I hope some enterprising journalist works out some way to wiggle in there and try to figure out exactly what all these administrators are doing, because to me, it's not a merely a rhetorical question. What are all these administrators doing? I'm 100% serious. Really, what on Earth are they doing?<p>A great deal of the truly hard work of running a University, like scheduling several thousand students into several thousand classes, is done either entirely by or with great assistance from computers. In the absence of prior knowledge of the situation, had you asked me whether a university would need more or fewer administrators today per student or professor than in 1960, I would have immediately answered "fewer".<p>Moreover, to be clear, I'm not trying to make an implicit argument here that they must be doing worthless things. That argument, if I were to make it, could only come after this question is answered. Further, I'm not asking for people to conjecture what they may or may not be doing from the outside; I can do that as well as the next guy. But if you have direct experience, I'm all ears. I'm especially interested in hearing about the experiences of people who are deep down in the system, removed from direct student or professor interaction, not a lab assistant or counsellor whose contribution is obvious.
I'm currently a student at a public university, where we just finished a multi-million dollar renovation of our five-story library. Previously all floors were study space for students, and you could almost always find study space, even during finals. The fourth floor is now exclusively administrative office space, and things are getting cramped.<p>This story has played out over and over in various corners of the school. An office would spring up in a dorm here or there. The IT department wanted to expand one of their offices into our heavily-used English tutoring center. It's an epidemic, as far as I'm concerned...
Holy crap. I went to Purdue from 1999-2004 I was out of stat and I paid around $17k in tuition and $4k in room+board, so it did nearly exactly double since I went there. It's one thing to hear that college costs are going up really fast, but it puts it into perspective when you see the actual school you went to.<p>I picked Purdue partly because I could go there without incurring any debt, which wasn't the case with a lot of private schools. Had I been born a few years later I would have had to go to an in-state school to do this.
At the college where my wife is a professor (small liberal arts school of perfectly average quality... very typical for its type) the pay of the administrators is considered competitive while that of the professors is considered less than competitive.<p>The average administrator makes a low 6 figures, the average professor makes about $50,000 to $60,000, teaching positions are constantly frozen, contributions to retirement frequently withheld (this way they can claim they maintain salaries while still cutting costs... looks better on the surface) while the number of administrators just keeps creeping up.<p>I suspect that as smaller colleges turn to a more business oriented way of operating, out of desperation to increase enrollment and raise funds, this trend will continue. The administrators at my wife's school operate more and more like C-level executives at a corporation while the faculty are becoming the worker bees of the hive. The two groups used to occupy a similar level with full professors being on par with the higher level administrators.
Disclaimer: I'm on the "dean" side of the ledger as a contractor for an Australian university.<p>One of the bloggers on my little network calculated that approximately 28c of each dollar of public funding for Australian universities is spent on academic staff:<p><a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/19/the-university-coalface-gets-28-cents-in-the-dollar/" rel="nofollow">http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/19/the-university-coalface-...</a><p>He went on to discuss reform options and possibilities:<p><a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/21/university-reform-part-i-what-are-the-options/" rel="nofollow">http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/21/university-reform-part-i...</a><p><a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/23/university-reforms-part-ii-the-barriers/" rel="nofollow">http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/23/university-reforms-part-...</a><p><a href="http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/26/university-reform-part-iii-so-what-can-be-done/" rel="nofollow">http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/26/university-reform-part-i...</a>
Well, for non-STEM majors at least the value of going to a top college is 70% being able to say you were good enough to get in. So you've got a positional good and thanks to the government lots of people who've been loaned the money to bid it up. And since most of these places are non-profit you won't see high returns to investors, meaning the one place for the money to go is to superfluous staff.<p>There's an element of Baumol's cost disease[1] too, but according to a paper I read recently (I'm too lazy to dig it up, sorry), that only accounts for >20% of the rising costs of tuition.<p>[1]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease</a>
Something I have always wondered is why deans and other administrators make such great salaries relative to professors. My hunch is that it is simply because they can, but I feel like I must be missing something. Does anyone know if these tough jobs in ways I don't appreciate?
And they say education needs more money. Not when so much of it goes to waste like this, it doesn't. If they audited every school from top to bottom, they'd probably save at least 50% of what those schools are getting right now.
The scale of this problem varies quite a bit based on institution type and based on the primary sources of revenue for the institution. A medium size two year institution has a very different (lighter) organizational structure from a large four year residential institution. In general, emphasis on the full featured residential experience leads to more "programs" (product bundling) and more administrators to run those programs. This might not be a bad thing especially for endowment driven institutions that have chosen a high cost strategy. These schools can afford to pay the large number of administrators and pay their faculty well pretty much without trouble.<p>The problem truly arises with the second tier of institutions that are trying their best to "keep up" with first their peer institutions and then the top tier in the US News rankings. Their budgets are generally more tuition driven which starts to put some constraints on what is possible. These schools build the same expensive high touch programs and resources to attract the best students and try to keep up in the rankings. Higher ed is like a school of fish - everyone wants to swim together but only a few really have the money to do it. This is where the cracks in the model really start to show.<p>There are definitely opportunities for disruption and change in higher ed. Intelligent application of technology both to teaching and learning and to the other elements of the current bundle (research, certification, etc.) will lead to disaggregation and (probably) reduced employment for higher education administrators. The wildcard is how accrediting organizations will respond to the changes on the horizon. They act as a brake on innovation, and since most federal and state funds are tied to accreditation, institutions are loath to change too quickly.
<i>The bottom line: From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10 times faster than they added tenured faculty.</i><p>-- Makes sense.<p>Non-profit=The profits go out the door in "costs"
Wow that is almost, but not quite as bad as the Memphis City School system, which has more administrators per student than any school system on the planet.
I think it is rather laughable all the tea party kooks here stepping up to justify this kind of bloated top heavy organization. Little wonder US universities are headed south in terms of the quality of their grads. All part of the same sports virus infects all of US education. It it makes money, it gets priority. No wonder US education costs are so high, yet teachers and students get shafted.
Unfortunate that this thread will probably dissolve beforehand, but coincidentally there's an IAmA on Reddit by an assoc. dean of admissions at Colgate about to start: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13vel5/im_karen_giannino_senior_associate_dean_of/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13vel5/im_karen_gianni...</a>
Have a read of Daniel Bernstein's travails at UIC.<p><a href="http://cr.yp.to/uic.html" rel="nofollow">http://cr.yp.to/uic.html</a><p>It's excruciatingly entertaining.
The problem extends way beyond the college level. I once saw a very small school (graduating fewer than 20 students from sixth grade) add a non-teaching position every year for five years.