5 ms·

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 in

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.
- danny_codes 2y ago
  I wouldn’t trust an LLM to do anything compliance related. Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit
  - teleforce 2y ago
    > cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.
    - javagram 2y ago
      Verification and validation of LLM output in this context would mean doing all the same research, training etc done today for human staff and then comparing the results line by line. It would actually take more time. How do you know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it who has also examined every relevant document and artifact from the process?
      - teleforce 2y ago
        > one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be processed the admin staff not the research contributions itself (these invention and innovation parts are performed by the graduate students and professors who are getting cuts by the limited budget). This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff. The agent AI can also include rule based expert system for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale scaling (pardon the pun). Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI based system will even get better over time due to this RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
- 2y ago
miohtama 2y ago
Compliance industry has gone from $0 to $90B in twenty years. It does not produce anything real, except lobbying for more compliance needing more compliance services, software and lawyers. Here is a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operating-Pre-Crime-Society/dp/3031192230 https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
- brookst 2y ago
  I did work for a compliance as a service company 35 years ago. Customs brokers go back much farther than that. I’m very suspicious of the claim this whole industry didn’t exist 20 years ago, which makes me suspicious of the other claims.
  - da_chicken 2y ago
    I work at a public K-12 in IT. We were definitely doing compliance reporting 20 years ago. Compliance is pretty central to the IEP process created in 1975, but it goes back further than that. We were cleaning out old cabinets that had been stored for many years. We found aggregated student data reports so old that my grandmother (still alive at 106) would have been among the headcount. 90 years ago we were doing compliance reports. The reports were very simple, but there were no computers to create them. They would have involved just as much time as we spend on today's reports only we have a hundred times the data in them.
like_any_other 2y ago
> "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Unlike product XYZ*, there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. At some point you have to ask - do you want to save the cancer, or the patient? *I am humoring your hypothetical, but there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies, e.g. the Britten V1000 motorcycle, or the recent article about wedding planning software (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174), or the older article on the windows terminal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133)
- exe34 2y ago
  > there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. as the comment you're replying to has already stated: > 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.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    First, I don't think we should take it as a given that all the admin. growth is just efficiently working on complying with regulations. And I'm pretty sure foreign countries, and travel to them, already existed in 1976. As did patents, contracts with other companies, and sanctions that US entities had to respect - remember, in 1976 there was the cold war. Second and more importantly - these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. The regulations you cite are not a law of nature - are universities or their bloated administrations lobbying to have this regulatory burden reduced or streamlined? It sure doesn't look like it.
AdrianB1 2y ago
The numbers in the post that you respond to are picturing a different situation: there are almost 3 admins per professor. That means the universities are not teaching places, but administrative places with some teaching as a secondary activity. I think people overcomplicated universities and that is what makes admins needed. Taking a step back, we need to make universities teaching places again, with 1 admin for 3 professors, not the other way around. Imagine savings, needing less grant money, less audits, less funding that comes with strings attached. In the end I think people make up too much irrelevant work. And that needs to go away.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  do you think this is parallel to the growth of "you MUST attend university" mindset?
- nhma 2y ago
  A more relevant metric than admins/professor would be admin staff/scientific staff. Given that a research group under a professor will probably contain numerous associate professors, assistant professors, postdocs, PhDs, and research assistants who all generate some admin workload, 3 admins per professor does not sound outlandish.
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    I'm not sure what the person meant in the comment you're replying to, but it sounds like in your comment you're reading "professor" as "full professor", which is not how I'd read it. I'd read it as basically "faculty member".
    - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
      Postdocs, PhD students, and RA's are not faculty either.
- coliveira 2y ago
  Universities became complicated because it is now a business. If you have a business, you need to complicate it to justify higher prices over time.
skeeter2020 2y ago
But historically universities DID deliver the same product in a weekend. It really feels lika a lot of the extra admin burden was generated itnernally and self-imposed. Each piece of DEI is small and well-meaning, and now we have these massive institutions that have to cut PhD students of all things to balance the books.
- sdenton4 2y ago
  A major source of administrative and non-teaching staff is that many universities have added things like 'a hostpital' on the side. This is reasonable when you're running a med school with a research component: you need patients to work on, after all. The hospital provides a high standard of care to the community that it serves, and creates both revenue and costs, far in excess of any DEI program.
  - dcow 2y ago
    Not challenging your point, just also pointing out that this scenario was already factored in (i.e. hospital admin not included) when calculating the initial ratios.
dpe82 2y ago
Bureaucracies are masters at creating work that justifies their own existence and growth.
milesrout 2y ago
>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. Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.

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.

danny_codes 2y ago
I wouldn’t trust an LLM to do anything compliance related. Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit
- teleforce 2y ago
  > cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.
  - javagram 2y ago
    Verification and validation of LLM output in this context would mean doing all the same research, training etc done today for human staff and then comparing the results line by line. It would actually take more time. How do you know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it who has also examined every relevant document and artifact from the process?
    - teleforce 2y ago
      > one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be processed the admin staff not the research contributions itself (these invention and innovation parts are performed by the graduate students and professors who are getting cuts by the limited budget). This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff. The agent AI can also include rule based expert system for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale scaling (pardon the pun). Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI based system will even get better over time due to this RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.
2y ago

miohtama 2y ago

Compliance industry has gone from $0 to $90B in twenty years. It does not produce anything real, except lobbying for more compliance needing more compliance services, software and lawyers. Here is a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operating-Pre-Crime-Society/dp/3031192230 https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...

brookst 2y ago
I did work for a compliance as a service company 35 years ago. Customs brokers go back much farther than that. I’m very suspicious of the claim this whole industry didn’t exist 20 years ago, which makes me suspicious of the other claims.
- da_chicken 2y ago
  I work at a public K-12 in IT. We were definitely doing compliance reporting 20 years ago. Compliance is pretty central to the IEP process created in 1975, but it goes back further than that. We were cleaning out old cabinets that had been stored for many years. We found aggregated student data reports so old that my grandmother (still alive at 106) would have been among the headcount. 90 years ago we were doing compliance reports. The reports were very simple, but there were no computers to create them. They would have involved just as much time as we spend on today's reports only we have a hundred times the data in them.

like_any_other 2y ago

> "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Unlike product XYZ*, there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. At some point you have to ask - do you want to save the cancer, or the patient? *I am humoring your hypothetical, but there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies, e.g. the Britten V1000 motorcycle, or the recent article about wedding planning software (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174), or the older article on the windows terminal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133)

exe34 2y ago
> there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. as the comment you're replying to has already stated: > 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.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  First, I don't think we should take it as a given that all the admin. growth is just efficiently working on complying with regulations. And I'm pretty sure foreign countries, and travel to them, already existed in 1976. As did patents, contracts with other companies, and sanctions that US entities had to respect - remember, in 1976 there was the cold war. Second and more importantly - these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. The regulations you cite are not a law of nature - are universities or their bloated administrations lobbying to have this regulatory burden reduced or streamlined? It sure doesn't look like it.

AdrianB1 2y ago

The numbers in the post that you respond to are picturing a different situation: there are almost 3 admins per professor. That means the universities are not teaching places, but administrative places with some teaching as a secondary activity. I think people overcomplicated universities and that is what makes admins needed. Taking a step back, we need to make universities teaching places again, with 1 admin for 3 professors, not the other way around. Imagine savings, needing less grant money, less audits, less funding that comes with strings attached. In the end I think people make up too much irrelevant work. And that needs to go away.

skeeter2020 2y ago
do you think this is parallel to the growth of "you MUST attend university" mindset?
nhma 2y ago
A more relevant metric than admins/professor would be admin staff/scientific staff. Given that a research group under a professor will probably contain numerous associate professors, assistant professors, postdocs, PhDs, and research assistants who all generate some admin workload, 3 admins per professor does not sound outlandish.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  I'm not sure what the person meant in the comment you're replying to, but it sounds like in your comment you're reading "professor" as "full professor", which is not how I'd read it. I'd read it as basically "faculty member".
  - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
    Postdocs, PhD students, and RA's are not faculty either.
coliveira 2y ago
Universities became complicated because it is now a business. If you have a business, you need to complicate it to justify higher prices over time.

skeeter2020 2y ago

But historically universities DID deliver the same product in a weekend. It really feels lika a lot of the extra admin burden was generated itnernally and self-imposed. Each piece of DEI is small and well-meaning, and now we have these massive institutions that have to cut PhD students of all things to balance the books.

sdenton4 2y ago
A major source of administrative and non-teaching staff is that many universities have added things like 'a hostpital' on the side. This is reasonable when you're running a med school with a research component: you need patients to work on, after all. The hospital provides a high standard of care to the community that it serves, and creates both revenue and costs, far in excess of any DEI program.
- dcow 2y ago
  Not challenging your point, just also pointing out that this scenario was already factored in (i.e. hospital admin not included) when calculating the initial ratios.

dpe82 2y ago

Bureaucracies are masters at creating work that justifies their own existence and growth.

milesrout 2y ago

>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. Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.