Why do you assume it's virtue signaling?
  - crackercrews 4y ago
    Incomplete demographic info deprives surveyors of information about who said what. It doesn't affect the answers given to the substantive questions. Asking for demographic info up front can affect the answers people give to the rest of the questions. And in answer to your question, I assume it's virtue signaling because it is all the rage these days. Did you miss all the black squares on Instagram?
    - phillipcarter 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - crackercrews 4y ago
        Does the SO survey ask for demo info before asking substantive questions? This is a well-known no-no. I can't tell if you actually missed the black squares or are just trolling. This was very, very hard to miss. Even if you're not on Instagram, it was widely covered in the news. [1] 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2020/06/02/blackout-tuesday-instagram-black-squares-blackouttuesday-theshowmustbepaused/?sh=13bb902a2794 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2020/06/02/blackou...
newsclues 4y ago
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discourses-bullets-ep-1/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discours...
plaguepilled 4y ago
How do we fund high-rigor alternatives to university that have strict limits on administrative hires?
officialchicken 4y ago
[flagged]
- bitwize 4y ago
  Hacker culture was incubated in universities. Some of it still thrives there.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  It directly relates to many of the institutions that employ and educate those in our profession, which directly effects the experience of individuals in these institutions.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  None. I flagged this post immediately because I knew what the comments section would turn into. I was right.
  - osishebzkmz 4y ago
    Typical authoritarian behavior. Can't handle discourse, so you run to the authorities to censor your opponents.
    - __float 4y ago
      Brand new accounts throwing accusations like this are not exactly helping the conversation, are they? Are you a regular here? Why not use your usual account, if so?
      - 41amxn41 4y ago
        He's absolutely and undeniably right, though.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      There is no meaningful discourse here. That’s my point.
10g1k 4y ago
Luckily, where I work (one of my jobs anyway), if someone can't do the job, they get booted. Regardless of gender or colour.
fwungy 4y ago
DEI is a juice box for handing out cushy jobs to political hacks. Any organization that puts DEI as its core mission is headed for mediocrity. Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.
- at-w 4y ago
  > The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people Is the (US) government pushing this directly through financial incentives?
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    Yes: * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/small-disadvantaged-business https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/women-owned-small-business-federal-contract-program https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/8a-business-development-program https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... "Department of Defense requires approval of a formal justification if the 8(a) sole-source contract exceeds $100 million; all other federal agencies require approval for sole-source 8(a) contract actions that exceed $25 million." That is, you can help the government launder up to $100M per contract and no one even has to write down a justification. Buy whatever the government asks you to, resell it to them for a 10% mark-up, and you can get up to $10M. And if you think people aren't playing that game, I have a bridge to sell you, but actually to this other person, who will get 10% for just existing.
  - fwungy 4y ago
    If you take government money as a contract or a grant you must comply with their rules. These rules include diversity targets for race, gender, and disability.
thwayunion 4y ago
Universities are projecting a ~20% decline in their total addressable market [1] starting about 10 years from now. Talk with any decision maker at a tuition-dependent institution for more than 10 minutes and they'll bring up this topic. Many of the USA's colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated. In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I've heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms. -- [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/second-demographic-cliff-adds-urgency-change https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online...
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Seems like the way Canada is handling its boomer problem
- youainti 4y ago
  This is why I read hn. Frequently there are people who know things that I don't which help me understand the situation better.
skymast 4y ago
Learn Mandarin, no country can survive this long with such weakness. Our enemies are salivating while our Generals are getting sex changes.
- gallopingcomp 4y ago
  Are you kidding me? Mainland China has the worst virtue-signaling bureaucracy that I’ve seen anywhere by far (and the corruption that came with it). Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here. And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy. And, which generals are you talking about?
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Not really. DIE is rotten to the core. It's racism.
    - tux2bsd 4y ago
      [dead]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- renewiltord 4y ago
  What we've discovered is that authoritarian countries frequently machismo virtue signal, and when the rubber hits the road they don't know how to fight. I imagine that the real harm will be like in most of Southern Europe where once mighty nations languish as their economies labour under the weight of regulation and the population is mostly poor outside a few cities. Their generals will fall to femboys and furries. But their businessmen can still win.
shoo 4y ago
This topic is covered on this weeks episode of the Economist's Checks and Balance podcast, which covers US politics. https://www.economist.com/checkspod https://www.economist.com/checkspod It's a great podcast, strongly recommended.
plantain 4y ago
Zero interest rate phenomenon.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Guaranteed loans
hayst4ck 4y ago
This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am very liberal. There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer: "If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?" Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole? Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of. There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations. The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage. I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash. Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.
- seneca 4y ago
  I think you're largely dead on. "DEI" programs are affirmative action dressed, along with an authoritarian undertone. > "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-americans-oppose-cash-reparations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-american...
- cuteboy19 4y ago
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
I actually can envision, new universitys being founded on purely meritocratic and scientific basis, having only "hard" research based topics and succesfully distance themselves from the "relgious" education base.
flippinburgers 4y ago
Working at a USA based company and having to deal with DEI sounds like a nightmare. Inadvertently racist? Purposefully racist? I honestly don't care.
fche 4y ago
tragedy

257 points by dgs_sgd 4y ago

Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s. It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?

edgyquant 4y ago
Because the job of schools as a business is to teach.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  (With exceptions…) universities aren’t businesses though. Academic idealism does still exist.
  - mountainb 4y ago
    This is the kind of rigid formalism that obscures accurate analysis of universities as economic entities responding rationally to the infinite money spigot that the government has inserted into them. Just because their formal tax status says one thing does not mean that it's not better to analyze them as businesses just like any other.
    - DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      Right, right - I just don’t want people to forget that there are fundamental differences - despite their similarities.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    > It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach? Astronaut 2: Never has been. Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.
kevviiinn 4y ago
So the more income, from student tuition and higher enrollment numbers, that a university has then it just hires more bureaucrats instead of... more faculty to teach more students?
rmason 4y ago
If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-my-tuition/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-...
- whitemary 4y ago
  It's at least as much related to government subsidies and financial programs that exist as band-aids over the accreditation crises in the American labor market, a result of elite overproduction. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it. But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product. We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment. The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.
  - flenserboy 4y ago
    If the money was to go somewhere, any sane institution would be pouring it into either facilities or the school's endowment. Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away. Trustees need to put their foot on the neck of this beast before it grows even more.
ecshafer 4y ago
I don't really see why schools should need most of their bureaucrats personally. I know a few people who work in admin at schools and it seems their jobs mostly revolve around writing a few emails a day. A school need some groundskeepers sure, a small IT department, a secretary for a department probably, and a small general admissions / bursars / financial aid department. I would warrant all other departments could be cut as they are not within the primary scope of teaching.
- kkylin 4y ago
  This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp. This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.
- mapierce2 4y ago
  I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement. https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history
  - mindslight 4y ago
    in loco parentis writ large.
- chongli 4y ago
  They need more bureaucrats because they’ve grown dramatically in scope. Schools used to be primarily about education. Now they’ve become Club Ed. A 4-year vacation paid for with unsecured loans. Full of gyms and climbing walls and aquatics complexes, libraries and recreation centers and football stadiums. Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs. This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.
analog31 4y ago
Do adjuncts count as faculty?
- gallopingcomp 4y ago
  This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically. Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places. (And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)
rqtwteye 4y ago
At a minimum you should expect the bureaucrat/teacher ratio to be the same with increasing student numbers.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Because professors directly add value to the education. Quite relevant as tuition costs rise.

mapierce2 4y ago

It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf

dudul 4y ago
[flagged]
- mapierce2 4y ago
  It's more complicated than you describe. Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place, they just lack focus, and are ineffective and solving the problems that they see. They see large-scale social problems of inequity, but are trying to solve it with equity-focused policy at universities, which most folks would already consider "the top." They aren't just for show, but the optics of a well-funded diversity departments is irresistably good.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    Equity is not a social problem. Do you think African women with five children would rather work 60 hrs a week in a cubicle and have .8 kids like Korean women?
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    > these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place I don't think they are, in most instances. I try never to attribute to malice, but it has been years of giving them undue, novel power. This is corruptive and they demonstrate this corruption in every case. Any normal person would be corrupted given the same power, all of a sudden, and a mandate to use it. To a diversity hammer everything looks like a seminar / written statement / fired for cause nail.

everdrive 4y ago

DEI is all the rage right now. My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough." Which is a pretty unfortunate set of blinders to have on. DEI is probably one of the more narrow reasons these days that someone might not feel that they can be themselves at work.

version_five 4y ago
I would say that the existence of those DEI programs is probably one of the biggest reasons people can't be themselves at work
- peanuty1 4y ago
  It's striking how much tech workers decry DEI on anonymous forums like Blind compared to the complete lack of dissent on workplace communications channels like Slack.
  - version_five 4y ago
    It's a prisoner's dilemma situation. Most people think it's BS, but the incentive to push back on it individually is almost nonexistent (because of the big downside) and so collectively we reach a shitty local minimum that could be overcome if everybody acted together.
  - ramphastidae 4y ago
    You first?
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    At Dropbox in 2015 we had a diversity all hands in the fall or winter (November IIRC). Arden (head of HR at the time) flipped out when someone posted the question about more permissive hiring standards for women and URM. Then we conducted and anonymous survey asking people if our hiring process favored women and URM candidate and 83% said yes. Very awkward for leadership.

twoifbyseat 4y ago

> Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.

mapierce2 4y ago
Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.
- amateuring 4y ago
  any proof for your assertions?
  - mapierce2 4y ago
    Personal observation
  - nextos 4y ago
    Lots of Dutch universities only hire women now, for instance. They lost a case in court but they still do this covertly [1]. In other places, it's not official but de facto there's a huge bias. [1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/eindhoven-university-loses-sex-discrimination-case-over-women-only-job-ads/ https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/eindhoven-university-l...
- twoifbyseat 4y ago
  > Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    There is no "over-representation" of protected categories, only of oppressor categories. A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women". They are totally blind to the fact that e.g. veterinary sciences and social "sciences" are ~95% women while being laser-focused on some areas where women are (still?) in the minority. This attitude gives lie to their claim of striving for equality and shows it to be nothing more than an ideologically driven activist organisation. [1] https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/ https://jamstalldhetsmyndigheten.se/

Animats 4y ago

"Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay." Ah, there's the problem.

mapierce2 4y ago
That line was a flag for me. I doubt it's that simple, that admins are that corrupt. I think they're just basic: "Hire a new person to promote equity and inclusivity? That sounds great!" The good optics are irresistible.
- opportune 4y ago
  This is a common argument for why many projects get bloated, not just JEDI. It has been mentioned as a contributing factor behind tech “over-hiring” in the past few years too. I think that in large bureaucracies this will always happen. As a manager looking for career growth, the more headcount you get and the more scope you “manage”, the easier it is to make the argument you should be a Director/VP/whatever - or to get hired in your next job as such. Managing 10 people is being a line manager. Managing 50 people is being a director. If you can make the case for hiring more people to support all the initiatives you are working on, you may have just doubled your income. In a smaller organization, people are usually more directly involved in the organization’s efforts and there is a more limited amount of funding for new things, so the only way you can empire build is by doing something that is very organizationally valuable (like making more money). In government, academia, and huge corporations, you have massive amounts of money coming in, and most people’s work is far removed from why that money is coming in. Advancement and growth is mostly about being able to secure as much of that money for your department as possible.
  - lumost 4y ago
    I suspect this is part of the reason that dual ic/manager ladder shops outperform management only shops. An IC can grow by delivering impact, over time you can move them around to reshape the org to deliver more impact. A manager is relatively fixed unless you decide to eliminate the department. Likewise, having everyone compete for more headcount doesn't bode well for the future.

toiletfuneral 4y ago

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jordigh 4y ago

> By B.S. [...] > The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected. This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn't just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrat" plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It's obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors. Don't get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.

deleted 4y ago
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at-w 4y ago
The Economist has a policy of not using authors' names for any of their articles.
carlosjobim 4y ago
The Economist has used anonymous writing since the start.

crackercrews 4y ago

I get a lot of surveys these days where the first questions are about identity. This sends the message that the thing they care about most is your racial and gender identity. But it may also bias the rest of the survey outcome. This possibility is why surveys used to only ask these questions at the end. But now it's more important to virtue signal up front, even if it means introducing bias.

phillipcarter 4y ago
Or it could be that they don't want incomplete demographic info that also biases results. Why do you assume it's virtue signaling?
- crackercrews 4y ago
  Incomplete demographic info deprives surveyors of information about who said what. It doesn't affect the answers given to the substantive questions. Asking for demographic info up front can affect the answers people give to the rest of the questions. And in answer to your question, I assume it's virtue signaling because it is all the rage these days. Did you miss all the black squares on Instagram?
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - crackercrews 4y ago
      Does the SO survey ask for demo info before asking substantive questions? This is a well-known no-no. I can't tell if you actually missed the black squares or are just trolling. This was very, very hard to miss. Even if you're not on Instagram, it was widely covered in the news. [1] 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2020/06/02/blackout-tuesday-instagram-black-squares-blackouttuesday-theshowmustbepaused/?sh=13bb902a2794 https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2020/06/02/blackou...

newsclues 4y ago

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discourses-bullets-ep-1/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discours...

plaguepilled 4y ago

How do we fund high-rigor alternatives to university that have strict limits on administrative hires?

officialchicken 4y ago

[flagged]

bitwize 4y ago
Hacker culture was incubated in universities. Some of it still thrives there.
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
It directly relates to many of the institutions that employ and educate those in our profession, which directly effects the experience of individuals in these institutions.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
None. I flagged this post immediately because I knew what the comments section would turn into. I was right.
- osishebzkmz 4y ago
  Typical authoritarian behavior. Can't handle discourse, so you run to the authorities to censor your opponents.
  - __float 4y ago
    Brand new accounts throwing accusations like this are not exactly helping the conversation, are they? Are you a regular here? Why not use your usual account, if so?
    - 41amxn41 4y ago
      He's absolutely and undeniably right, though.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    There is no meaningful discourse here. That’s my point.

10g1k 4y ago

Luckily, where I work (one of my jobs anyway), if someone can't do the job, they get booted. Regardless of gender or colour.

fwungy 4y ago

DEI is a juice box for handing out cushy jobs to political hacks. Any organization that puts DEI as its core mission is headed for mediocrity. Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.

at-w 4y ago
> The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people Is the (US) government pushing this directly through financial incentives?
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  Yes: * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/small-disadvantaged-business https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/women-owned-small-business-federal-contract-program https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... * https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistance-programs/8a-business-development-program https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan... "Department of Defense requires approval of a formal justification if the 8(a) sole-source contract exceeds $100 million; all other federal agencies require approval for sole-source 8(a) contract actions that exceed $25 million." That is, you can help the government launder up to $100M per contract and no one even has to write down a justification. Buy whatever the government asks you to, resell it to them for a 10% mark-up, and you can get up to $10M. And if you think people aren't playing that game, I have a bridge to sell you, but actually to this other person, who will get 10% for just existing.
- fwungy 4y ago
  If you take government money as a contract or a grant you must comply with their rules. These rules include diversity targets for race, gender, and disability.

thwayunion 4y ago

Universities are projecting a ~20% decline in their total addressable market [1] starting about 10 years from now. Talk with any decision maker at a tuition-dependent institution for more than 10 minutes and they'll bring up this topic. Many of the USA's colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated. In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I've heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms. -- [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/second-demographic-cliff-adds-urgency-change https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online...

brailsafe 4y ago
Seems like the way Canada is handling its boomer problem
youainti 4y ago
This is why I read hn. Frequently there are people who know things that I don't which help me understand the situation better.

skymast 4y ago

Learn Mandarin, no country can survive this long with such weakness. Our enemies are salivating while our Generals are getting sex changes.

gallopingcomp 4y ago
Are you kidding me? Mainland China has the worst virtue-signaling bureaucracy that I’ve seen anywhere by far (and the corruption that came with it). Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here. And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy. And, which generals are you talking about?
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Not really. DIE is rotten to the core. It's racism.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
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renewiltord 4y ago
What we've discovered is that authoritarian countries frequently machismo virtue signal, and when the rubber hits the road they don't know how to fight. I imagine that the real harm will be like in most of Southern Europe where once mighty nations languish as their economies labour under the weight of regulation and the population is mostly poor outside a few cities. Their generals will fall to femboys and furries. But their businessmen can still win.

shoo 4y ago

This topic is covered on this weeks episode of the Economist's Checks and Balance podcast, which covers US politics. https://www.economist.com/checkspod https://www.economist.com/checkspod It's a great podcast, strongly recommended.

plantain 4y ago

Zero interest rate phenomenon.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Guaranteed loans

hayst4ck 4y ago

This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am very liberal. There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer: "If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?" Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole? Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of. There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations. The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage. I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash. Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.

seneca 4y ago
I think you're largely dead on. "DEI" programs are affirmative action dressed, along with an authoritarian undertone. > "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-americans-oppose-cash-reparations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-american...
cuteboy19 4y ago

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

I actually can envision, new universitys being founded on purely meritocratic and scientific basis, having only "hard" research based topics and succesfully distance themselves from the "relgious" education base.

flippinburgers 4y ago

Working at a USA based company and having to deal with DEI sounds like a nightmare. Inadvertently racist? Purposefully racist? I honestly don't care.

fche 4y ago

tragedy