6 ms·

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:t

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.

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.