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

Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

quillette.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 372 posts

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#301

Post by musicale »

bluedino wrote: post #142
kbenson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I'm seeing online Stanford has about 22k students in 2022. 2700 does seem like a large number compared to the student population, and given it seems like it isn't meant to house all the administrative staff, that does seem like a lot. That said, Stanford is private, so I'm not sure they're a good example. Various state universities seem like they would be a more apt target to look at to see what this is lik…

According to the internet: Stanford University has 24,916 employees.Jul 11, 2022

Makes sense: 2300 professors, and then a butler for every student.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#303

Post by dave333 »

HKH2 wrote: post #41
dave333 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a game world motivation can be generated by access to the next room, level, whatever. Or, if you finish your fractions drill problems, you can play XYZ for an hour.

I'm talking about being motivated enough to be willing to ask questions that may make you look stupid etc. I don't think the system you're proposing would work for open-ended subjects.

AI professors will soon be as good at teaching as the real thing and nobody need feel stupid talking to a program.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#304

Post by SilverBirch »

krona wrote: post #13
SilverBirch wrote: post #5

This is... strange. The issue of a price would seem to me to be an issue of supply and demand. Yet, this article talks about a weirdly tangential topic. This article seems to put forward the idea that the administration of colleges has become bloated and this has led to higher fees. But that's simply not the causal chain. No one in any administration is thinking "better put that tuition up, and accept the loss in can…

> But none of this has anything to do with Quillette's racist agenda. So why bring it up?

That's what I'm bringing up - the economic issues are actually driving education cost, and it's not a coincidence that Quillette is banging on about the 71 diversity staff at an institution that employs 25,000 people instead. It's just a constant drip of subtle racist bilge that Quillette puts into all their articles.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#305

Post by daniel-cussen »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#306

Post by daniel-cussen »

Animats wrote: post #163
Hermitian909 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanford and other top institutions can't really be compared to other schools, students fees are not how these institutions make money. There are massive business arms tying in to fortune 500s, political think tanks, government institutions, etc. It's a whole different game for schools at this level. To understand administrative bloat in the US it's much more instructive to look somewhere like University of Idaho whe…

Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital and real estate firm which operates a school on the side for the tax exemption. Back in the early 1990s, Stanford split off their endowment and land operations into a separate company, the Stanford Management Company. That worked out very well. They had startup money in Cisco, Yahoo, Google... Over time, the SMC tail came to wag the SU dog.

No post body was provided.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#307

Post by SilverBirch »

elefanten wrote: post #11
SilverBirch wrote: post #5

This is... strange. The issue of a price would seem to me to be an issue of supply and demand. Yet, this article talks about a weirdly tangential topic. This article seems to put forward the idea that the administration of colleges has become bloated and this has led to higher fees. But that's simply not the causal chain. No one in any administration is thinking "better put that tuition up, and accept the loss in can…

Quite a claim you conclude with. Can you elaborate?

Just take a read through some of the articles on the site, it's all absurd right wing bollocks about critical race theory, often literally written by people like Noah Carl who got fired for publishing racist pseudo-science. There's a reason out of the 25,000 staff at the university of Michigan Quillette decided the 70 with "diversity" in their title were the problem.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#309

Post by LatteLazy »

The whole "bloated administration" claim stinks of an easy, painless, simple and wrong solution to a complex problem. If the Author has some hard evidence to support the claim then I am all ears. But what he does present is weak. For instance, he claims that the Uni of Michigan spent 10m USD on 76 Diversity officers. Assuming that's true and they're all totally useless (I am sympathetic), that's still less than 5% of the budget, less than half the average year on year increase for one year. And that is assuming they are all completely useless, and that students have zero interest in paying for such services...

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#310

Post by Siira »

boppo1 wrote: post #188
EricE wrote: post #162

They can only get away with this crap due to government subsidized student loans. Remove the artificial inflation of cheap government money and this crap would self-correct overnight. Even better - make colleges guarantee loans. If people can't get a job after 2 years of graduation make the schools start making the loan payments until they do get a job. BS degrees would dry up overnight too.

I couldn't agree more with your second point. But we'd need some sort of safety net for the humanities or else basically all but a few hollywood-feeding schools would drop them. Right now they're bloated and giving worthless credentials to kids for intersectional harry potter phd theses, but it would be good to keep the cores of the departments alive (if there's anything left).

The same humanities who championed that it’s in our Iranian culture to beat our people to death for having “improper” hijab? The sooner these leeches get defunded the better.
Post reply on HN