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It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions. "Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrat

It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions. "Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%. When we look at individual schools the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country." https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

tomohelix 2y ago
Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues. But they would also want less work and delegate responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and bloated institutions. It is a vicious feedback loop.
choxi 2y ago
But why don’t they? Does anyone know what all these administrators do? I’ve heard the theory that more regulation leads to more admin needs but I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades.
- pj808 2y ago
  The common argument is that universities offer vastly more services to their students then in the past. Career centers, for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part because students also 'shop' for universities with the best perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less egregious examples include better campus security and health support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students' expectations.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A Unitarian system might be better, faculty run classes maybe without even TAs, your grade is however you do on your final, Spartan campuses without student amenities. The kids would be more depended on themselves to sink or flourish, but it’s almost like that anyways. But if I had to choose for my own kid and had the money to afford it, I would still go with the full campus experience, although a Unitarian experience would probably be better for access overall.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      The unitarian model you mentioned is the norm in Germany and France (and even the UK to a certain extent - a CSU will have better student amenities than Oxbridge tbh).
- osnium123 2y ago
  There are also more federal regulations that universities need to comply with and that drives up the number of administrators.
- r58lf 2y ago
  I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    “I have no idea what these other people I don’t work with do, so it must be nothing” is a really naive and insulting thing to say. They probably don’t know what you do either, would it be fair to say you do nothing of value?
- reaperducer 2y ago
  Does anyone know what all these administrators do? Yes. You don't. But other people do. I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades Every industry has. Education more than most.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    >Yes. You don't. But other people do. This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of examples would have been
    - skywhopper 2y ago
      There are thousands of different jobs they could have. You can’t think of any work that might happen at a university?
    - stevenbedrick 2y ago
      Ok, I’ll bite. My university has a team of experts to help students with academic writing. Another that helps us figure out how best to organize our classes in the online LMS that we use for distance education, and to ensure that we all are following a similar structure so as to not drive our students insane. Another team that helps support grad students on visas with logistics around immigration law and what-not. We have an office that helps with patents and technology transfer. Another team that helps with data repositories and management plans. We have a whole research computing office that runs our hpc team and deals with random IT things that scientists are always thinking up. Another that runs our IRB and helps us with that whole process. Another that helps us handle data use agreements so we can share data between institutions while staying compliant with relevant laws and what-not. We have an office that deals with contracts and legal agreements so I don’t have to figure out whether a certain clause in a funding agreement makes sense or not. And we have a whole team that helps me with budgets and financial analysis of my grants and research projects to make sure that my staff don’t suddenly find themselves unemployed in the middle of a grant year because I overspent or didn’t understand that certain kinds of expenses weren’t allowed. This is just off the top of my head and includes who I’ve worked with in the last month or two; I didn’t even get into the animal techs, the facilities folks, etc etc. These are all people who are at extreme risk of losing their jobs in the next weeks and months because of the chaos happening with NIH funding, and I can say with certainty that I as a scientist and an educator am far more effective because I have these professionals working with me. This is what our indirects cover and it is absolutely crucial.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean it’s just a bunch of lazy jerks collecting paychecks for doing nothing. You clearly don’t know anything about the state of higher ed regulation if you think nothing has changed in the last few decades. FERPA, HIPAA, Title IX, a huge IT infrastructure and all the security concerns that go with that, the ADA…
- mattkrause 2y ago
  “Students” might also be the wrong denominator for research-intensive places. Penn has an army of postdocs and research staff too. Even though they aren’t paid out of indirects, they do need to get paid, have places to park, get safety training, etc, all of which do need admins.
- rs186 2y ago
  > I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades. Because things never made headlines and you never paid attention. Maybe talk to a professor or an administrator, or ask ChatGPT before posting such ignorant comment.
gedy 2y ago
Yeah it's not partisan to wonder if it's a political move to maximize annoyance to point blame back at the current administration. Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed to be cut.
uberman 2y ago
Who do you think advises students getting into classes, who do you think reviews applications or works with companies to get students jobs. There is administrative over head because these activities are not core competencies of researchers. People act like a reseach faculty member should be conducting cutting edge research while writing findings applying from Grant's advising students on course course offerings and courting employers while also snoozing with alumni for donations. Noone can do it all and thus there are specialist in these fields that usually cost a fraction of what a faculty member costs.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility. Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - heylook 2y ago
    ...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...
    - mnky9800n 2y ago
      I’m happy to accept a job where my housing is subsidized. What university is this?
      - ykonstant 2y ago
        I recall that universities in extremely expensive places like UCLA, Stanford etc subsidize housing and/or provide specially priced housing for staff and faculty. Not to say they are cheap, they are just tolerable given the salaries, which is more than you can say with regular market pricing.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago, and are equally full today that they were back then. The student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time, but the growth of administration was explosive. I don't entirely know how much of this is attributable to each part, but my suggestions are that these administrators are driven by: 1. Increases in student services (ie sports) 2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX 3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research funding 4. Huge endowments that need managers
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead. For instance, I can tell you right now with certainty that at any large university the number of software devs or database admins in the IT department far outpace the number of financial analysts working in foundation/endowment. Pick any large university at random, and I'll wager that without even knowing the spread. But here's the thing, universities need IT divisions. They also need the other large operations level bureaucracies they typically have put in place. Facilities and plant, university police, housing, etc etc. You can't pull off a large university without these divisions nowadays. So saying, "Oh we can cut them" is very shortsighted.
  - rblatz 2y ago
    I worked at a large public university. The University had a large central IT team, but each college had its own independent IT team that managed their own computers, network, printers, and other technology. Each also had their own software dev teams and there was significant overlap an inefficiencies in this model.
    - skywhopper 2y ago
      Not every university is set up this way, and it’s not necessarily as inefficient as you think, since different colleges have different needs.
User23 2y ago
The White House is trying to require at least 85% of grant money go to research and not administration. It’s such an obviously common sense improvement and the first serious proposal to roll back this administrative bloat that I’ve ever seen.
- bglazer 2y ago
  No they’re cutting payments for indirect costs down to 15%. They’re not requiring money be spent on research instead of admin, they’re just giving out less money. This is not and was never supposed to increase American research productivity. Just the opposite actually, they want less science done in America, and as a bonus they “save” about $5 billion, that is, approximately one half the cost of a single aircraft carrier
- jasonhong 2y ago
  This sounds great in theory, until you start looking at the actual things that overhead covers. Things like the cost of my office space, my lab space, electricity, heating, building maintenance, telephone, computer network, IT and tech support, the photocopier machine we share, my admin assistant that handles travel and purchases, the admins in my department that handle grant budgets and compliance (which quite frankly I don't want to personally deal with), and more. I mentioned Chesterton's Fence in another post here, about really understanding a problem and why things are done in a certain way, before tearing everything down. I'd really encourage people to try to understand things better before jumping to conclusions, it's not all that different from the engineer's disease that often gets mentioned on HN.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      I wonder, am I a bot, or an American...
- r58lf 2y ago
tptacek 2y ago
Everything that isn't PIs and grad students is funded out of admin, including all the lab techs.
- jleyank 2y ago
  Computer clusters, chem or bio lab gear, staff and techs, …. Some of this isn’t cheap and it’s not safe to let the grad students and p-docs do it. And somebody has to TA all those pre-xx and other mid to advanced course students.
- PhotonHunter 2y ago
  Lab techs are often classified as “administrative and professional” employees by university HR but on NIH grants they would be paid for as a direct cost, other personnel (B on the R&R budget form).
  - mattkrause 2y ago
    I think “core” facilites can be handled a bit differently. There are certainly NIH mechanisms for supporting them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are partially supported—-or at least backstopped—-by indirects…
    - PhotonHunter 2y ago
      Yes, this is so. Ideally, you’d see a mix of direct support (e.g., a core as part of a large site grant like a U54) for things that advance the state of the art and indirect support for core activities supporting other investigators. Institutions vary how they manage core facilities as cost centers, what level they’re administered at (unit or uni-wide).
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  That isn’t true. Research staff is funded via grants almost exclusively, in computer science. I’m not sure about the sciences, but I would assume they would have a lot of labs that are not set up for education and would be funded mostly by grants.
bko 2y ago
In Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion," one of the characters describes a government agency that both builds monuments and provides medical care to children. When faced with budget cuts, they reduce the medical care while continuing to build monuments, because monuments are visible evidence of their work while the absence of medical care only shows up in statistics. The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?
- ptero 2y ago
  I recently saw a term for this -- "hostage puppy", which I think is an excellent description. I think [1] is the original source for the definition. [1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673 https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673
  - soared 2y ago
    Oof the US team I work for is beholden to a foreign HQ that runs the hostage puppy play, great term.
  - drfuchs 2y ago
    Here's a literal "hostage puppy" that was quite the rage in 1973 (though National Lampoon didn't use that phrase): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%2...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ModernMech 2y ago
  The literal worst thing Penn could do for students at this point is to take more on they aren't sure they will be able to support through their Ph.D. They are protecting and looking our for the students they have by not accepting more.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  this is the same reason wealthy donors want a building with their name on it, but don't want to fund the janitors who will keep it clean.
jasonhong 2y ago
It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in academia, one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face. For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down. In the past, professors used to handle some of these things informally and part-time on top of their teaching and research, but it really has to be professionalized and be done full time because of risks and costs of getting it wrong. Taking a step back, discussions about "too many admins" also feels not all that different from those threads on HN saying "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc) is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not something that universities can easily reduce without loosening requirements at the Federal level
- teleforce 2y ago
  > one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits I think this a gap that can be easily and fittingly addressed by explainable AI (XAI) hopefully with much cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation. I've got the feeling that Elon proposed DOGE as a trojan horse for doing this sneakily: 1) Reduced the budget to make govt more efficient so staff number reduction is inevitable 2) Sell and provide XAI based solutions for regulatory compliance, etc (accidentally his AI company name is xAI) 3) Repeat these with many govt's organization, research, academic institutions 4) Profit! But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.
bilbo0s 2y ago
Um, I'm not a fan of bloated university employment structures, but 1976 and 2018? Respectfully, you're comparing apples and oranges. On the campuses of today's major universities there are entire support divisions. Housing, Facilities and Plant, Foundation, and on and on. And all that is before we even get to the big new divisions to come online on campuses since 1976. ie - University Police and IT divisions. These divisions collectively employ thousands of people at a typical university. In fact, at most universities, the ratio of employees in the bureaucracies to academic staff is roughly between 15:1 and 20:1. If we want to cut that appreciably, you have to take a hatchet to the biggest divisions. (For most universities that will be IT.) Which is exactly what some universities have done. For example, the University of Wisconsin got that ratio down to roughly 8:1 at one point. But there were still a whole lot of database admins over at UW DoIT. Point being, when people say "administrators", they're talking about the flood of IT guys, facilities planners, and project managers hired long after 1976. Most universities are far more lean on deans than they are on software developers or database admins for instance. So it's not at all clear how to get rid of an appreciable number of these people and still have a functioning UCLA just as an example. And here's the bad news, I've only mentioned a few of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like the University of Texas, or University of Michigan, or University of Wisconsin. Or even Penn for that matter. It's not as easy a problem to solve as people make it out to be.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Wait, why is University police so historically recent?
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Cleary Act
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      Not really. At the biggest universities, police pre-date that law. The reason is obvious when you consider how large many universities have become. If you throw 50000 20 year olds into a 3 square mile area, there's likely to be a lot of crime that happens. Sexual assaults, narcotics, and thefts mostly. There are, of course, more serious crimes that happen as well. In all that chaos, these universities have an obligation to keep order.
jltsiren 2y ago
If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation. Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.
- acdha 2y ago
  > If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance I have a friend who’s a fairly established scientist in his field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have exactly the effect you’re describing by requiring them to spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying to save money there will cost more than it’s worth because most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid for by NIH but they’d have to add accounting staff to document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that level of precision.
- heylook 2y ago
  > If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.
  - naijaboiler 2y ago
    For a tech company, sales and marketing are admin staff. Professors are to universities what engineers are to a tech company
- xienze 2y ago
  > If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation. Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out of having to tighten up the finances. I’m reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two prior. The administration went on and on about how there was absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public statements about how they would “need” to do ridiculous things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department, etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol building, and the state relented.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions Administrators are typically paid out of tuition. Penn is cutting uses in line with sources.
- sega_sai 2y ago
  I am assuming some grant overheads also go to admin.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I get that, but a research university's prestige comes from the recognition for the research they do. Accepting fewer grad students means less research will be done and fewer papers will be published. They could presumably cut admin staff to some extent, and pay grad students out of the tuition funds freed up. But why would we expect the bosses to fire their friends?
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    This is a complicated ecosystem, it's not that simple. Academic departments are not places where there's a lot of slack - positions are scarce, the competition for them is fierce, and the people who get them are notorious workaholics. Cutting admin means more work on professors, means less research output, means fewer grants funded, means fewer grad students supported. So you can cut students and get fewer students, or cut admin still get fewer students but also less research and funding as well.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
[flagged]
- csomar 2y ago
  Then how did the universities operate before the increases? How come digitalization is not able to reduce the admin numbers. You are the one to justify why you need this additional overhead and not the other way around.
  - PhotonHunter 2y ago
    They didn’t used to have to deal with FAR and DFARS compliance, export compliance, cybersecurity, iEdison reporting, and so on. Nevertheless, the administrative component of F&A indirects has been capped at 26% for years. The universities have to fill the budget gap with other funds (and no, not tuition, that is not used for the research enterprise).
    - lc9er 2y ago
      This is exactly it. A modern university has needs that are far greater and demanding than one of 50+ years ago. And generally, the people doing the ground-level work are underpaid and overworked. If anything, there may be a glut of VP and C-level positions, but they don’t make up the bulk of employees.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    In addition to what the other commenter said, most of the public universities doing scientific research used to be far better funded from their states than they are today on a cost-per-student basis. Additional administrative staff that many universities now have is often necessitated by their regulatory complexity as well as the need for generating different sources of funding. These are broad statements that do oversimplify matters, but part of the full story.
  - apical_dendrite 2y ago
    Why would digitization reduce the number of university admins? I'm sure there were some clerks and secretaries whose jobs were automated, but the universities also had to add huge IT departments. Plus, everything about a university is more complicated now then in was 50 years ago. In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots. I'm sure the percentage that are international is vastly higher now. Probably a higher percentage want to visit campus. Financial aid is a lot more complicated. So just the admissions office is doing much more work.
skywhopper 2y ago
Universities have more administrators and “other professionals” because they provide more services. There was only a very small IT department in the 70s. Student support services were minimal. This is not a good statistic without more context.
amluto 2y ago
> Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%. There’s a separate factor at play here: colleges are increasingly using people who are not full-time tenured professors to teach classes. See, for example: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/ https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...
bloomingkales 2y ago
Every medieval fantasy movie you ever saw, who were the extras? The people in the castle stay because there's only ever a few positions in the castle. By definition there can only be a few, otherwise you are not a castle person. I don't know if this equilibrium is natural or not since it's been the paradigm for centuries across a lot of life. I'm describing deep entitlement, the pure raw form of it.
rayiner 2y ago
It’s also revealing the way this move is being marketed by universities. This certainly isn’t the first time HHS has raised concerns about the magnitude of indirect costs. Obama’s HHS also tried to reduce indirect costs: https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-and-other-research-schools-thwart-obama-administration-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Nk5PT0Mc8MQZihFVNs5gNK/story.html https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  There's nothing revealing about it. The article you posted talks about capping things around 40 or 50%, or 95% of current funding. Not 15%, which will bankrupt those schools. It's an example of how you can take something that's true, put it out of context, and be completely wrong.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    The 40-50% isn’t what the Obama administration proposed. The article says the administration didn’t propose a specific number. The point is that there’s clearly a problem here that isn’t something Trump is making up.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      One of the common moves I’ve seen with Trump and particularly his defenders is to take an issue that’s real, then convert it into a weapon. So imagine my dog is overweight and needs to go on a bit of a diet: well, what if we took that same dog and reduced its calorie intake by 75% until it starved to death. Then while I’m standing over the corpse, I explain to you that “this isn’t something I was making up, there was a real problem there.” Even if, against all odds, you really are in favor of reforming things, killing a bunch of dogs pretty much guarantees a good-faith conversation can never happen. At some point you just need to decide if you’re on the side of truth or bullshit.
      - rayiner 2y ago
potato3732842 2y ago
>It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions. Ye olde Sowell quote[1] about institutional priorities and budget cuts seems highly appropriate here. [1] https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budget_politics.html https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...
- toomim 2y ago
  Incredible.
analog31 2y ago
Are adjuncts counted as faculty? We were not when I was one. This could just be a classification problem. I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.
- MITSardine 2y ago
  My university only has 6% faculty, but 52% scientific staff overall, not counting graduate students. I do believe this is a classification issue coupled with the appearance and now ubiquity of precarious positions (soft-funded staff, postdocs).
sethev 2y ago
Graduate students are paid to attend - they're more like employees than undergraduate students. Why wouldn't a university faced with funding cuts start by not hiring additional people rather than getting rid of current ones?
- burnerthrow008 2y ago
  Maybe because graduate students directly contribute to the university’s mission by teaching undergrads and “producing” research (both of which bring in $$$), while administrators seem to be purely a cost center, many of whom serve no useful purpose?
  - sethev 2y ago
    I mean, the grants that are being cut is the money that graduate students bring in. Less grant money -> fewer graduate students. In theory maybe it's possible to be more efficient like you're suggesting, but it's hard to see how the immediate response could be any different.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Is it possible to do all three at the same time? - talk about academic "administrators" - lazily generalize - be intellectually honest The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole book of information!
1shooner 2y ago
I encourage anyone taking this line of criticism to compare an e.g. $5B state university to any other similar sized enterprise, and consider what increased operational and administrative costs those other organizations have had to undertake since 1976. This can include HR and IT and healthcare, legal liability and industry compliance. Now add to that the additional regulatory burdens specific to higher education, and the increased market expectations of higher education as a holistic 'experience' that is almost unrecognizable from what it was 50 years ago. Much of that professional staff is geared toward corporate-style product development and marketing, because they've been forced to by a lack of public funding. And while a commercial corporation generally aims to retain and grow a customer base, gaining some economy of scale for those professional positions, universities are functionally capped at those small ratios you describe. Of course there is administrative bloat, and the funding model doesn't do enough to self-regulate that, but lack of public investment causes more systemic inefficiencies than that.
analog31 2y ago
This may be a side issue, but is a pet peeve of mine. Penn is a private university. I'm a staunch supporter of higher education, but I think it's worth observing that the public university and college system educates people at a much lower cost. The huge cost disparity between private and public college challenges most simplistic explanations. I'm drawn to the parallels between our "private" universities and our "private" health care system. Both face almost exactly the same criticism of costing twice as much while imposing barriers to access. I don't think improving higher education is the present government's intention, but if it were my intention, I'd focus on supporting our public universities, colleges, community colleges, and trade schools. Both of my kids graduated from public colleges, debt free.
MITSardine 2y ago
The author of that article is acting as though there were only two types of employees at a university: faculty and administrative. Yet this is false, faculty are "team leaders" managing a team of scientific staff (non-faculty). Typically (besides PhD students) postdocs and research scientists. For instance, one university has: - faculty 6% (the actual professors and associate professors running things) - postdocs 9% (faculty/staff scientist aspirants with a PhD) - research staff 25% (e.g. research engineer, research scientist) - other academic staff 12% (I imagine, technicians) - admin staff 28% So, while faculty is only 6% of the overall workforce, scientific employees still make up 52% of the lot. Add to that the PhD students who are not counted as employees in the US despite being paid and having employee duties towards their superior (a member of faculty). This same university has about 40% of the number of employees worth of graduate students (7k to the 17k), for instance. In conclusion, what the statistics you report show, is rather how precarious research has become. There existed no such thing as a postdoc in the 70s; my advisor's advisor, who was recruited in that decade, had already signed a contract for tenured employment before his PhD was even over, as did many of his peers. Nowadays, it's typical to postdoc for a minimum of 3 years, and then play the odds, which are not in the candidate's favour as the 6% faculty to 9% postdoc hints at.
jayd16 2y ago
It's way way way easier to freeze hiring (akin to admissions) than to go through a layoff. Not saying admin salaries are justified but gutting staff has much more fallout than fewer admissions.

tomohelix 2y ago

Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues. But they would also want less work and delegate responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and bloated institutions. It is a vicious feedback loop.

choxi 2y ago

But why don’t they? Does anyone know what all these administrators do? I’ve heard the theory that more regulation leads to more admin needs but I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades.

pj808 2y ago
The common argument is that universities offer vastly more services to their students then in the past. Career centers, for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part because students also 'shop' for universities with the best perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less egregious examples include better campus security and health support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students' expectations.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  A Unitarian system might be better, faculty run classes maybe without even TAs, your grade is however you do on your final, Spartan campuses without student amenities. The kids would be more depended on themselves to sink or flourish, but it’s almost like that anyways. But if I had to choose for my own kid and had the money to afford it, I would still go with the full campus experience, although a Unitarian experience would probably be better for access overall.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    The unitarian model you mentioned is the norm in Germany and France (and even the UK to a certain extent - a CSU will have better student amenities than Oxbridge tbh).
osnium123 2y ago
There are also more federal regulations that universities need to comply with and that drives up the number of administrators.
r58lf 2y ago
I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  “I have no idea what these other people I don’t work with do, so it must be nothing” is a really naive and insulting thing to say. They probably don’t know what you do either, would it be fair to say you do nothing of value?
reaperducer 2y ago
Does anyone know what all these administrators do? Yes. You don't. But other people do. I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades Every industry has. Education more than most.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  >Yes. You don't. But other people do. This assertion is so much more compelling than a couple of examples would have been
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    There are thousands of different jobs they could have. You can’t think of any work that might happen at a university?
  - stevenbedrick 2y ago
    Ok, I’ll bite. My university has a team of experts to help students with academic writing. Another that helps us figure out how best to organize our classes in the online LMS that we use for distance education, and to ensure that we all are following a similar structure so as to not drive our students insane. Another team that helps support grad students on visas with logistics around immigration law and what-not. We have an office that helps with patents and technology transfer. Another team that helps with data repositories and management plans. We have a whole research computing office that runs our hpc team and deals with random IT things that scientists are always thinking up. Another that runs our IRB and helps us with that whole process. Another that helps us handle data use agreements so we can share data between institutions while staying compliant with relevant laws and what-not. We have an office that deals with contracts and legal agreements so I don’t have to figure out whether a certain clause in a funding agreement makes sense or not. And we have a whole team that helps me with budgets and financial analysis of my grants and research projects to make sure that my staff don’t suddenly find themselves unemployed in the middle of a grant year because I overspent or didn’t understand that certain kinds of expenses weren’t allowed. This is just off the top of my head and includes who I’ve worked with in the last month or two; I didn’t even get into the animal techs, the facilities folks, etc etc. These are all people who are at extreme risk of losing their jobs in the next weeks and months because of the chaos happening with NIH funding, and I can say with certainty that I as a scientist and an educator am far more effective because I have these professionals working with me. This is what our indirects cover and it is absolutely crucial.
skywhopper 2y ago
Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean it’s just a bunch of lazy jerks collecting paychecks for doing nothing. You clearly don’t know anything about the state of higher ed regulation if you think nothing has changed in the last few decades. FERPA, HIPAA, Title IX, a huge IT infrastructure and all the security concerns that go with that, the ADA…
mattkrause 2y ago
“Students” might also be the wrong denominator for research-intensive places. Penn has an army of postdocs and research staff too. Even though they aren’t paid out of indirects, they do need to get paid, have places to park, get safety training, etc, all of which do need admins.
rs186 2y ago
> I don’t think higher education has been increasingly regulated for decades. Because things never made headlines and you never paid attention. Maybe talk to a professor or an administrator, or ask ChatGPT before posting such ignorant comment.

gedy 2y ago

Yeah it's not partisan to wonder if it's a political move to maximize annoyance to point blame back at the current administration. Similar to teachers having to buy their own pencils etc but school administrators and their retirement funds never seemed to be cut.

uberman 2y ago

Who do you think advises students getting into classes, who do you think reviews applications or works with companies to get students jobs. There is administrative over head because these activities are not core competencies of researchers. People act like a reseach faculty member should be conducting cutting edge research while writing findings applying from Grant's advising students on course course offerings and courting employers while also snoozing with alumni for donations. Noone can do it all and thus there are specialist in these fields that usually cost a fraction of what a faculty member costs.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
At many schools, advising is a professorial responsibility. Professors have a hard job, but they have a job that is very powerful and prestigious and can be incredibly lucrative (thanks to consulting gigs, patents, etc.).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- heylook 2y ago
  ...subsidized housing, normalized sabbaticals, teaching a course that uses the textbook you yourself wrote...
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    I’m happy to accept a job where my housing is subsidized. What university is this?
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      I recall that universities in extremely expensive places like UCLA, Stanford etc subsidize housing and/or provide specially priced housing for staff and faculty. Not to say they are cheap, they are just tolerable given the salaries, which is more than you can say with regular market pricing.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago, and are equally full today that they were back then. The student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time, but the growth of administration was explosive. I don't entirely know how much of this is attributable to each part, but my suggestions are that these administrators are driven by: 1. Increases in student services (ie sports) 2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX 3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research funding 4. Huge endowments that need managers

bilbo0s 2y ago
Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead. For instance, I can tell you right now with certainty that at any large university the number of software devs or database admins in the IT department far outpace the number of financial analysts working in foundation/endowment. Pick any large university at random, and I'll wager that without even knowing the spread. But here's the thing, universities need IT divisions. They also need the other large operations level bureaucracies they typically have put in place. Facilities and plant, university police, housing, etc etc. You can't pull off a large university without these divisions nowadays. So saying, "Oh we can cut them" is very shortsighted.
- rblatz 2y ago
  I worked at a large public university. The University had a large central IT team, but each college had its own independent IT team that managed their own computers, network, printers, and other technology. Each also had their own software dev teams and there was significant overlap an inefficiencies in this model.
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    Not every university is set up this way, and it’s not necessarily as inefficient as you think, since different colleges have different needs.

User23 2y ago

The White House is trying to require at least 85% of grant money go to research and not administration. It’s such an obviously common sense improvement and the first serious proposal to roll back this administrative bloat that I’ve ever seen.

bglazer 2y ago
No they’re cutting payments for indirect costs down to 15%. They’re not requiring money be spent on research instead of admin, they’re just giving out less money. This is not and was never supposed to increase American research productivity. Just the opposite actually, they want less science done in America, and as a bonus they “save” about $5 billion, that is, approximately one half the cost of a single aircraft carrier
jasonhong 2y ago
This sounds great in theory, until you start looking at the actual things that overhead covers. Things like the cost of my office space, my lab space, electricity, heating, building maintenance, telephone, computer network, IT and tech support, the photocopier machine we share, my admin assistant that handles travel and purchases, the admins in my department that handle grant budgets and compliance (which quite frankly I don't want to personally deal with), and more. I mentioned Chesterton's Fence in another post here, about really understanding a problem and why things are done in a certain way, before tearing everything down. I'd really encourage people to try to understand things better before jumping to conclusions, it's not all that different from the engineer's disease that often gets mentioned on HN.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    I wonder, am I a bot, or an American...
r58lf 2y ago

tptacek 2y ago

Everything that isn't PIs and grad students is funded out of admin, including all the lab techs.

jleyank 2y ago
Computer clusters, chem or bio lab gear, staff and techs, …. Some of this isn’t cheap and it’s not safe to let the grad students and p-docs do it. And somebody has to TA all those pre-xx and other mid to advanced course students.
PhotonHunter 2y ago
Lab techs are often classified as “administrative and professional” employees by university HR but on NIH grants they would be paid for as a direct cost, other personnel (B on the R&R budget form).
- mattkrause 2y ago
  I think “core” facilites can be handled a bit differently. There are certainly NIH mechanisms for supporting them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are partially supported—-or at least backstopped—-by indirects…
  - PhotonHunter 2y ago
    Yes, this is so. Ideally, you’d see a mix of direct support (e.g., a core as part of a large site grant like a U54) for things that advance the state of the art and indirect support for core activities supporting other investigators. Institutions vary how they manage core facilities as cost centers, what level they’re administered at (unit or uni-wide).
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
That isn’t true. Research staff is funded via grants almost exclusively, in computer science. I’m not sure about the sciences, but I would assume they would have a lot of labs that are not set up for education and would be funded mostly by grants.

bko 2y ago

In Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion," one of the characters describes a government agency that both builds monuments and provides medical care to children. When faced with budget cuts, they reduce the medical care while continuing to build monuments, because monuments are visible evidence of their work while the absence of medical care only shows up in statistics. The administrators are the school at this point, why would they choose to cut there?

ptero 2y ago
I recently saw a term for this -- "hostage puppy", which I think is an excellent description. I think [1] is the original source for the definition. [1] https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673 https://x.com/perrymetzger/status/1887896797575520673
- soared 2y ago
  Oof the US team I work for is beholden to a foreign HQ that runs the hostage puppy play, great term.
- drfuchs 2y ago
  Here's a literal "hostage puppy" that was quite the rage in 1973 (though National Lampoon didn't use that phrase): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%2...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ModernMech 2y ago
The literal worst thing Penn could do for students at this point is to take more on they aren't sure they will be able to support through their Ph.D. They are protecting and looking our for the students they have by not accepting more.
skeeter2020 2y ago
this is the same reason wealthy donors want a building with their name on it, but don't want to fund the janitors who will keep it clean.

jasonhong 2y ago

It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in academia, one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face. For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down. In the past, professors used to handle some of these things informally and part-time on top of their teaching and research, but it really has to be professionalized and be done full time because of risks and costs of getting it wrong. Taking a step back, discussions about "too many admins" also feels not all that different from those threads on HN saying "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.

SubiculumCode 2y ago
As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc) is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not something that universities can easily reduce without loosening requirements at the Federal level
teleforce 2y ago
> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits I think this a gap that can be easily and fittingly addressed by explainable AI (XAI) hopefully with much cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation. I've got the feeling that Elon proposed DOGE as a trojan horse for doing this sneakily: 1) Reduced the budget to make govt more efficient so staff number reduction is inevitable 2) Sell and provide XAI based solutions for regulatory compliance, etc (accidentally his AI company name is xAI) 3) Repeat these with many govt's organization, research, academic institutions 4) Profit! But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.

bilbo0s 2y ago

Um, I'm not a fan of bloated university employment structures, but 1976 and 2018? Respectfully, you're comparing apples and oranges. On the campuses of today's major universities there are entire support divisions. Housing, Facilities and Plant, Foundation, and on and on. And all that is before we even get to the big new divisions to come online on campuses since 1976. ie - University Police and IT divisions. These divisions collectively employ thousands of people at a typical university. In fact, at most universities, the ratio of employees in the bureaucracies to academic staff is roughly between 15:1 and 20:1. If we want to cut that appreciably, you have to take a hatchet to the biggest divisions. (For most universities that will be IT.) Which is exactly what some universities have done. For example, the University of Wisconsin got that ratio down to roughly 8:1 at one point. But there were still a whole lot of database admins over at UW DoIT. Point being, when people say "administrators", they're talking about the flood of IT guys, facilities planners, and project managers hired long after 1976. Most universities are far more lean on deans than they are on software developers or database admins for instance. So it's not at all clear how to get rid of an appreciable number of these people and still have a functioning UCLA just as an example. And here's the bad news, I've only mentioned a few of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like the University of Texas, or University of Michigan, or University of Wisconsin. Or even Penn for that matter. It's not as easy a problem to solve as people make it out to be.

pjc50 2y ago
Wait, why is University police so historically recent?
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Cleary Act
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    Not really. At the biggest universities, police pre-date that law. The reason is obvious when you consider how large many universities have become. If you throw 50000 20 year olds into a 3 square mile area, there's likely to be a lot of crime that happens. Sexual assaults, narcotics, and thefts mostly. There are, of course, more serious crimes that happen as well. In all that chaos, these universities have an obligation to keep order.

jltsiren 2y ago

If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation. Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance. If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.

acdha 2y ago
> If there are regulations governing what the university is allowed to do with federal money, the university needs administrators to ensure and report compliance I have a friend who’s a fairly established scientist in his field. The promised cuts to NIH indirect funding would have exactly the effect you’re describing by requiring them to spend time calculating everything as direct costs for every shared resource precisely enough to survive an audit. Trying to save money there will cost more than it’s worth because most of the shared people, equipment, and resources are paid for by NIH but they’d have to add accounting staff to document which fraction gets billed to which grant at that level of precision.
heylook 2y ago
> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. In my experience, they'll try find literally anyone else they can before laying off engineers. Both times I've been a part of it was like 10-20% of laid off employees were engineering. 80-90% recruiting, support, admin, HR, middle management, design, etc, etc. As much as possible leave sales, marketing, engineering functions alone.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  For a tech company, sales and marketing are admin staff. Professors are to universities what engineers are to a tech company
xienze 2y ago
> If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation. Eh, maybe. Part of me thinks this is making a spectacle out of having to tighten up the finances. I’m reminded of when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state called for a 2% budget cut. Or in other words, going back to what the budget was a year or two prior. The administration went on and on about how there was absolutely no fat to cut and started making loud public statements about how they would “need” to do ridiculous things like cut the number of offered sections for undergrad mathematics courses by 15%, eliminate the music department, etc. They whipped the students into a frenzy and the whole thing culminated with a protest march down to the capitol building, and the state relented.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions Administrators are typically paid out of tuition. Penn is cutting uses in line with sources.

sega_sai 2y ago
I am assuming some grant overheads also go to admin.
kelnos 2y ago
I get that, but a research university's prestige comes from the recognition for the research they do. Accepting fewer grad students means less research will be done and fewer papers will be published. They could presumably cut admin staff to some extent, and pay grad students out of the tuition funds freed up. But why would we expect the bosses to fire their friends?
- ModernMech 2y ago
  This is a complicated ecosystem, it's not that simple. Academic departments are not places where there's a lot of slack - positions are scarce, the competition for them is fierce, and the people who get them are notorious workaholics. Cutting admin means more work on professors, means less research output, means fewer grants funded, means fewer grad students supported. So you can cut students and get fewer students, or cut admin still get fewer students but also less research and funding as well.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

[flagged]

csomar 2y ago
Then how did the universities operate before the increases? How come digitalization is not able to reduce the admin numbers. You are the one to justify why you need this additional overhead and not the other way around.
- PhotonHunter 2y ago
  They didn’t used to have to deal with FAR and DFARS compliance, export compliance, cybersecurity, iEdison reporting, and so on. Nevertheless, the administrative component of F&A indirects has been capped at 26% for years. The universities have to fill the budget gap with other funds (and no, not tuition, that is not used for the research enterprise).
  - lc9er 2y ago
    This is exactly it. A modern university has needs that are far greater and demanding than one of 50+ years ago. And generally, the people doing the ground-level work are underpaid and overworked. If anything, there may be a glut of VP and C-level positions, but they don’t make up the bulk of employees.
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  In addition to what the other commenter said, most of the public universities doing scientific research used to be far better funded from their states than they are today on a cost-per-student basis. Additional administrative staff that many universities now have is often necessitated by their regulatory complexity as well as the need for generating different sources of funding. These are broad statements that do oversimplify matters, but part of the full story.
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  Why would digitization reduce the number of university admins? I'm sure there were some clerks and secretaries whose jobs were automated, but the universities also had to add huge IT departments. Plus, everything about a university is more complicated now then in was 50 years ago. In 1970, Harvard had 6000 applicants for 1200 freshman spots. Today it has 54,000 for 1900 spots. I'm sure the percentage that are international is vastly higher now. Probably a higher percentage want to visit campus. Financial aid is a lot more complicated. So just the admissions office is doing much more work.

skywhopper 2y ago

Universities have more administrators and “other professionals” because they provide more services. There was only a very small IT department in the 70s. Student support services were minimal. This is not a good statistic without more context.

amluto 2y ago

> Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%. There’s a separate factor at play here: colleges are increasingly using people who are not full-time tenured professors to teach classes. See, for example: https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/ https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp...

bloomingkales 2y ago

Every medieval fantasy movie you ever saw, who were the extras? The people in the castle stay because there's only ever a few positions in the castle. By definition there can only be a few, otherwise you are not a castle person. I don't know if this equilibrium is natural or not since it's been the paradigm for centuries across a lot of life. I'm describing deep entitlement, the pure raw form of it.

rayiner 2y ago

It’s also revealing the way this move is being marketed by universities. This certainly isn’t the first time HHS has raised concerns about the magnitude of indirect costs. Obama’s HHS also tried to reduce indirect costs: https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-and-other-research-schools-thwart-obama-administration-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Nk5PT0Mc8MQZihFVNs5gNK/story.html https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...

matthewdgreen 2y ago
There's nothing revealing about it. The article you posted talks about capping things around 40 or 50%, or 95% of current funding. Not 15%, which will bankrupt those schools. It's an example of how you can take something that's true, put it out of context, and be completely wrong.
- rayiner 2y ago
  The 40-50% isn’t what the Obama administration proposed. The article says the administration didn’t propose a specific number. The point is that there’s clearly a problem here that isn’t something Trump is making up.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    One of the common moves I’ve seen with Trump and particularly his defenders is to take an issue that’s real, then convert it into a weapon. So imagine my dog is overweight and needs to go on a bit of a diet: well, what if we took that same dog and reduced its calorie intake by 75% until it starved to death. Then while I’m standing over the corpse, I explain to you that “this isn’t something I was making up, there was a real problem there.” Even if, against all odds, you really are in favor of reforming things, killing a bunch of dogs pretty much guarantees a good-faith conversation can never happen. At some point you just need to decide if you’re on the side of truth or bullshit.
    - rayiner 2y ago

potato3732842 2y ago

>It's pretty telling that schools like Penn don't cut their administrators, but instead they cut their admissions. Ye olde Sowell quote[1] about institutional priorities and budget cuts seems highly appropriate here. [1] https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budget_politics.html https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...

toomim 2y ago
Incredible.

analog31 2y ago

Are adjuncts counted as faculty? We were not when I was one. This could just be a classification problem. I might go even further and suggest that the problem is trying to figure out how a university works by counting job titles.

MITSardine 2y ago
My university only has 6% faculty, but 52% scientific staff overall, not counting graduate students. I do believe this is a classification issue coupled with the appearance and now ubiquity of precarious positions (soft-funded staff, postdocs).

sethev 2y ago

Graduate students are paid to attend - they're more like employees than undergraduate students. Why wouldn't a university faced with funding cuts start by not hiring additional people rather than getting rid of current ones?

burnerthrow008 2y ago
Maybe because graduate students directly contribute to the university’s mission by teaching undergrads and “producing” research (both of which bring in $$$), while administrators seem to be purely a cost center, many of whom serve no useful purpose?
- sethev 2y ago
  I mean, the grants that are being cut is the money that graduate students bring in. Less grant money -> fewer graduate students. In theory maybe it's possible to be more efficient like you're suggesting, but it's hard to see how the immediate response could be any different.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Is it possible to do all three at the same time? - talk about academic "administrators" - lazily generalize - be intellectually honest The answers you are seeking require reading at least a whole book of information!

1shooner 2y ago

I encourage anyone taking this line of criticism to compare an e.g. $5B state university to any other similar sized enterprise, and consider what increased operational and administrative costs those other organizations have had to undertake since 1976. This can include HR and IT and healthcare, legal liability and industry compliance. Now add to that the additional regulatory burdens specific to higher education, and the increased market expectations of higher education as a holistic 'experience' that is almost unrecognizable from what it was 50 years ago. Much of that professional staff is geared toward corporate-style product development and marketing, because they've been forced to by a lack of public funding. And while a commercial corporation generally aims to retain and grow a customer base, gaining some economy of scale for those professional positions, universities are functionally capped at those small ratios you describe. Of course there is administrative bloat, and the funding model doesn't do enough to self-regulate that, but lack of public investment causes more systemic inefficiencies than that.

analog31 2y ago

This may be a side issue, but is a pet peeve of mine. Penn is a private university. I'm a staunch supporter of higher education, but I think it's worth observing that the public university and college system educates people at a much lower cost. The huge cost disparity between private and public college challenges most simplistic explanations. I'm drawn to the parallels between our "private" universities and our "private" health care system. Both face almost exactly the same criticism of costing twice as much while imposing barriers to access. I don't think improving higher education is the present government's intention, but if it were my intention, I'd focus on supporting our public universities, colleges, community colleges, and trade schools. Both of my kids graduated from public colleges, debt free.

MITSardine 2y ago

The author of that article is acting as though there were only two types of employees at a university: faculty and administrative. Yet this is false, faculty are "team leaders" managing a team of scientific staff (non-faculty). Typically (besides PhD students) postdocs and research scientists. For instance, one university has: - faculty 6% (the actual professors and associate professors running things) - postdocs 9% (faculty/staff scientist aspirants with a PhD) - research staff 25% (e.g. research engineer, research scientist) - other academic staff 12% (I imagine, technicians) - admin staff 28% So, while faculty is only 6% of the overall workforce, scientific employees still make up 52% of the lot. Add to that the PhD students who are not counted as employees in the US despite being paid and having employee duties towards their superior (a member of faculty). This same university has about 40% of the number of employees worth of graduate students (7k to the 17k), for instance. In conclusion, what the statistics you report show, is rather how precarious research has become. There existed no such thing as a postdoc in the 70s; my advisor's advisor, who was recruited in that decade, had already signed a contract for tenured employment before his PhD was even over, as did many of his peers. Nowadays, it's typical to postdoc for a minimum of 3 years, and then play the odds, which are not in the candidate's favour as the 6% faculty to 9% postdoc hints at.

jayd16 2y ago

It's way way way easier to freeze hiring (akin to admissions) than to go through a layoff. Not saying admin salaries are justified but gutting staff has much more fallout than fewer admissions.