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Stanford's Administrative Bloat Is Out of Control (2018)
- bachmeier 3y ago> Stanford’s foremost problem is administrative bloat. The University employs 14,448 non-teaching employees, more than double the 6,769 it had on the payroll in 1984 That sounds like a big deal, but it doesn't mean anything. Stanford is among the top research universities in the world. Of course they're going to have a lot of non-teaching employees. The institution primarily exists for research, not teaching.
- cozzyd 3y agoPostdocs, for example would be counted under that.
- metadat 3y agoStanford is actually a real estate play disguised as a school and research institution. References: https://www.kqed.org/news/11781771/how-stanford-became-the-largest-landowner-in-silicon-valley https://www.kqed.org/news/11781771/how-stanford-became-the-l... https://revealnews.org/article/the-stanford-empire/ https://revealnews.org/article/the-stanford-empire/
- iancmceachern 3y agoSo is NYU
- washadjeffmad 3y agoDuring the pandemic when our universities were rumbling about furloughing staff, the governor told them they had to divest themselves of excess property holdings first. After that, there was no furlough, and no properties were sold. However, almost universally, the boards that proposed the furloughs all took PPP loans for themselves.
- bell-cot 3y ago> it doesn't mean anything EXACTLY, sad to say. If $Bobville_University operates $Bobville_Hospital - then how should you count the full-time medical, facilities, security, administrative staff at the hospital? At most a puny percentage of them are $Bobville_Professors. Which is not to say that administrative bloat - both headcount and top-job salaries - isn't an existential problem in American academia. But to identify (& hopefully kill) it, you have to do some actual work, sorting through the details.
- tmn 3y agoThey show a chart of the various 'non-teaching' roles. To my eyes, research positions are not included.
- cozzyd 3y agoThe same chart that shows SLAC, the national lab?
- jhbadger 3y agoExactly, as someone who was non-teaching research faculty (not at Stanford), I can say there are lots of people in research institutions who don't teach. That's a different issue than the real issue of growth of the number of administrative staff. It isn't useful to lump all "non-teaching employees" as a group.
- webdood90 3y agoI see these numbers but it doesn't hold much weight for me. My wife is an admin for a non-profit atmospheric research company and I see all of the work they have to do. Endless paperwork and red tape to raise money, to pay money, to orchestrate travel, plan events, and more. Maybe the world has just gotten more complex?
- linksnapzz 3y agoThat complexity, and the administrative growth that has risen to meet it, is not endogenous to academia. In the US, it's a reflection of the regulatory environment that colleges now have to operate in, vs. say, the early 1960s.
- 303uru 3y agoStanford has a $40B endowment and enough real-estate and land value to put a damn 10x multiplayer on that. They should probably employee more people and further distribute all that capital they're sitting on.
- LarsDu88 3y agoWell they could and should employee more people, but is it really better for society if all those added people are administrative assistants versus say... physics researchers?
- mmcwilliams 3y agoIn many (likely most) cases the non-teaching positions listed in this survey are staff researchers servicing a grant.
- LarsDu88 3y agoIn that case the article is a bit misleading. Underpaid staff researchers are indeed very often the ones making the world a better place.
- iancmceachern 3y agoYes, it is in fact better for soceity. A soceity made up of all physicists and no office managers wouldn't work. We need multiple office managers per physicist for our economic model to work.
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- throwaway0x6 3y agoAdministrative bloat is out of control all across education. From state primary schools to the world's best private universities. The problem to solve is how to we increase the quality of education while decreasing bloat and costs. It's proving to be a tough problem to solve.
- 6R1M0R4CL3 3y agono surprise there. administrations, like governments, first start to serve people. they grow. and after some time, they grow to fulfill themselves and their own needs. and soon, the people or their "clients" become the ones paying for the administration ever growth, and the main goal of the administration is to serve itself and its growth.