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The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#41

Post by tensor »

fluidcruft wrote: post #40
tensor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a first hand example from the secretary at the last university where I worked? The university used to give travelling professors and students a per-diem for food. I think it was around $50 US per day, so pretty reasonable. You had to justify if you spent more than that. However, while I was there the administration decided that they wanted to cut down on some imagined "abuse" that people were not spending t…

You seem to totally not grok compliance at a fundamental level. You're blaming the tail for wagging, but the dog's tail doesn't wag just because it chooses to.

This is not an external compliance issue, it is entirely the university management that is responsible. Plus, it is only one example out of many. I was never in the system deep enough to be able to recount the other examples, but I certainly remember lots of drama around forced classroom aids and other nonsense.

Excessive bureaucracy is not some inevitable thing that you cannot help. It's driven by people who directly cause it to fester and grow.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#42

Post by ylem »

dthal wrote: post #35
beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

Sorry if its a little OT, but I actually have this question: Is it normal for grad students to get reimbursed by their institution for conference travel?

In my experience, in the US, it is normal to reimburse physics graduate students. I won't say how many of us there were to a room at times, but we were reimbursed....

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#43

Post by programminggeek »

One reason people don't seem to mention much is that universities, particularly research universities, act as a kind of educational industrial complex wherein the government essentially funds the universities with grant research dollars and with it comes the overhead of administration and such.

That research money gets spent largely on research, but once you hire people for those projects the university finds ways of keeping them around. More than that, buildings and such over time get built to further the research agendas of the schools, furthering the dependency on federal grant money.

So, in a sense, the bureaucracy of the federal government funds the bureaucracy of universities as well.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#44

Post by alexggordon »

I think, particularly in private education in the US, there is going to be a bubble that is going to pop soon. With continued monetization of education obviously comes people whose job it is to continue monetizing it (more administration). It then follows that there is a continuing push to turn a school into a 'business'. As a developer that works at a SASS company working in education, we've seen the admissions departments of higher education institutions turn from a passive information providing source, to a proactive sales team with set quota's and goals. It's actually quite startling to look at the shift from the perspective of a decade ago.

Eventually though, students are going to realize that the product they're paying for isn't worth it. $200,000 in loans for a liberal arts degree is gratuitous. With that, private education will see a significant drop in enrollment and public education will explode, I presume. However, the thing I'm most afraid of is tiered pricing for universities, which I'm sure is bound to come. Want an art degree? Those are practically free. Want Computer Science degree? You're going to have to pay for that...

The moral of this story is that there needs to be a serious paradigm shift in the motivations of schools in the US soon. Motivations need to switch from income and attendance, to outcome and employability. I know personally, I have yet to be asked by my alma mater what I would change to make the university better. This lack of focus on outcome, curriculum, and education 'ability' I think is one of the biggest downfalls of private higher education.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#45

Post by eob »

dthal wrote: post #35
beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

Sorry if its a little OT, but I actually have this question: Is it normal for grad students to get reimbursed by their institution for conference travel?

CS PhD here: In our field, yes.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#46

Post by 1971genocide »

alexggordon wrote: post #44

I think, particularly in private education in the US, there is going to be a bubble that is going to pop soon. With continued monetization of education obviously comes people whose job it is to continue monetizing it (more administration). It then follows that there is a continuing push to turn a school into a 'business'. As a developer that works at a SASS company working in education, we've seen the admissions depa…

We already have that in the UK now. An Computer Science degree is twice as expensive as an english degree and a medical degree is almost 130% more expensive than a Computer Science degree ( This is for international students ). I wonder what happens if this continues.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#47

Post by fluidcruft »

tensor wrote: post #41
fluidcruft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to totally not grok compliance at a fundamental level. You're blaming the tail for wagging, but the dog's tail doesn't wag just because it chooses to.

This is not an external compliance issue, it is entirely the university management that is responsible. Plus, it is only one example out of many. I was never in the system deep enough to be able to recount the other examples, but I certainly remember lots of drama around forced classroom aids and other nonsense. Excessive bureaucracy is not some inevitable thing that you cannot help. It's driven by people who directl…

How does it makes sense for administration to take their overhead and then spend it hiring unnecessary beurocrats (rather than shuffling funds to give themselves raises)?

The ever-growing regulatory burden that the private sector always cries about? This is the same thing.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#48

Post by ssalazar »

gamblor956 wrote: post #8
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

The proposal was immediately dismissed because it was a stupid idea. There is a tremendous amount of administrative work related to academics that most professors never notice because they're not the ones doing the work. If the professors had to do all of the administrative work themselves--even just the bare minimum--they would barely have any time to teach. Moreover, a substantial amount of money would be wasted on…

This. As a current grad student at a large research university, I have no interest in what little administrative work I do have to do, and my professors exhibit similar disinclinations.

That being said, at my school, the jobs of many of the admins I interact with seem to be navigating other administrative systems in the university. Its ridiculous and the solution needs to involve less bureaucracy, but not the complete dissolution of it. I've seen an entire grant left unspent because of the red-tape needed to spend it.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#49

Post by niels_olson »

baldfat wrote: post #6
danieltillett wrote: post #5

As a former tenured professor I thought a lot about this issue. The underlying problem is that administrative staff create work to justify their existence. The more administrative staff you employ the more you need to employ. I was on the academic council for a couple of years (itself a huge waste of resources and time) so I got to put up a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with ac…

> As a former tenured professor Key word "former" Leaving Higher Education was the best decision I have made in the last 10 years.

Seriously, the more I experience the outside (vis-a-vis grant applications, requirements imposed on extramural partners, etc), the happier I'm actually in the military, salary paid, and all I have to deal with is Catch-22 level paperwork stupidity. I have to input my work hours in 3 different databases (hello, SQL anyone?), but at least we still have per diem meals. Although that's irrelevant since we rarely get conference funding.

Re: The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities

#50

Post by beloch »

bruceb wrote: post #36
beloch wrote: post #24

Even in just a few years as a grad student I saw noticeable increases in bureaucratic overhead. When I started you could go to a conference and claim your expenses pretty much on the honor system. As students, we knew our trips were being paid out of a finite fund and racking up unnecessary expenses would limit our trips in the future. We kept each other honest. By the end, our PI had been forced to hire a full time…

They should be using http://expensebot.com/

You should be aware that any kind of expense software used by a university would have to scale up to thousands of users and would, of course, need to be totally and utterly obfuscated. If any old category theorist or quantum physicist can figure it out it would result in pandemonium!

Peoplesoft... Now there's a real university expense reporting platform. Whatever you do, don't go into expense reports under the main menu. That will corrupt your account and cause you to cease being paid. Change your role from student, employee, or faculty to petitioning_supplicant34, go into the cost reporting section, flip the null flag, then go into history and enter your expenses under category T311802, unless it's Tuesday or a prime numbered day of the Julian calendar. If that doesn't work and it's not a Tuesday or prime Julian date, request an update from Pam in accounts, who will be on vacation until the next solstice.

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