People are happy to claim they want to downsize university administrations when the appeal is voiced like this, but another kind of editorial that pops up just as frequently in the opinion press later, they will be just as enthusiastically demanding more counseling for students in emotional quandaries, more university-mediated internship opportunities, more officials providing sexual assault prevention training, more recourse to resolve student-advisor disputes in a way that shifts the power balance towards the student, more varied dining options and a plethora of other goodies that can mostly only be realised with more and/or more powerful admin staff.
Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
151–160 of 296 posts
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#152Maybe they can start by getting getting rid of the NCAA (private corporation) siphoning billions from colleges and universities.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#153As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of: (Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) ) And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.
Look at how much gets taken out of a grant for "overhead," too! Stunning.
For those that are unfamiliar, when a faculty member wins a grant the university takes 50%+ for themselves. Right off the top. So if you are awarded a grant for $100k from DARPA, NIH or some other granting organization you'll only end up having ~$47k to spend. The rest goes straight to the pocket of the university.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#154I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over-employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3…
This. I worked in residential life while I was in college. One of the key things that was emphasized to us was that colleges and universities are now becoming accessible to a much larger section of the population, to the point where kids that a generation ago would have stayed at home because they couldn't handle life at a university are now able to attend. This is why everything under the purview of the dean of students has ballooned: dorms are not dorms anymore. They are not where you sleep, but where you live as a community with the support from the university. And to fund that, the university must charge more. Strictly speaking as a student you do get a lot more services at a university today than you did 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. It just comes at a cost, and there is no cheaper alternative that is just as good (taking into account actual education as well as perceived value of your degree).
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but university libraries also do a whole lot more than just manage books. The library at the University I work for has computer labs, GIS labs, a makerspace, 3D printing, electronics fabrication, photography and video studios, plus a hundred other things. All of those take staff.
FWIW, that's not what most people mean by the term "library".
It is in the context of university libraries. Nowadays these sorts of services are common at bigger schools, and they are managed by the library.
Libraries at universities have always offered more than just buildings full of books. My point is that there is a lot more to managing a serious library than just cataloging books. Trained librarians especially do a lot to directly contribute to research by connecting researchers with the right sources of information.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#156Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City. 35 acres. 2,700 people on site. None are students. None are faculty. No teaching or research will occur there. It's all administrators .[1] "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises;…
Yeah, who needs the Library and Archives? The book conservation lab is one of the things in the RWC location, that's clearly overhead that's totally not needed! Buckminster Fuller's models? Let 'em molder.
Still, when it became clear a university cannot put a video online without having it transcribed in at least 2 different ways [1], I must say, my understanding of the regulation argument grew.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at how much gets taken out of a grant for "overhead," too! Stunning.
For those that are unfamiliar, when a faculty member wins a grant the university takes 50%+ for themselves. Right off the top. So if you are awarded a grant for $100k from DARPA, NIH or some other granting organization you'll only end up having ~$47k to spend. The rest goes straight to the pocket of the university.
Dang. That's cold.
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the view of people who have not really looked at university budgets. "experiences" are cheap compared to headcount. Buildings and experiences are mainly funded by outside donation specifically for the experience or building. People do not often donate to "expand salaries and headcount for faculty and administrators". The result is that students pay for headcount and donors pay for experiences. It isn't just a…
On the research point, why are research and teaching commingled? Both are important, but it seems that they require very different skillsets. Would we be better off filling universities primarily with people who love teaching, and are great at it, and having some other kind of institution (or some separate division of universities) do the research? Is this heresy?
IIRC there's a fairly strong correlation between content mastery and teaching ability, even at the high school level, far more than the correlation between level of teacher training and teaching ability.
Obviously there's other factors (effort, as you point out).
Though I think it's partly an artifact of the days when an undergrad degree would bring students to the leading edge of research, so there was simply no-one else qualified. There would have been a lot more synergy when researchers were explaining cutting edge ideas to students (it still happens a bit, but it's the exception rather than the rule).
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#159I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over-employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3…
Having also worked in higher ed for quite a long time (I've been out since 2004) I always quipped that young people really just want "lifestyle camps" or "lifestyle towns" where they can have the experience they want without all the pesky classes and studying getting in the way. Go there for a couple years, party down, then maybe move on in life. It would save a lot of people a lot of hardship and pain.
I've thought this too and I bet it could be done for far less than half the cost.
You'd have a lot less debt and roughly equal job prospects when you "graduated".
Re: Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
#160I work in the administration for a top public US research University. The increase in size of University administration and bureaucracy is due to a number of factors. One is certainly unnecessary employment and over-employment. Not only at high levels, with VP's, Assistant VP's, Assistant Vice VP's, Chancellors, Vice Chancellor's, Executive VP's, Directors of XYZ, etc, but also at low levels where the work done by 3…
Loved everything you said except the part about market dynamics being the culprit. I think you correctly identify the widespread availability of student loans as a key factor driving this bloat; but there's nothing "market-based" about them. In a market, interest rates would vary according to the risk of the loan. Bad schools which don't teach and don't actually improve student outcomes and simply spend on other thin…
>Students who now go to schools who do nothing for them and have no chance of paying their loans -- or spend most of their adult life trying to -- would be dissuaded from making that incorrect financial choice.
The feedback loop for that is incredibly slow and incomplete. University reputations move on the order of decades, and only a handful of universities enter the public consciousness by way of reputation. Most students also don't have the freedom of choice to go to any university of their choosing (or everyone would go to the 'best' one). 'invisible hand' arguments just don't work on this one.