4 ms·

The change in academia is largely correlated with the fall-off of tenured positions in favor of adjunct faculty and the explosion of administration. I don't th

The change in academia is largely correlated with the fall-off of tenured positions in favor of adjunct faculty and the explosion of administration. I don't think it indicates that there is no need for tenure, but rather that tenure provided a bulwark against the very outcomes we now are seeing.

all2 4y ago
What if we started an institution that automated most of the admin, hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent? It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work...
- majormajor 4y ago
  "hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent?" Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that already happens for admissions.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work... Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals? Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do. In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who run the town and implement the services, it becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and associated services? The sports complex and associated services? The transportation system? And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a university, because a university is just a school, and it shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One, you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get rid of these services, often times the local town cannot replace them. So how are they to manage? So if you're having trouble understanding why a university can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it could be because you don't have a clear understanding of their role and why they are crucial. Universities require bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size of the student population.
  - kjksf 4y ago
    Here's the problem with your "admins are so absolutely necessary" argument. Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-increase-admin-positions/ https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased 75% across universities. Per 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-... over the last 20 years, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body. So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level of admin service or was the level of service just fine and they got bloated because they could, not because they needed to?
    - stametseater 4y ago
      Bureaucracies bloat because they gradually fill up with the sort of bureaucrats who seek foremost to expand their own dominion. From the individual perspective of such a bureaucrat, the more people they have working under them, the more important they are. From this individual selfish incentive, bureaucratic bloat becomes an emergent phenomenon. Or put another way: > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. > Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. > The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
    - Kevin_S 4y ago
      OK but you also have to measure the services the university provides to students through the increase in administration. Things listed already in this thread articulate that students desire these services. I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it explains the vast majority of the bloat. Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately they demand greater services.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > pure skill/ability/talent First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously define and measure those qualities.
- wyager 4y ago
  > hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent This would be great, but I will present without comment the fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far the best way that we know how to do ability-based admissions. You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission.
  - all2 4y ago
    > You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission. Is this for any institution of higher learning? Or just public institutions (ie, institutions that receive public/federal money)?
ModernMech 4y ago
The new trend now is not adjunct faculty, but well-paid lecturers with 5-year contracts instead of tenure.
cal5k 4y ago
Heavy government involvement in student loans created a perverse incentive to bloat costs (administration) and increase tuitions. Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power. It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions. Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.
- zoolily 4y ago
  Heavy government involvement with public universities in the form of subsidies once made public education free in some states and low tuition everywhere. As government subsidies have decreased, tuition costs have risen to compensate. The state paid 75% of the costs to educate a student in the closest university to me in 2005, but paid less than 25% of those costs in 2020. Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the expansion of the administration and increasing education costs.
aborsy 4y ago
In some sense, everyone is adjunct. People who work in industry have fixed-term renewable contracts. If job security is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as French do (with their CDI contracts). The main point is, professors don’t need life-time protection in many fields where research is increasingly focused on obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven. The gap between the type of research in academia and industry is not that much in many areas. Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of the industry. The duration could depend on the field.
- zoolily 4y ago
  Most industry positions are much better than adjunct positions. Adjunct faculty are temporary part-time workers who teach one or two classes per term. They are paid $1000-4000 per class without benefits, which is less than minimum wage when you count time to prepare for class, grade, and interact with students outside of class. A quarter of adjuncts depend on public assistance programs like food stamps to survive.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > If job security is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as French do (with their CDI contracts). A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be fired for low performance, or for economical reasons. You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.

all2 4y ago

What if we started an institution that automated most of the admin, hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent? It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work...

majormajor 4y ago
"hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent?" Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that already happens for admissions.
ModernMech 4y ago
> It seems to me that something so simple couldn't possibly work... Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals? Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do. In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who run the town and implement the services, it becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and associated services? The sports complex and associated services? The transportation system? And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a university, because a university is just a school, and it shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One, you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get rid of these services, often times the local town cannot replace them. So how are they to manage? So if you're having trouble understanding why a university can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it could be because you don't have a clear understanding of their role and why they are crucial. Universities require bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size of the student population.
- kjksf 4y ago
  Here's the problem with your "admins are so absolutely necessary" argument. Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-increase-admin-positions/ https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased 75% across universities. Per 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-... over the last 20 years, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body. So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level of admin service or was the level of service just fine and they got bloated because they could, not because they needed to?
  - stametseater 4y ago
    Bureaucracies bloat because they gradually fill up with the sort of bureaucrats who seek foremost to expand their own dominion. From the individual perspective of such a bureaucrat, the more people they have working under them, the more important they are. From this individual selfish incentive, bureaucratic bloat becomes an emergent phenomenon. Or put another way: > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. > Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. > The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
  - Kevin_S 4y ago
    OK but you also have to measure the services the university provides to students through the increase in administration. Things listed already in this thread articulate that students desire these services. I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it explains the vast majority of the bloat. Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately they demand greater services.
cratermoon 4y ago
> pure skill/ability/talent First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously define and measure those qualities.
wyager 4y ago
> hired and based admissions on pure skill/ability/talent This would be great, but I will present without comment the fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far the best way that we know how to do ability-based admissions. You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission.
- all2 4y ago
  > You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission. Is this for any institution of higher learning? Or just public institutions (ie, institutions that receive public/federal money)?

ModernMech 4y ago

The new trend now is not adjunct faculty, but well-paid lecturers with 5-year contracts instead of tenure.

cal5k 4y ago

Heavy government involvement in student loans created a perverse incentive to bloat costs (administration) and increase tuitions. Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power. It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions. Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.

zoolily 4y ago
Heavy government involvement with public universities in the form of subsidies once made public education free in some states and low tuition everywhere. As government subsidies have decreased, tuition costs have risen to compensate. The state paid 75% of the costs to educate a student in the closest university to me in 2005, but paid less than 25% of those costs in 2020. Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the expansion of the administration and increasing education costs.

aborsy 4y ago

In some sense, everyone is adjunct. People who work in industry have fixed-term renewable contracts. If job security is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as French do (with their CDI contracts). The main point is, professors don’t need life-time protection in many fields where research is increasingly focused on obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven. The gap between the type of research in academia and industry is not that much in many areas. Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of the industry. The duration could depend on the field.

zoolily 4y ago
Most industry positions are much better than adjunct positions. Adjunct faculty are temporary part-time workers who teach one or two classes per term. They are paid $1000-4000 per class without benefits, which is less than minimum wage when you count time to prepare for class, grade, and interact with students outside of class. A quarter of adjuncts depend on public assistance programs like food stamps to survive.
yodsanklai 4y ago
> If job security is to be offered, extend it to other professions as well, as French do (with their CDI contracts). A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be fired for low performance, or for economical reasons. You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.