9 ms·

The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

137 points by Fede_V 12y ago

baldfat 12y ago
Title really should be consequences of business models in education reform of higher education. It showed a consequence of selling scientific research and less tenure for the scientist and researchers looking for a job outside of college. Was a former faculty member of a college as a librarian. Colleges have nothing on Public School Administrators. My city of 120,000 went from 2003 = 8 administrators and 4 high school principles for two high schools. 2014 = 32 administrators and 16 high school principles for two high schools
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  This culture believes that management and finance are the most important and valuable things in the world - more important than science, more necessary than art, more powerful than physical reality. This culture is spectacularly wrong, and will be discovering exactly how wrong over the next few decades.
narrator 12y ago
This sounds like more evidence the new and growing phenomenon of "bullshit jobs" http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ .
- rhino369 12y ago
  My brain can't handle neon yellow background, but I don't think bullshit jobs are a new phenomenon. I think there was a huge bloat in bullshit jobs from the 1980s-2008. A lot of jobs that should have been lost due to productivity gains because of computers and networking were converted into bullshit jobs. We went to so long with a real significant recession, it was like a forest that hasn't had a fire to clear the brush out. In 2009, the company I worked for fired 1/3 the office staff and we actually improved the collective productivity of the office. And it wasn't forced overtime, the office staff had a 40 hour week max even for salaried people.
  - gaius 12y ago
    It goes back alot further than that, we used to call those guys pyramid builders.
    - pitay 12y ago
      I have heard it referred to as empire building.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    No they're not. Parkinson' Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law is the adage that "Work expands to fill the time allotted to it." But Parkinson's original book looked humorously but semi-seriously at actual administrative growth such as the growth of the British Civil Service and Admiralty staff even as British overseas colonies and navy were shrinking.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      One of the few management books that are still current after fifty years.
      - ghaff 12y ago
        And the most fun to read of the bunch I'm sure.
  - ashark 12y ago
    Revolutionary Road[1] by Richard Yates, published 1961, prominently features passages about how useless most of the jobs in the protagonist's office are, including his. Aside from the specifics of how the office operates (paper versus email) it could have been written today. Whole book's a great, though painful, read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road
    - ashark 12y ago
- sitkack 12y ago
  The shipping on my strikemag order is 30 pounds on a 20 pound order, for paper. This is ridiculous. protest. Edit the funny thing is, I can get "product" from China due to a bilateral shipping agreement, but knowledge from the UK, well that is expensive. If only Strikemag had their shit printed in China and shipped to the states. Then it would cost zero.
danieltillett 12y ago
As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with academics. The idea was the academics do all the needed administrative tasks, and since nobody's job would depend on doing administrative tasks, that we would only be doing the bare minimum needed to keep the university running. Also everyone would be aware of what the consequences of some new administrate task would be on teaching and research. The look on the vice chancellor's (university president) face was priceless - I don't need to tell anyone here that the proposal was immediately dismissed without discussion.
- hyp0 12y ago
  http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
- secabeen 12y ago
  It's an interesting idea, but it misses the substantial increase in administrative load that public schools have seen over the past 30 years. 30 years ago there were non-existent services for disabled students, socionomically-disadvantaged students, international students and scholars, etc. There was also substantially fewer federal research grants and the associated paperwork required to receive those grants. You'd be surprised how much administrative work is required to receive federal grants and to employ the domestic and international researchers that do said research. (Effort reporting, Visa applications and processing, expenditure justification, backup and reconciliation, etc.)
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    I am not surprised with how much work is involved in administering grants as I had to spend a significant amount of my time doing this. Unfortunately almost all the time spent was pointless and not really needed. All the support activities can be provided by academics. Actually it is far better that academics teaching to the students provide this support since they actually know what the students will face, not some admin flunky who has no real idea of what happens in the classroom.
spiritplumber 12y ago
I once had an argument with one of these people (Not being a grad student, I was not allowed to take a class that taught cluster computing, on a cluster that I had built and had written about half the linux distro for). So I gave the guy a hug. A professor had to come over and persuade me to put the admin guy back on the ground again a few minutes later. I took that class and got a B+. Lesson learned: Punch less, hug more, remind useless people that their proper place in life is as high up as they want, as long as it's out of my way.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jacalata 12y ago
  Oh hey, it's that sociopath dude again.
  - warcher 12y ago
    hahaha, man, I hope he joined that boxing gym like I suggested last month. Get the bad blood out, man. It's good for you.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      I got back into fencing. Thanks :) I still stink at it, and am likely to keep stinking at it, but it's a good workout in a competitive environment.
      - warcher 12y ago
        Take care of yourself. And with all due respect, pump the brakes, man. The behavior you are claiming to indulge in is NOT OK.
        spiritplumber 12y ago
        The episode I related above was from either 2005 or 2006, I forget. The last time I was in a fight, was in August of 2013, someone in a very altered mental state came at me with a knife. I believe at that point a therapeutic hold (bear hug and lift) is more than justified :) I'm a big guy and that gives me some power. Power comes with responsibility, like "don't call the cops and potentially get some crazy person killed when you can handle it yourself and then call an ambulance". Thanks for the advice! I have, generally, followed it.
beloch 12y ago
Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time secretary to deal with the bureaucracy. Everything we expensed required a paper trail. $50 lobster dinner on credit? No problem getting reimbursed. $3 hotdog with no receipt? Brace yourself for hours of paperwork. This idiotic policy pressured us to spend more in pricey restaurants and avoid cheaper street vendors (Try explaining to a thai street vendor that the receipt has to have your name on it). Similarly, it was easier to claim a $50 cab ride than a $5 subway fare. Add in the cost of paying people to scrutinize our every receipt and I'm sure the University tripled the cost of conference trips. Success? Absolutely, at least for the sleazy admin who tripled the staff reporting to him, likely by claiming students couldn't be trusted to keep costs down. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it illustrates my point: Treating people as dishonest by default carries a heavy price, payable in bureaucrat salaries.
- batbomb 12y ago
  The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.
  - beloch 12y ago
    The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference. The old honor method was to add up what you spent on food and claim it as "per diem". The maximum was far more than you actually needed most places (Note: There's a big difference in food costs between, for example, Geneva and Bangkok). The new method required receipts with your name on them for everything.
    - 12y ago
unabridged 12y ago
Combine this with the rise of adjuncts over professors and you find that most of the teaching staff is making much less than their administrative support. I find it insane that as an adjunct you would be lucky to break $25k while seeing job postings at the school for a Benefits and Insurance Coordinator that can make up to $66k.
- cowsandmilk 12y ago
  not to mention the benefits (e.g. retirement and insurance) and longer term employment rather than single semester contracts.
programminggeek 12y ago
One reason people don't seem to mention much is that universities, particularly research universities, act as a kind of educational industrial complex wherein the government essentially funds the universities with grant research dollars and with it comes the overhead of administration and such. That research money gets spent largely on research, but once you hire people for those projects the university finds ways of keeping them around. More than that, buildings and such over time get built to further the research agendas of the schools, furthering the dependency on federal grant money. So, in a sense, the bureaucracy of the federal government funds the bureaucracy of universities as well.
alexggordon 12y ago
I think, particularly in private education in the US, there is going to be a bubble that is going to pop soon. With continued monetization of education obviously comes people whose job it is to continue monetizing it (more administration). It then follows that there is a continuing push to turn a school into a 'business'. As a developer that works at a SASS company working in education, we've seen the admissions departments of higher education institutions turn from a passive information providing source, to a proactive sales team with set quota's and goals. It's actually quite startling to look at the shift from the perspective of a decade ago. Eventually though, students are going to realize that the product they're paying for isn't worth it. $200,000 in loans for a liberal arts degree is gratuitous. With that, private education will see a significant drop in enrollment and public education will explode, I presume. However, the thing I'm most afraid of is tiered pricing for universities, which I'm sure is bound to come. Want an art degree? Those are practically free. Want Computer Science degree? You're going to have to pay for that... The moral of this story is that there needs to be a serious paradigm shift in the motivations of schools in the US soon. Motivations need to switch from income and attendance, to outcome and employability. I know personally, I have yet to be asked by my alma mater what I would change to make the university better. This lack of focus on outcome, curriculum, and education 'ability' I think is one of the biggest downfalls of private higher education.
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  We already have that in the UK now. An Computer Science degree is twice as expensive as an english degree and a medical degree is almost 130% more expensive than a Computer Science degree ( This is for international students ). I wonder what happens if this continues.
perfunctory 12y ago
http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
shiven 12y ago
The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy. Pay Post-Docs like shit, but hire another Vice-Provost with a 100K+ package! Welcome to modern higher education and research where people doing the research get paid worse than the those BS'ing in 'administration'. How do I know? First-hand experience being at the wrong end of the table.
winsich 12y ago
In other industries administrative bloat gets disintermediated. That's been hard in academia. It might not be forever.
apdinin 12y ago
I'm not convinced the accelerated growth in administrative positions is entirely a result of corporatization. FWIW - I'm commenting as someone who has served on a few committees at a top 50 public, Research I institution. Not a single meeting ever included anything remotely resembling the phrase "we need to decrease costs in order to increase revenues and line our pockets!" In the US (which is all I can speak to), the growth in administrative staff seems more like a response to increased layers of political bureaucracy. For example, schools are scrambling to add Title XI administrators because the federal government requires them in order to get federal funding (including student loans). Faculty don't want to be responsible for the associated administration and paperwork, so someone has to do it. Regarding increases in tuition prices, most if not all states are slashing higher education funding. That shortfall has to be made up for somehow.
benbreen 12y ago
http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=176001479&Title=Course%20Mentor%2C%20Political%20Science http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=1760... This (utterly depressing) academic job ad is, to me, the worst example yet of the trend toward recasting professors and teachers as "service providers" overseen by better-paid administrators. Featuring requirements like "Bring the course of study to life with engaging live webinars or relevant recorded webinars that enhance expected competencies" and the demand that the "course mentor" pays for their own conference travel and academic journal subscriptions, and responds to all emails from students within 4 hours, as well as an injunction to "Communicate with positive regard, respect, and solution- focus with members of other departments." I can't get behind the bashing of all academic administrators, but whoever wrote this job ad strikes me as a pretty good example of what is going wrong in university administration right now.

137 points by Fede_V 12y ago

Title really should be consequences of business models in education reform of higher education. It showed a consequence of selling scientific research and less tenure for the scientist and researchers looking for a job outside of college. Was a former faculty member of a college as a librarian. Colleges have nothing on Public School Administrators. My city of 120,000 went from 2003 = 8 administrators and 4 high school principles for two high schools. 2014 = 32 administrators and 16 high school principles for two high schools

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
This culture believes that management and finance are the most important and valuable things in the world - more important than science, more necessary than art, more powerful than physical reality. This culture is spectacularly wrong, and will be discovering exactly how wrong over the next few decades.

narrator 12y ago

This sounds like more evidence the new and growing phenomenon of "bullshit jobs" http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ .

rhino369 12y ago
My brain can't handle neon yellow background, but I don't think bullshit jobs are a new phenomenon. I think there was a huge bloat in bullshit jobs from the 1980s-2008. A lot of jobs that should have been lost due to productivity gains because of computers and networking were converted into bullshit jobs. We went to so long with a real significant recession, it was like a forest that hasn't had a fire to clear the brush out. In 2009, the company I worked for fired 1/3 the office staff and we actually improved the collective productivity of the office. And it wasn't forced overtime, the office staff had a 40 hour week max even for salaried people.
- gaius 12y ago
  It goes back alot further than that, we used to call those guys pyramid builders.
  - pitay 12y ago
    I have heard it referred to as empire building.
- ghaff 12y ago
  No they're not. Parkinson' Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law is the adage that "Work expands to fill the time allotted to it." But Parkinson's original book looked humorously but semi-seriously at actual administrative growth such as the growth of the British Civil Service and Admiralty staff even as British overseas colonies and navy were shrinking.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    One of the few management books that are still current after fifty years.
    - ghaff 12y ago
      And the most fun to read of the bunch I'm sure.
- ashark 12y ago
  Revolutionary Road[1] by Richard Yates, published 1961, prominently features passages about how useless most of the jobs in the protagonist's office are, including his. Aside from the specifics of how the office operates (paper versus email) it could have been written today. Whole book's a great, though painful, read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road
  - ashark 12y ago
sitkack 12y ago
The shipping on my strikemag order is 30 pounds on a 20 pound order, for paper. This is ridiculous. protest. Edit the funny thing is, I can get "product" from China due to a bilateral shipping agreement, but knowledge from the UK, well that is expensive. If only Strikemag had their shit printed in China and shipped to the states. Then it would cost zero.

danieltillett 12y ago

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with academics. The idea was the academics do all the needed administrative tasks, and since nobody's job would depend on doing administrative tasks, that we would only be doing the bare minimum needed to keep the university running. Also everyone would be aware of what the consequences of some new administrate task would be on teaching and research. The look on the vice chancellor's (university president) face was priceless - I don't need to tell anyone here that the proposal was immediately dismissed without discussion.

hyp0 12y ago
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
secabeen 12y ago
It's an interesting idea, but it misses the substantial increase in administrative load that public schools have seen over the past 30 years. 30 years ago there were non-existent services for disabled students, socionomically-disadvantaged students, international students and scholars, etc. There was also substantially fewer federal research grants and the associated paperwork required to receive those grants. You'd be surprised how much administrative work is required to receive federal grants and to employ the domestic and international researchers that do said research. (Effort reporting, Visa applications and processing, expenditure justification, backup and reconciliation, etc.)
- danieltillett 12y ago
  I am not surprised with how much work is involved in administering grants as I had to spend a significant amount of my time doing this. Unfortunately almost all the time spent was pointless and not really needed. All the support activities can be provided by academics. Actually it is far better that academics teaching to the students provide this support since they actually know what the students will face, not some admin flunky who has no real idea of what happens in the classroom.

spiritplumber 12y ago

I once had an argument with one of these people (Not being a grad student, I was not allowed to take a class that taught cluster computing, on a cluster that I had built and had written about half the linux distro for). So I gave the guy a hug. A professor had to come over and persuade me to put the admin guy back on the ground again a few minutes later. I took that class and got a B+. Lesson learned: Punch less, hug more, remind useless people that their proper place in life is as high up as they want, as long as it's out of my way.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jacalata 12y ago
Oh hey, it's that sociopath dude again.
- warcher 12y ago
  hahaha, man, I hope he joined that boxing gym like I suggested last month. Get the bad blood out, man. It's good for you.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    I got back into fencing. Thanks :) I still stink at it, and am likely to keep stinking at it, but it's a good workout in a competitive environment.
    - warcher 12y ago
      Take care of yourself. And with all due respect, pump the brakes, man. The behavior you are claiming to indulge in is NOT OK.
      - spiritplumber 12y ago
        The episode I related above was from either 2005 or 2006, I forget. The last time I was in a fight, was in August of 2013, someone in a very altered mental state came at me with a knife. I believe at that point a therapeutic hold (bear hug and lift) is more than justified :) I'm a big guy and that gives me some power. Power comes with responsibility, like "don't call the cops and potentially get some crazy person killed when you can handle it yourself and then call an ambulance". Thanks for the advice! I have, generally, followed it.

beloch 12y ago

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time secretary to deal with the bureaucracy. Everything we expensed required a paper trail. $50 lobster dinner on credit? No problem getting reimbursed. $3 hotdog with no receipt? Brace yourself for hours of paperwork. This idiotic policy pressured us to spend more in pricey restaurants and avoid cheaper street vendors (Try explaining to a thai street vendor that the receipt has to have your name on it). Similarly, it was easier to claim a $50 cab ride than a $5 subway fare. Add in the cost of paying people to scrutinize our every receipt and I'm sure the University tripled the cost of conference trips. Success? Absolutely, at least for the sleazy admin who tripled the staff reporting to him, likely by claiming students couldn't be trusted to keep costs down. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it illustrates my point: Treating people as dishonest by default carries a heavy price, payable in bureaucrat salaries.

batbomb 12y ago
The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.
- beloch 12y ago
  The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference. The old honor method was to add up what you spent on food and claim it as "per diem". The maximum was far more than you actually needed most places (Note: There's a big difference in food costs between, for example, Geneva and Bangkok). The new method required receipts with your name on them for everything.
  - 12y ago

unabridged 12y ago

Combine this with the rise of adjuncts over professors and you find that most of the teaching staff is making much less than their administrative support. I find it insane that as an adjunct you would be lucky to break $25k while seeing job postings at the school for a Benefits and Insurance Coordinator that can make up to $66k.

cowsandmilk 12y ago
not to mention the benefits (e.g. retirement and insurance) and longer term employment rather than single semester contracts.

programminggeek 12y ago

One reason people don't seem to mention much is that universities, particularly research universities, act as a kind of educational industrial complex wherein the government essentially funds the universities with grant research dollars and with it comes the overhead of administration and such. That research money gets spent largely on research, but once you hire people for those projects the university finds ways of keeping them around. More than that, buildings and such over time get built to further the research agendas of the schools, furthering the dependency on federal grant money. So, in a sense, the bureaucracy of the federal government funds the bureaucracy of universities as well.

alexggordon 12y ago

I think, particularly in private education in the US, there is going to be a bubble that is going to pop soon. With continued monetization of education obviously comes people whose job it is to continue monetizing it (more administration). It then follows that there is a continuing push to turn a school into a 'business'. As a developer that works at a SASS company working in education, we've seen the admissions departments of higher education institutions turn from a passive information providing source, to a proactive sales team with set quota's and goals. It's actually quite startling to look at the shift from the perspective of a decade ago. Eventually though, students are going to realize that the product they're paying for isn't worth it. $200,000 in loans for a liberal arts degree is gratuitous. With that, private education will see a significant drop in enrollment and public education will explode, I presume. However, the thing I'm most afraid of is tiered pricing for universities, which I'm sure is bound to come. Want an art degree? Those are practically free. Want Computer Science degree? You're going to have to pay for that... The moral of this story is that there needs to be a serious paradigm shift in the motivations of schools in the US soon. Motivations need to switch from income and attendance, to outcome and employability. I know personally, I have yet to be asked by my alma mater what I would change to make the university better. This lack of focus on outcome, curriculum, and education 'ability' I think is one of the biggest downfalls of private higher education.

1971genocide 12y ago
We already have that in the UK now. An Computer Science degree is twice as expensive as an english degree and a medical degree is almost 130% more expensive than a Computer Science degree ( This is for international students ). I wonder what happens if this continues.

perfunctory 12y ago

http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf

shiven 12y ago

The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy. Pay Post-Docs like shit, but hire another Vice-Provost with a 100K+ package! Welcome to modern higher education and research where people doing the research get paid worse than the those BS'ing in 'administration'. How do I know? First-hand experience being at the wrong end of the table.

winsich 12y ago

In other industries administrative bloat gets disintermediated. That's been hard in academia. It might not be forever.

apdinin 12y ago

I'm not convinced the accelerated growth in administrative positions is entirely a result of corporatization. FWIW - I'm commenting as someone who has served on a few committees at a top 50 public, Research I institution. Not a single meeting ever included anything remotely resembling the phrase "we need to decrease costs in order to increase revenues and line our pockets!" In the US (which is all I can speak to), the growth in administrative staff seems more like a response to increased layers of political bureaucracy. For example, schools are scrambling to add Title XI administrators because the federal government requires them in order to get federal funding (including student loans). Faculty don't want to be responsible for the associated administration and paperwork, so someone has to do it. Regarding increases in tuition prices, most if not all states are slashing higher education funding. That shortfall has to be made up for somehow.

benbreen 12y ago

http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=176001479&Title=Course%20Mentor%2C%20Political%20Science http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=1760... This (utterly depressing) academic job ad is, to me, the worst example yet of the trend toward recasting professors and teachers as "service providers" overseen by better-paid administrators. Featuring requirements like "Bring the course of study to life with engaging live webinars or relevant recorded webinars that enhance expected competencies" and the demand that the "course mentor" pays for their own conference travel and academic journal subscriptions, and responds to all emails from students within 4 hours, as well as an injunction to "Communicate with positive regard, respect, and solution- focus with members of other departments." I can't get behind the bashing of all academic administrators, but whoever wrote this job ad strikes me as a pretty good example of what is going wrong in university administration right now.