Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 296 posts

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

#271

Post by tmalsburg2 »

meri_dian wrote: post #27

I 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…

I'm a researcher at a university in Germany. Here in Germany, the administration has also been growing for many years and it's growing much faster than research staff. I have never heard anyone say that the administration is staffed with redundant workers. Everyone agrees that the admin people are totally overloaded. The primary reason is, as you say, regulations. However, my impression is that a lot of these regulations are home-made and completely unnecessary. Some people in admin (clearly not everyone) seem to have a tendency to make up new regulations that serve no real purpose apart from securing their own jobs. In a perverse sense, this may actually be rational behavior, so it is not surprising that this is happening. However, this means that poor management is in fact to blame, because what is poor management if not prioritizing your own personal agenda over the good of the institution you're working for. Disclaimer: My experience with (several) German institutions may obviously not translate to US universities. I have worked for one US university (UC system) and I have only (well, mostly) good things to say about the administration there.

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

#272

Post by heedlessly2 »

wisty wrote: post #158
zippergz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

however, you have researchers who are doing cutting-edge research who also teach the 101s to freshmen. They should just leave the intro levels to lower ranking researchers

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

#273

Post by heedlessly2 »

gravypod wrote: post #236
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…

> donate to my alma mater I've heard of people doing this but why would you ever have donated your money to someone you have already paid? I wouldn't donate to my pizza place, my doctor, or my barber. Why would a college be different?

you don't tip your pizza place?

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

#274

Post by gmarx »

bllguo wrote: post #42
asdfjklasdfjkl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one: You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework. I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.

very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment. I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries…

HackerNews is selection bias central. I suspect the overwhelming majority of college students don't even know the term "problem set" :) Most of it is, read this book of literature and write something showing you both read it and have absorbed the latest fads in college politics and art criticism.

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

#275

Post by gmarx »

forkLding wrote: post #111
gmarx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Mor…

I think they pursue the title of professor for 2 reasons: 1) For an intellectual there is no more awesome job/life than living among and working with other such people 2) Anything below full professor and you need to find another job in 7 years

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

#276

Post by vanderZwan »

rocqua wrote: post #263
vanderZwan wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of this (i.e. graduate level courses) the only ones with sufficient mastery are those that are doing the research. Sadly, sufficient mastery of the subject often comes at the cost of sufficient mastery of teaching , which becomes especially important for such difficult subjects. If only some of that money spent on more staff was spent on assistant teachers whose main skill was teaching and coaching other…

Honestly, when mastery of the subject becomes detrimental to teaching the subject, your not taking the highest-level courses. A great researcher has to teach and convince themselves, those skills translate to teaching at that level. I'm mostly thinking about the highest level math courses though.

I guess you're talking about the point where it's more collaboration on a half-solved problem than data transfer about solidified knowledge? Because then I agree, but that's a really different type of knowledge transfer we're talking about then.

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

#277

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

vacri wrote: post #160
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, but in a market, if loans allowed to fluctuate with propensity of it being paid off, the student who'd be about to enroll in a good-for-nothing school would be facing far, far higher rates... which would tighten that feedback loop.

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

#278

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

michaelt wrote: post #214
WalterBright wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by adults that grew up with computers yet seem to be unable to google a school for their reputation and the job prospects for graduates. Back in my day, pre-internet, every high school guidance counselor had catalogs that compared schools, so did public libraries, and magazines like US News & World Report would annually publish rankings.

Feedback loops for "Is this degree a good investment?" are slow because it can take 15 years or more between starting an undergraduate degree to reaching maximum salary (and/or fully paying off loans). So you can only really report on how good value a course was 15 years ago - and in the intervening period, there's a good chance the academics, curriculum, price, industry and economy will have changed a great deal.

But if student loans existed in a competitive market, there would exist huge incentive for loan providers to do everything they could to really figure these things out. I completely take your point that this feedback would never be exact, but with federal student loans, the current feedback is about as worse as it could be. In a true market system, loan providers -- who would care a lot about being paid back! -- would require higher rates for schools with more dubious success, and would therefore tighten the feedback loop between school quality and student enrollment.

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

#279

Post by DimeFoolish »

The tenure system allows strange, awkward, and awful people to hold lifetime jobs. This is one of the most stupid concepts ever devised by "smart people." Further, get rid of "easy money" visa vie the U.S. Federal Student Loan program. If you're stupid, you don't belong in a higher education setting. Boom. Problem solved.

And yes, you PhD morons, I'm talking about you.

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

#280

Post by Fej »

slackstation wrote: post #16

The pointless admin is from services given to the students. Universities (that aren't household brand names like the Ivys) compete on services and facilities. And because most students are young and using other people's money (their parents or their future selves) they will choose schools not because they have the best deal educationally but, because they beautiful grounds, newer, swankier dorms and all of the social…

I have at least one good example...at my university there is an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Sounds pointless on its face, but it's not. It helps students start businesses and obtain patents, for example.
Post reply on HN