Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
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Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#2Wall of text warning.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#3I have actually had an idea related to the sort of debt had to be taken by American university students for their academics.
Why not use a mixture of blended learning and Coursera, where students pay not just professors but also industry folk for cutting-edge knowledge but also open up a marketplace for Youtube tutorial people to do physical workshops in their cities that can be charged and move onto a sort of Airbnb for education and workshops? I feel a lot of straight-up learning can be gained and the 3% charged per workshop will go towards scholarships. For people who think you would be paying high prices per lecture/workshop in this model, a university student has already been paying about $50 or more per lecture.
Instead of basically physical/manual admin systems in individual centralized universities, you have decentralized software system managing schedules and booking workshops/lectures.
Just an opinion and thought I've been having, any feedback welcome.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#4Whether it's a university or a government or any other bureaucracy, the money eventually flows to the top. And the top tier of employees have no incentive to remove their own livelihoods.
Thinning the waste at the top is a great idea, but never gets done unless a bigger bureaucracy makes it happen.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#5We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#6Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution but clearly many people are making big money in this business at the expense of students. The federal loan programs certainly don't help either. Allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would also lessen this money feast for universities. Alas, no solution looks in sight so I do my part in keeping money away from these money furnaces.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#7We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, perhaps the word "pointless". But certainly there are administrators on the public school payroll who's job is ensuring regulatory compliance and collecting/filing the evidence of compliance, and that function did not exist years ago.
Now, whether or not that is "pointless" is a debatable. The laws were passed in the first place to cure some perceived ill. It's fair to have an ROI discussion around that.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#8We can't cut the pointless admin for public schools because we need to comply with government regulations. Not making a judgement call here, but it's there.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, perhaps the word "pointless". But certainly there are administrators on the public school payroll who's job is ensuring regulatory compliance and collecting/filing the evidence of compliance, and that function did not exist years ago. Now, whether or not that is "pointless" is a debatable. The laws were passed in the first place to cure some perceived ill. It's fair to have an…
If it is the word "pointless", I bet your parent used it as that's the phrase that's used in the submission title.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#9Extremely unpopular opinion: Let's cut both the extra admin, and excess tenured professors. In fact, the entire tenure system should be completely upended. At my alma mater there were a lot of professors who didn't have enough students sign up for their classes, or their field of study was phased out, or reduced. Instead they sat around doing "research" and when they were forced to teach, quite a few openly expressed disdain for teaching.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#10Wall of text warning.
Good, that beats the heck out of a Youtube ELI5 or a slideshow of tweet-sized snippets. A 30-second skim suggests that the writing is of high enough quality to warrant a 10 minute read. Since it is all on one page, I can ctrl-S and read it on the bus. Buses are also good.