Administrators Ate My Tuition
washingtonmonthly.com
Administrators Ate My Tuition
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#2So tuition has tripled, and it's all because of the administrative budget, which is a whopping 15% of expenditures?
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#3So tuition has tripled, and it's all because of the administrative budget, which is a whopping 15% of expenditures?
Administrators are setting the priorities of expenditures. In so-called "fiscal emergency," administrators have opted to cut academic programs and freeze hiring in teaching while at the same time increasing expenditures on bureaucracy. The article cites abundant examples.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#4So tuition has tripled, and it's all because of the administrative budget, which is a whopping 15% of expenditures?
Administrators are setting the priorities of expenditures. In so-called "fiscal emergency," administrators have opted to cut academic programs and freeze hiring in teaching while at the same time increasing expenditures on bureaucracy. The article cites abundant examples.
Still, according to the article's own numbers, if we reset the administrative fraction of the budget to 1947 levels, we would only shave 6% off of costs; this hardly explains much of the huge increase in inflation-adjusted tuition since then.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#5So tuition has tripled, and it's all because of the administrative budget, which is a whopping 15% of expenditures?
To be fair, it was 15% in 1995, and is higher now.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Administrators are setting the priorities of expenditures. In so-called "fiscal emergency," administrators have opted to cut academic programs and freeze hiring in teaching while at the same time increasing expenditures on bureaucracy. The article cites abundant examples.
Still, according to the article's own numbers, if we reset the administrative fraction of the budget to 1947 levels, we would only shave 6% off of costs; this hardly explains much of the huge increase in inflation-adjusted tuition since then.
Administrators can be frightfully bad at capital allocation. They don't have much incentive to spend wisely, and they are often disconnected from what really matters to a university. Also, the more admins you have, the louder their voice will be, and the more misdirected intellectual firepower they will have making reports about how their decisions are the best.
IIRC, the real cost is often building, and IT. There's also money getting wasted by academics, because they have to follow too many rules. If you give academics a budget, and tell them to spend it wisely, they will probably do so. Give them a list of rules, and they will follow the rules, even if it means they waste a lot of money.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#7It's true that it's not just the administrators. It's the budgets and programs that come with them.
I went to Georgia Tech. The last time I heard a report, Georgia Tech had 3 staff members dedicated to the fraternity system. 1 for fraternities, 1 for sororities, and one for minority organizations that don't want to be in the mainstream system. Schools should have zero staff dedicated to the "greek" system. Greek letter organizations are free associations of citizens that operate on the periphery of the school. But we need staff. And we need budget and fees to pay to educate this system, and monitor them.
Expand this to every corner of campus. You not only need many staff dedicated to diversity programs, you must take "fees" from students to pay for diversity days, weeks, and months. I served in Georgia Tech's student government, and watched every week as student organizations came through asking for money to pay for bands, t-shirts, refreshments, banners, etc, all from student funds. Many of the projects were nice ideas, few of them justified boosting the cost of education for a school's students.
At most schools, there are multiple staff members dedicated to purposes for which there should be zero staff. But some combination of social agendas and lawsuit avoidance builds up the headcount.
Students pay for access to sporting events, which used to be about actual students competing, but are now huge cash cows that serve as farm leagues for pro sports teams. Students now pay hundreds of dollars in fees for the _chance_ to see their school's sporting events, even though stadium capacities are often triple or more the student population.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#8Beware -- this article makes a variety of claims that are not well supported. They are not even anecdotal, they're just out of thin air. Just one example from the first part:
"Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to teaching."
Um, any data _at all_ to back this up? In my experience at a public university, this is not at all true. And when administrators make a career out it, it is often in roles like working on technological infrastructure of a campus.
Also, many universities are growing their research programs. From what I've seen, it takes a lot more staff to support the research side of things than to support the educational side of things. And research is paid for (in theory) from grants and such, not tuition.
Anyway, there are a variety of problems with the way higher education is run and funded, but this article doesn't cover them. Instead, it uses a few statistics and a lot of bold, inaccurate, unsubstantiated, sensationalistic hand waving about that darn old wasteful ivory tower.
"There are lies, darn lies, and statistics" applies quite well in this case.
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#9So tuition has tripled, and it's all because of the administrative budget, which is a whopping 15% of expenditures?
Here's a gross oversimplification showing the possibility (not actuality) of something like this's occurrence.
1) Suppose the government sponsors $100 out of every student's $103 tuition.
2) Suppose that $3 of that $103 tuition goes towards the beaurocracy.
3) Suppose beaurocracy costs somehow increase to $9, from $3 (and that all other costs remain fixed).
Outcome: Student tuition is now $109, $100 of which is paid for by the government. The students' share of the tuition, however, has tripled from $3 to $9. I doubt the percentages work out anything like that in the real world, though.
And on an entirely unrelated note, a fun quote: "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
Re: Administrators Ate My Tuition
#10Beware -- this article makes a variety of claims that are not well supported. They are not even anecdotal, they're just out of thin air. Just one example from the first part: "Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who have spent time in a classroom or laboratory often hope to make administration their lif…
> And research is paid for (in theory) from grants and such, not tuition.
The former dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing has a series of posts arguing that many (most?) universities actually lose money on research, contrary to the grants argument:
http://innovate-wwc.com/2010/07/05/why-universities-do-resea...
http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...