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Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

theguardian.com

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Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#111

Post by forkLding »

gmarx wrote: post #12
forkLding wrote: post #3

I 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…

You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests. I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top unive…

I wonder about that point though, although professors also pursue the universities with more prestige, did they really spend the time to acquire the title of professor for prestige?

I think a decentralized system prioritizes the professor over the administration. In fact if universities aren't meant to be areas of teaching then why have them? My approach is more cutting out that middleman which is the university.

Moreover, prestige of unis are gradually fading away, although rare, I can sort of see a future where university credentials dont matter.

Excuse my bad grammar, I write very fast and in between my work so I dont really proofread.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#112

Post by wbillingsley »

forkLding wrote: post #3

I 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…

The Coursera/edX model is a university that is 100% administration -- they themselves employ no academics on a continuing basis at all.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#113

Post by forkLding »

wbillingsley wrote: post #112
forkLding wrote: post #3

I 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…

The Coursera/edX model is a university that is 100% administration -- they themselves employ no academics on a continuing basis at all.

True, what I'm proposing is not a full manual administration. I see software really as the thing that relieves people of a lot of manual supervision or administration by physical people. I also wrote an article before on the idea of Blended Learning and that I think its far more effective than physical or online learning, Coursera was just a similar comparison that I could use like "Uber for dog-walkers".

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#114

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

melling wrote: post #74
postnihilism wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but using one of the most successful and wealthy institutions in the world as an example of ineffective bloat isn't useful for the overall argument. "This workout routine is a waste of time and effort. See, look at Usain Bolt doing it."

With the cost of education in the US being so expensive and the constant call for student loan forgiveness ($1 trillion), it might be worth looking into the extra cost. I’m sure Stanford isn’t unique. The cost of a university education has far outpaced inflation. Harvard cost $2,600 in 1970. https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college-costs-are-so-hig...

Actually, it is unique in that cost is no barrier to receiving an education at Stanford.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#115

Post by dmix »

In an administrative heavy organization every problem seems to be answered with "how can we add more administrative layers, processes, and backroom deals to satisfy x group (management, media, special interest groups, voters, etc) that something appears to be being done?" rather than asking "looking at all available options what is the best way to resolve this problem (inside and out of government)?". Basically a "When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" type of thing.

This is the difference between group A (admins) and group B (engineers, teachers, etc) in Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1]. The former is often presented as a clever talented group of smart people who savvily work the system in TV shows like House of Cards but I question the utility it really offers the world when the ROI is so often questionable.

I'm curious how much of this modern dysfunction in modern governments (not just in the US) is due to the fact politicians are now almost entirely career politicians who spend their formative years in this insular world. The majority coming from the same private schools and 90% of them with law degrees. Rather than in the past, such as the founding fathers, who were businessmen, writers, and intellectuals first embedded in the real world who then went into public service.

The same analogy applies to Universities with administrators being raised within the system rather than the teaching staff intimately familiar with the front-line realities of the organization.

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/ironlaw.htm

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#116

Post by mnm1 »

barake wrote: post #32
mnm1 wrote: post #6

Yes. 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…

Is tuition actually going up by that much? Most schools raise prices to raise scholarships to raise rankings, leaving revenue virtually flat. There is a coordinated effort to temporarily exempt schools from antitrust rules so they can collectively coordinate a tuition drop, and stop the fake scholarship arms race.

Yes, tuition is actually going up by that much (20k vs 50k). Even inflation adjusted it's still almost double. Room and board has also almost tripled (5k vs 15k). At this rate, in fifteen years or so, I'd expect to pay 100k a year just in tuition or almost half a million per child. Luckily I have no kids, but if I do they're going to learn prefect German or other language that gets them free tuition in Europe. Fuck these prices. Even for a software engineer making good money, they are simply not achievable.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#117

Post by spaceseaman »

barake wrote: post #32
mnm1 wrote: post #6

Yes. 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…

Is tuition actually going up by that much? Most schools raise prices to raise scholarships to raise rankings, leaving revenue virtually flat. There is a coordinated effort to temporarily exempt schools from antitrust rules so they can collectively coordinate a tuition drop, and stop the fake scholarship arms race.

From my anecdotal perspective, at private institutions (especially the Ivy's) your statement seems accurate. For public universities tuitions have been skyrocketing without any increase in scholarship funding. In fact my school recently cut funding to merit-based scholarships because they no longer have the money from the state to offer them.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#118

Post by melling »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #114
melling wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the cost of education in the US being so expensive and the constant call for student loan forgiveness ($1 trillion), it might be worth looking into the extra cost. I’m sure Stanford isn’t unique. The cost of a university education has far outpaced inflation. Harvard cost $2,600 in 1970. https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college-costs-are-so-hig...

Actually, it is unique in that cost is no barrier to receiving an education at Stanford.

No, it isn’t unique. Many elite/expensive schools offer either free or heavily discounted tuition for lower and middle income students.

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/how-ivy-league-financial-a...

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

melling wrote: post #105
greglindahl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Stanford, there's no connection between university undergraduate cost and price. Tuition is an unimportant part of the budget.

First, I was talking about the extra cost, in general, with all universities. Second, since you brought it up, can you explain how they determine the cost of tuition? If it’s unimportant maybe they can simply eliminate it for everyone. Are other universities the same?

> If it’s unimportant maybe they can simply eliminate it for everyone

Sticker price is an important value signal, which draws elites who, as alumnae, support the institution, so what elite universities do is have high sticker prices and then internal need-based financial aid packages that cover much of the costs for non-wealthy students. This also, incidentally, maximizes tuition revenue, as those who can pay from their own pocket or outside scholarships do pay. But maximizes revenue is incidental, because tuition is not the main source of revenue.

Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching

#120

Post by BEEdwards »

phlakaton wrote: post #70
vinylkey wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that all 2,700 administrators are unneeded, but rather that everything would run as good (if not better) without that much administration bloat.

For you to make that argument, you must first make the case that 2,700 actually constitutes bloat. Who exactly would you say is expendable and why? (Not getting down to brass tacks is the great weakness in the article too, I think. The author seems to have an idea that these expendable positions can simply be identified by filtering out anyone who can't explain what they do in non-jargon terms, or asking the surplus…

When your core business is teaching, you have more admin than teachers AND your teachers still have spend a lion share of their time doing admin work, I think it's safe to say you some of those 2700 administrators are unneeded and possibly a hindrance.
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