6 ms·

America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

34 points by krosaen 3y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
There are no ads unless use Javascript engine For example No Javascript engine, works where archive.ph is blocked: x=https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/04/americas-elite-universities-are-bloated-complacent-and-illiberal links $x Text-only, no browser, works where archive.ph is blocked: curl -si40A "" $x \ grep -Eo "data\":\"[^}]+\","\|name\":\"p \ |sed 's/data\":\"//;s/\",$//; s/name\":\"p/@@/s;/@\{4\}//' \ |tr -d '\12' \ |tr @ '\12' \ |fmt > 1.txt less 1.txt
7thaccount 3y ago
I have a super liberal (politically, not in the classical sense) sister as a professor at a small school (non Ivy League). She talks all the time about the hyper bloated administration that literally does nothing except make things less efficient and collect a paycheck. It would seem that whether you're on the political left OR right (or somewhere in the middle), that we can all agree that there is a ton of bloat in these institutions and that teaching and research has taken a backseat to sports, never ending growth of campus facilities, and milking students of every last dollar.
- Tier3r 3y ago
  Has any university manage to buck this trend?
  - randomdata 3y ago
    Where would the market fit be for a university to buck the trend? Those who want to fund research will hire the researchers themselves in order to retain ownership and control. Those who want to learn for the sake of learning turn to the internet. There is no money to be made here. The money is in selling sports and status. The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. An efficiently run university doesn't reflect well. It's the glitz and glamour that gets people's attention (especially employer attention).
    - ramesh31 3y ago
      Cal Tech comes to mind. Probably the only org left in the US doing this.
    - awesomeMilou 3y ago
      > The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. You're misrepresenting why people attend university. Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping. Not all of us are gifted. And not all upper class jobs can be filled by gifted people. Some of us just want a way to enter a class that they would otherwise have no way of entering. At least it's like this in my part of the world, then again most of my countries universities aren't for profit.
      - randomdata 3y ago
        > Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping Yes, exactly. The gatekeeping and networking are facilitated by it being absurdly expensive hobby. Nobody wants to network with some random nobody from the slums. They want to connect with people who come from wealth. The bloat works to keep the risk high, pushing away those who aren't in the right class.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Research institutes like Rockefeller, Allen Institute, Scripps.
    - linhns 3y ago
      I wouldn’t count those as universities.
      - j7ake 3y ago
        They are places of scholarship and they grant degrees. What is missing from them that makes them not universities?
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    They sometimes fire a lot of administrators towards the end when on life support, but that's only after cutting back all the programs to where the university is pretty much dead anyway.
- naasking 3y ago
  I was under the impression that sports were always a huge deal, are you saying that's increased even more? The growth of administrative roles has been crazy, and behind the majority of the increased costs from what I've seen.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Sports are MUCH bigger now. Apparently some small private schools make nearly all their money from kids that are obsessed with sports, but too terrible to get a scholarship at a real school. So they have basketball teams with 100 players and kids pay through the nose to continue being part of a team even though they never even play. You can't make this stuff up.
- shdh 3y ago
  The increase in the number of administrators has also infected US healthcare and government agencies.
- devwastaken 3y ago
  I can also confirm this is true. Costs are sky high, there's accreditation corruption, and research is minimal if not fabricated. The solution is to pull out gov funding and ban education loans across the board as predatory practices. New things can only begin when the old dies, and we are continually trying to life support a system that is so obviously dead.
h2odragon 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Anqpn https://archive.ph/Anqpn
bell-cot 3y ago
Um, yes? Universities are, essentially, very feudal institutions. And the ever-more-expensive-and-prestigious-and-diamond-encrusted competition between the "top" universities looks very much like the history of the House of Bourbon. Which proved unsustainable - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ginkgotree 3y ago
[flagged]
Ajay-p 3y ago
A university is often run by an administrative bureaucracy and the first rule of any bureaucracy is survival, followed by expansion, and accumulation of wealth. Combined with workplace protections against reducing employees through redundancy and you have a self perpetuating, bloated system.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
Restricting student loans for non stem degrees, student visas, and eliminating the non-profit status of higher ed institutions would go a long to reigning in the fat and excessiveness of tuition. Look at the salaries of college admins and board of trustees. Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous.
- ossicones 3y ago
  International students often end up subsidizing US students. Restricting student visas might end up actually increasing tuition. Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater. With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    What does not make sense is we let foreigners invest $500k to buy a green card and ability to live in the US. But a young, potentially productive and educated student who would ostensibly be looking to start a family and make more productive and more patriotic Americans, who has sunk a couple hundred thousand dollars into our higher education institutions still has to go through the gauntlet to earn the right to live in the US.
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. This is simply the free market though. Consider that, for its top executive roles, Harvard is recruiting people who are coming from or comparing the offer to C-suite positions. Harvard's endowment is $36 billion USD, and it takes in like $6 billion annually. It is the scale of a Fortune 500, where executive salaries are in the tens of millions. Like it or not, if you want to pull these top-tier executives to manage your Fortune 500-scale operation, this is what you need to compete against. You may think that's an oversized valuation given what they actually do (and I don't disagree), but from the perspective of the institution this is simply doing business. The only other option is admitting that all executives everywhere are massively overpaid, but good luck getting the US leadership class to acknowledge that one.
tech_ken 3y ago
People talk a lot about the bloat at universities, but I think that they don’t often think about that bloat as being the rational response to a system that is increasingly pushing them to (a) provide collegiate credentialling to basically the entire US workforce and (b) operate the infrastructure of a small village. Yes administrative bloat is real, yes universities are opaque morasses of money and bureaucracy. They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge. Does this require endless “Vice Provost of X” type bullshit jobs? No, but consider the amount of cruft at a private corporation of similar size and scope. In some ways this is simply what happens when organizations grow this big, IMO edit: I didn't even mention that they also must maintain enormous research operations, some of them performing research that is literally the bleeding edge of human knowledge. Like imagine trying to helm a corporation that is simultaneously invested in multi-billion dollar government grants for deep-tech R&D, alongside a portfolio of ~15 hotels, a minor-league football team, an urgent care, a landscaping company, and something like 10-20 high schools of students. Not to mention libraries, museums, gyms, food, etc. And god help you if your campus is more than 50 years old, because the cost of maintaining all those buildings are going to be insane. If you were able to do this all without bloat or graft honestly I think you'd a generational genius in management.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge. No, they are not. They just have access to unlimited taxpayer money in the form of unlimited student loans. Admin gets a cut of this, so obviously the more student loan money flowing through the school, the bigger the cut. Even 20 years ago, my college required people living in the dorms to buy a certain minimum number of meals at $20 per shitty defrosted Aramark/Sodexo meal or more. And this was in NYC, I could have walked 2min in any direction out and gotten a much more nutritious and better tasting meal for $5 to $10 back in those days. The root cause of the problem always has and will be the tap of unlimited taxpayer money. But with the benefit of tying it to a young person’s credit, so they keep their heads down and be good little worker bees.
satellite2 3y ago
This new, "it's because of liberals, groupthink, wokes" tone is really desacralizing the Economist image.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  They seem to have shifted to cater to a more American audience at some point.
- bitbangboom 3y ago
  I disagree, I think this was a well researched and thorough accounting of a concerning trend. Sometimes the opinions and facts provided challenge our worldview, but provide additional information and viewpoints to give us a more complete picture.
  - krosaen 3y ago
    Same - this is the kind of article that would have been easy to write in a lazy finger pointing way, but it's clear they took pains to justify their arguments and IMO didn't fall into the anti-work reactionary trap.

34 points by krosaen 3y ago

There are no ads unless use Javascript engine For example No Javascript engine, works where archive.ph is blocked: x=https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/04/americas-elite-universities-are-bloated-complacent-and-illiberal links $x Text-only, no browser, works where archive.ph is blocked: curl -si40A "" $x \ grep -Eo "data\":\"[^}]+\","\|name\":\"p \ |sed 's/data\":\"//;s/\",$//; s/name\":\"p/@@/s;/@\{4\}//' \ |tr -d '\12' \ |tr @ '\12' \ |fmt > 1.txt less 1.txt

7thaccount 3y ago

I have a super liberal (politically, not in the classical sense) sister as a professor at a small school (non Ivy League). She talks all the time about the hyper bloated administration that literally does nothing except make things less efficient and collect a paycheck. It would seem that whether you're on the political left OR right (or somewhere in the middle), that we can all agree that there is a ton of bloat in these institutions and that teaching and research has taken a backseat to sports, never ending growth of campus facilities, and milking students of every last dollar.

Tier3r 3y ago
Has any university manage to buck this trend?
- randomdata 3y ago
  Where would the market fit be for a university to buck the trend? Those who want to fund research will hire the researchers themselves in order to retain ownership and control. Those who want to learn for the sake of learning turn to the internet. There is no money to be made here. The money is in selling sports and status. The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. An efficiently run university doesn't reflect well. It's the glitz and glamour that gets people's attention (especially employer attention).
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    Cal Tech comes to mind. Probably the only org left in the US doing this.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    > The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. You're misrepresenting why people attend university. Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping. Not all of us are gifted. And not all upper class jobs can be filled by gifted people. Some of us just want a way to enter a class that they would otherwise have no way of entering. At least it's like this in my part of the world, then again most of my countries universities aren't for profit.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping Yes, exactly. The gatekeeping and networking are facilitated by it being absurdly expensive hobby. Nobody wants to network with some random nobody from the slums. They want to connect with people who come from wealth. The bloat works to keep the risk high, pushing away those who aren't in the right class.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Research institutes like Rockefeller, Allen Institute, Scripps.
  - linhns 3y ago
    I wouldn’t count those as universities.
    - j7ake 3y ago
      They are places of scholarship and they grant degrees. What is missing from them that makes them not universities?
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  They sometimes fire a lot of administrators towards the end when on life support, but that's only after cutting back all the programs to where the university is pretty much dead anyway.
naasking 3y ago
I was under the impression that sports were always a huge deal, are you saying that's increased even more? The growth of administrative roles has been crazy, and behind the majority of the increased costs from what I've seen.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Sports are MUCH bigger now. Apparently some small private schools make nearly all their money from kids that are obsessed with sports, but too terrible to get a scholarship at a real school. So they have basketball teams with 100 players and kids pay through the nose to continue being part of a team even though they never even play. You can't make this stuff up.
shdh 3y ago
The increase in the number of administrators has also infected US healthcare and government agencies.
devwastaken 3y ago
I can also confirm this is true. Costs are sky high, there's accreditation corruption, and research is minimal if not fabricated. The solution is to pull out gov funding and ban education loans across the board as predatory practices. New things can only begin when the old dies, and we are continually trying to life support a system that is so obviously dead.

h2odragon 3y ago

https://archive.ph/Anqpn https://archive.ph/Anqpn

bell-cot 3y ago

Um, yes? Universities are, essentially, very feudal institutions. And the ever-more-expensive-and-prestigious-and-diamond-encrusted competition between the "top" universities looks very much like the history of the House of Bourbon. Which proved unsustainable - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ginkgotree 3y ago

[flagged]

Ajay-p 3y ago

A university is often run by an administrative bureaucracy and the first rule of any bureaucracy is survival, followed by expansion, and accumulation of wealth. Combined with workplace protections against reducing employees through redundancy and you have a self perpetuating, bloated system.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

Restricting student loans for non stem degrees, student visas, and eliminating the non-profit status of higher ed institutions would go a long to reigning in the fat and excessiveness of tuition. Look at the salaries of college admins and board of trustees. Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. It's gone beyond ridiculous.

ossicones 3y ago
International students often end up subsidizing US students. Restricting student visas might end up actually increasing tuition. Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater. With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  What does not make sense is we let foreigners invest $500k to buy a green card and ability to live in the US. But a young, potentially productive and educated student who would ostensibly be looking to start a family and make more productive and more patriotic Americans, who has sunk a couple hundred thousand dollars into our higher education institutions still has to go through the gauntlet to earn the right to live in the US.
tech_ken 3y ago
> Harvard pays their president over $1million one year. This is simply the free market though. Consider that, for its top executive roles, Harvard is recruiting people who are coming from or comparing the offer to C-suite positions. Harvard's endowment is $36 billion USD, and it takes in like $6 billion annually. It is the scale of a Fortune 500, where executive salaries are in the tens of millions. Like it or not, if you want to pull these top-tier executives to manage your Fortune 500-scale operation, this is what you need to compete against. You may think that's an oversized valuation given what they actually do (and I don't disagree), but from the perspective of the institution this is simply doing business. The only other option is admitting that all executives everywhere are massively overpaid, but good luck getting the US leadership class to acknowledge that one.

tech_ken 3y ago

People talk a lot about the bloat at universities, but I think that they don’t often think about that bloat as being the rational response to a system that is increasingly pushing them to (a) provide collegiate credentialling to basically the entire US workforce and (b) operate the infrastructure of a small village. Yes administrative bloat is real, yes universities are opaque morasses of money and bureaucracy. They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge. Does this require endless “Vice Provost of X” type bullshit jobs? No, but consider the amount of cruft at a private corporation of similar size and scope. In some ways this is simply what happens when organizations grow this big, IMO edit: I didn't even mention that they also must maintain enormous research operations, some of them performing research that is literally the bleeding edge of human knowledge. Like imagine trying to helm a corporation that is simultaneously invested in multi-billion dollar government grants for deep-tech R&D, alongside a portfolio of ~15 hotels, a minor-league football team, an urgent care, a landscaping company, and something like 10-20 high schools of students. Not to mention libraries, museums, gyms, food, etc. And god help you if your campus is more than 50 years old, because the cost of maintaining all those buildings are going to be insane. If you were able to do this all without bloat or graft honestly I think you'd a generational genius in management.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge. No, they are not. They just have access to unlimited taxpayer money in the form of unlimited student loans. Admin gets a cut of this, so obviously the more student loan money flowing through the school, the bigger the cut. Even 20 years ago, my college required people living in the dorms to buy a certain minimum number of meals at $20 per shitty defrosted Aramark/Sodexo meal or more. And this was in NYC, I could have walked 2min in any direction out and gotten a much more nutritious and better tasting meal for $5 to $10 back in those days. The root cause of the problem always has and will be the tap of unlimited taxpayer money. But with the benefit of tying it to a young person’s credit, so they keep their heads down and be good little worker bees.

satellite2 3y ago

This new, "it's because of liberals, groupthink, wokes" tone is really desacralizing the Economist image.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
They seem to have shifted to cater to a more American audience at some point.
bitbangboom 3y ago
I disagree, I think this was a well researched and thorough accounting of a concerning trend. Sometimes the opinions and facts provided challenge our worldview, but provide additional information and viewpoints to give us a more complete picture.
- krosaen 3y ago
  Same - this is the kind of article that would have been easy to write in a lazy finger pointing way, but it's clear they took pains to justify their arguments and IMO didn't fall into the anti-work reactionary trap.