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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#261

Post by arlort »

etempleton wrote: post #43

Double edged sword. What the author proposes can be found. Go to some small low endowment private or public school for less money. Oh wait, you say, I don’t want to go there! The buildings aren’t as nice, the dorms are cramped and drab, there aren’t as many resources, the food sucks, the Wi-Fi is spotty, heck even the website sucks. Why is this? Because they don’t have the human or financial resources to do so. You g…

> the food sucks

How is this related to tuition? Do you not cook your own food or eat from private restaurants in US universities?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#262

Post by Eisenstein »

WalterBright wrote: post #242
Eisenstein wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't getting involved in an industry. When they do, it is to build public schools, which seems to be a great idea. What they are doing is submitting to public demand that education be accessible to everyone by paying for it, or by lending people the money for it. It is like saying that food stamps are 'government getting involved in the grocery industry'. If one counts subsidies, then the government is involve…

It's not ideological. All you have to do is look at the results. Lending people money for college led to huge increases in tuition.

It seems ideological to me because the government was specifically mentioned. If it were a non-profit guaranteeing all college loans, would 'non-profit' have been mentioned instead of government? I doubt it.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#263

Post by fallingknife »

clintonb wrote: post #256

This is the equivalent of asking, “Why does need so many people? It’s just a website!” You cannot blindly cut 90% of staff. Administrative salaries aren’t necessarily the driver of increased tuition costs. They may be one of many factors. My wife wrote five articles on the myths behind rising education costs, including administrative bloat: https://michellelessly.com/2016/08/08/5-myths-behind-the-ris... .

> Critics often fail to consider is that a college campus is essentially a city housed within a municipality

And why should they be? Why can't students partake of the services that the rest of the population does? This is how it typically works at European schools which seem to cost much less. Why can't schools just be schools?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#264

Post by bigbacaloa »

missedthecue wrote: post #115
testfoobar wrote: post #110

In the US, both college education and healthcare have become enormous taxpayer wealth extraction schemes. Everyone has a "right" to education and healthcare, therefore we should subsidize it with taxpayer money. That is as far as the politics go. We have stupidly funded the demand side of the equation to where both education and healthcare are incredibly bloated behemoths capable of absorbing all the money thrown at…

Schools compete not on price but on other factors. That's why they want to build massively expensive campuses and elaborate facilities, because that is what students base their decisions on. If schools competed on price, everyone would be going to state colleges c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶g̶e̶. I'm not sure how you compel schools to compete on price, because the consumers don't care about price. They'd rather get…

If students chose colleges based on something rational like expected future earnings they would all choose engineering schools.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#265

Post by bigbacaloa »

bumby wrote: post #120
kragen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you advocate as the best metrics across the domains of literary merit and moral fiber? It sounds like you need to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .

Ha! As a matter of fact I’m re-reading it at the moment. But as a former reliability engineer, i bristle as Persig’s claim that quality can’t be defined.

Reliability engineers and quality control are among the principal reasons why university administrations are so bloated ...

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#266

Post by bigbacaloa »

dave333 wrote: post #18

Education should be recast as a sort of MMORPG instead of a physical campus. Would be 100th or 1000th the cost and achieve 80% of the results. Kahn Academy and the like are a start.

One crystal clear lesson of COVID confinement was that online university education sucks.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#267

Post by exmadscientist »

pas wrote: post #84
exmadscientist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The other side to the problem that most commenters here are missing is something that is much easier to see if you are employed by the school (as I used to be). There are dozens of layers of bloat and positions that exist only to make Doing Stuff (for values of Stuff that include both Research and Teaching) as slow as possible. Even getting a door fixed -- to stop the door stuck open alarm going off -- took mult…

wow, this sounds like a very extreme case study. could you detail why it took many days to fix that door?

Not easily. I wasn't the lead (this one was tackled by the official Lab Manager with the Lab Manager Title, which does matter to some people) so I don't recollect everything that went on. The alarm was intermittent and directly related to use of that door, so it wasn't like it was squawking at 2 am and annoying Security or anything. We did have to do Special Things to that door because we actually needed to prop it open for some Research Stuff, so that added headaches of its own. (I seem to recall the solution to that was a magnet in the right place. Which we had to remove should any official maintenance staff come calling because they hated such quick fixes.)

But, honestly, what sticks out in my mind with the Door Saga, what I remember years later, is what the union maintenance guy did. He showed up at 11:55, set up his ladder, then "noticed" it was noon, and left to go on break because that was The Rule. I don't remember what he did with the ladder, but it sure did piss the next guy off... so he left too, because he needed the first guy to do his job. Fun all around!

I have union blood in my veins. I don't cross picket lines. UFCW scholarships helped put me through college. So I don't say this lightly: Fuck. That. Union. Utterly destructive leeches. Unions have so much more to offer our workers and our society, and instead they do... this bullshit. Thanks for giving everyone a reason to hate you, you greedy assholes.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#268

Post by heisenbit »

The US universities are too focused on increasing funding. This has major externalities: Marketing and premium salaries for sales staff. Marketing expenses include spending on buildings and programs (sports) which have no impact on academic output. Sales costs are related to lobbying and outreach staff - some of them extremely expensive as - unlike boring admin staff - can command premium salaries in industry. US universities have become optimized to chase after marginal dollars of additional income at the expense of cost efficiency of education. The financial incentives of the vast majority of non-academic staff are not aligned with education and this part has been in control since the ’90.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#269

Post by raverbashing »

Animats wrote: post #119

Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators. [1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human res…

Meanwhile TAs, instructors, or anyone in faculty without tenure gets paid how much again? Less than $20/hr?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#270

Post by whakim »

ip26 wrote: post #148
Animats wrote: post #119

Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators. [1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human res…

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

As a sibling commenter noted, these figures around "staff" employees are super misleading and tend to cherrypick the most egregious examples of administrative bloat. For example, I worked for several years as a staff researcher at Harvard; along with ~30 other "staff" employees and a few members of faculty we published papers and built open-source software. Firing 9 in 10 staff employees - as the author of the article wants to do - would completely gut a huge amount of the work that big research universities do.
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