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 secretary to deal with the bureaucracy. Everything we expensed required a paper trail. $50 lobster dinner on credit? No problem getting reimbursed. $3 hotdog with no receipt? Brace yourself for hours of paperwork.
This idiotic policy pressured us to spend more in pricey restaurants and avoid cheaper street vendors (Try explaining to a thai street vendor that the receipt has to have your name on it). Similarly, it was easier to claim a $50 cab ride than a $5 subway fare. Add in the cost of paying people to scrutinize our every receipt and I'm sure the University tripled the cost of conference trips. Success? Absolutely, at least for the sleazy admin who tripled the staff reporting to him, likely by claiming students couldn't be trusted to keep costs down.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it illustrates my point: Treating people as dishonest by default carries a heavy price, payable in bureaucrat salaries.
they started wanting boarding passes to reimburse flights at my school. Right around the time when you could start going through airports without a paper boarding pass. And people at gates would constantly take the paper boarding pass from you when you boarded.
Or that one time I had to provide the group photo from a conference as proof that I attended so they would reimburse me for registration. I might have flown to San Diego just to have a vacation, not attend the conference...
The easy solution for that is a stipend and receipts when you go over the cost for a few defined scenarios (for example, $60 to get to the airport, $20 a meal). If you are a cheap bastard, you make a few bucks. If it took three train trips and a taxi to get to the airport, keep the receipts.
The bureaucrats feared exactly the result of what you propse: That people would spend more than they eat and pocket the difference.
The old honor method was to add up what you spent on food and claim it as "per diem". The maximum was far more than you actually needed most places (Note: There's a big difference in food costs between, for example, Geneva and Bangkok). The new method required receipts with your name on them for everything.
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?
Polices tend to be lab and department specific. Most everyone I know if reimbursed for flights and hotels (though they are typically required to apply for internal travel grants that exist for this purpose). Food reimbursement varies from lab to lab.
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....
In my department, typically each student has a finite amount allocated for conference travel. After that, you either apply for travel grants, or (commonly) your supervisor will probably have access to extra funding, but it's still a finite resource.
Nobody would go to a conference if they had to pay their own way because nobody's paid enough to be able to, quite frankly.
It's not quite this bad where I am, but it's definitely heading in that direction. We've just had a new expenses system implemented, and it's obviously a nightmare compared to the old one, which was just a form you staple receipts to.
Any university where admin staff outnumber teaching/research staff is doing something wrong in my opinion. A certain amount of administration is obviously essential and invaluable, but there's a limit...
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.
You should try the Defense Travel System. After submitting my itinerary once, probably the 5th time I'd taken the exact same quarterly trip, using the exact same system, my ticketing never came through. I finally realized it and called one of the travel people. He said "Once you hit submit, you have to go back and check on this other page, in about an hour, to make sure it actually went through, otherwise you have to resubmit."
Wat? This is in production? On a financial system?
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 academics. The idea was the academics do all the needed administrative tasks, and since nobody's job would depend on doing administrative tasks, that we would only be doing the bare minimum needed to keep the university running. Also everyone would be aware of what the consequences of some new administrate task would be on teaching and research. The look on the vice chancellor's (university president) face was priceless - I don't need to tell anyone here that the proposal was immediately dismissed without discussion.
It's an interesting idea, but it misses the substantial increase in administrative load that public schools have seen over the past 30 years. 30 years ago there were non-existent services for disabled students, socionomically-disadvantaged students, international students and scholars, etc.
There was also substantially fewer federal research grants and the associated paperwork required to receive those grants. You'd be surprised how much administrative work is required to receive federal grants and to employ the domestic and international researchers that do said research. (Effort reporting, Visa applications and processing, expenditure justification, backup and reconciliation, etc.)
I am not surprised with how much work is involved in administering grants as I had to spend a significant amount of my time doing this. Unfortunately almost all the time spent was pointless and not really needed.
All the support activities can be provided by academics. Actually it is far better that academics teaching to the students provide this support since they actually know what the students will face, not some admin flunky who has no real idea of what happens in the classroom.
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 highly-paid professors spending hours on tasks that a lowly-paid administrative staffer could complete in minutes.
"My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.
"The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on."
Providing a diatribe from another professor does little to support your argument that professors have any idea as to the amount of administrative work required to make a university function. Indeed, the quote actually supports my argument that most professors are blissfully or even deliberately ignorant of the time and effort necessary to prepare grant proposals for research funding, student grants for student projects and job applications, setting up conferences and workshops for the faculty and students, managing the curriculum, and other tasks necessary for the university to function so that the professors can do their jobs (lecturing and/or research).
None of these burdens was created by the administrative staff--they are external burdens that the administrative staff were hired to address so that the academic faculty didn't have to waste their time on it.
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 the $50 on food, but maybe kept some of it, or used it to buy a beer heaven forbid. So they required receipts for everything, no more per-diem. Even better, they decided that they know how and when you should eat and set limits on breakfast lunch and dinner individually.
This created so much paperwork that they had to hire more full time staff to go through all the receipts. Clearly this cost the university way way more than it potentially saved and also created huge problems for people with special dietary requirements.
All of this was exclusively caused by the administrative staff, not tenured professors who universally hated it. The older secretaries who were around when things were better also hated it and thought it stupid.
But it served exactly the purpose it was supposed to do which was to make more work for administration. You can't expect some administrator to put themselves out of a job by proposing less paperwork. The only way to break this crazy situation is give them something better to do with their time like teaching and research.
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.
Some of my favorite sci-fi authors like Asimov (Foundation) and Harry Harrison (Stainless Steel Rat) might disagree with your last sentence. ;)
Personally, I think both sentences at the end of your comment are correct: it is inevitable that bureaucracy grows, and it is driven by the bureaucrats.
It's almost like a "law" of economics, which, of course, describes human behavior. So they can at once be the cause of something that is inevitable.
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.
>most professors are blissfully or even deliberately ignorant of the time and effort necessary to prepare grant proposals for research funding.
I can assure you that this is not true. Any "deliberate" ignorance is likely an attempt to trim the amount of admin demanded.
I have prepared research proposals for numerous governmental and non-profit funders, and the amount of admin required on each varies enormously, with the EU being the absolute worst. The EU demands more, because others demand more from it; reports have to be made to this and that body, etc, etc. Completely unnecessary. Whereas one non-profit requires only a two page report and copies of any manuscripts in preparation or published (bliss!).
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.
You have capture exactly the purpose of my proposal. If you put people in charge of administration who have better things to do with their time so they don't waste time on administration. When you put professional admistrators in charged of administration then all you end up with is the need for more administration.
If you accept the axiom that some administrative tasks are pointless and unnecessary, then there are two ways for academics to avoid doing them.
They can refuse to do them. Eliminate the pointless, unnecessary task, and accept the non-consequence of not doing it.
They can hire a professional administrator to do it. Naturally, the administrator will in turn hire an underling to perform all the unnecessary tasks, and retain all vital tasks for himself. But now that the administrator has an employee, that creates an additional management burden, to ensure that person is doing the pointless unnecessary tasks correctly and before the deadline.
It is clear that professional administrators and academics have different incentives with regard to administrative overhead. One would prefer to see it grow without bound, whereas the other would prefer to see it shrink to its minimum viable size.
The colossal mistake that too many organizations have made in the past is to allow the administrators to control the administrative budget. That is the one thing that absolutely cannot be delegated away from the people doing the core work of the business.
This was my strategy in regards pointless tasks - just don't do them. What I found is nothing happened 95% of the time and for the other 5% someone would visit me in person and tell me that it was really important.
Well I am glad to have such a well thought out critique. You might be surprised to learn that academics are far cheaper to hire than admin staff and will work three times as hard. The whole idea is to get rid of all the pointless admin work. My idea is that you would have three times as many academics teaching and researching, but the university as a whole would be doing 10% of the admin work [1].
1. My personal experience is only about 10% of all administrative work is actually required - all the rest is either make work or nice-but-not-essential activities.
I am currently a staff member at a well-known U.S. research University. I have been so for around 10 years.
I have noticed a rise in the view that administrative staff are an inevitable and unnecessary accretion within higher ed.
I find it hard to imagine the Campus network being built and maintained in the manner you propose. My area is information security. I equally cannot fathom faculty taking an interest in incident response duties, or dealing with network intrusion detection, or that kind of thing. We have seen what life is like without these functions. Quickly the Campus network is overrun with compromised devices, the rest of the world begins shunning the Campus address space, and the network becomes more and more unusable. This is, contrary to what we might hope, a full time responsibility. I cannot imagine any faculty who would be interested in dealing with PCI or HIPAA compliance in order to use credit cards, or run a health clinic or hospital.
Is there really no place for any kind of administrative staff? Once you let in and feed a few rats, they just breed, multiply and overrun the place?
I do find it troubling that I earn more than graduate student instructor or indeed many junior faculty. It is less than what I would make in private enterprise. I don't know how to justify this, or indeed what the way to address it if indeed many staff positions are (as I believe) essential.
In the end, I am no longer interested in trying to answer this question. However much I might have believed in the mission of higher education has been eroded by my dislike of being increasingly considered vermin. I will be leaving higher ed, and take that even higher salary. This has, as I have observed at least at my University, increasingly been the path of the more skilled tech folks.
IT, like the library system, provides infrastructure in support of the university's core mission. I've never heard anybody say, "Damn, the network here just works too well... let's sack the IT folks so we can focus on our research like we used to!" Likewise, no professor or student is likely to say "Do we really need all these reference books?" about the library. The value and need for these complex services is almost universally acknowledged among professors and students.
When I think of administrative excesses I think about how we now have MBAs pulling down high six figures for nonsense like Assistant Vice Dean of Student Life. Each of these superfluous executives is supported by their own mini-fiefdom, with assistants and reports who cost a lot of money and make a lot of busywork for professors/students while performing their functions. Having these corporate-minded people who care little for the original mission and purpose of the university leads to perverse decision making as they work to fatten their own bottom lines, advance their agendas, or increase the size of their influence.
This is how universities have come around to the view that academic labor is a cost to be minimized, forcing a generation of young academics into exploitative and unsustainable adjuctships.
I think a big problem with the corporatization of the university is that administrative incentives are not aligned with it's traditional mission. In a business corporation, highly-paid executives are accountable to shareholders. If their work doesn't advance the core mission of the company (making money) then you can be sure there will be repercussions. Until the compensation of high-ranking university administrators is somehow tied to the university's performance on research and teaching, we'll continue to see growth of administration for administration's sake at the expense of other areas.
I rarely see any nuance given to the rants against admin staff. My response above yours here was to a former professor's supposedly serious past suggestion to dismiss all admin staff. It is not the first time I have heard this idea. All staff are so frequently painted with the same broad brush, with no effort to distinguish as you have done here.
These folks running the Campus network command rather good salaries by EDU standards, though less than their commercial peers. Is it ok a network engineer who maintains a world class 10Gb or faster research network serving 100,000+ nodes with a dizzying variety of uses be compensated more than junior professors?
My idea is not to dismiss anyone, but make sure that everyone is involved in teaching and research. The network people have a lot to give students and this should be made part of their job. When you have better things to spend your time on other than make work activities you avoid all of these pointless activities.
Well, you did write you would get rid of all administrative staff and replace with academics.
I cannot see how very many, if any, academics will be interested in 24x7 on call duties to maintain a campus network. Are a handful of faculty assigned this responsibility? Do they leave class to deal with a down router? Do they spend their sabbatical replacing end of life wireless access points? Do they run fiber to new buildings? Or does this responsibility rotate: this week, the history department looks after the network, and next week the English department handles it?
As much as I think you under-estimate the work required in this network example, if the proposal is to ask the network engineer to also teach in some capacity, then I also think you under-estimate what is required to be an effective teacher.
Running a production network and doing cutting edge research in even networking do not overlap. Expertise in one of these says nothing about one's proficiency in the other.
I don't at all disagree with the suggestion that there are some administrative staff who just add overhead. If we were able to reliably identify which these are, then sure, elimination of these positions and turn-over of what few real responsibilities they had to those who remain (perhaps academics) would be a fine way to ensure things stay lean.
But what you propose seems to imply most staff positions are fluff, and have responsibilities that could be picked up without radically changing the focus of faculty. I think such a claim is really divorced from a real understanding of what makes the infrastructure and resources at a top tier (or perhaps even any tier) University possible.
I should have been more precise in my language - my original post was just a short response to the article. In reality any change like I was proposing would require the current staff are retained and their job description changed. You are not going to be able to turn over the network to the English department and expect it to stay online for long :)
I actually don't underestimate what is required by the network engineers, but I do think it would be great if they were also teaching and doing research. If we moved to an all academic model then it would be possible to employee more network engineers and spread the load across more people. The skilled staff would be able to share their experience with the students. I actually value the contribution of the support staff very highly and want them involved in the core activities of the university. I have no time for the usual academic dismissal of administration as being full of worthless people, what I have an issue with is letting people work as full time admistrators.
Many administrative activities are fluff. What I would like to see is only the essential activities done and people spend their time on the important activities.
I'll be honest, it never even occured to me that IT support would be considered admin overhead. Of course, I was shocked to find out laborers considered me management, given I'm an engineer. To me, complaining about IT overhead is like complaining about maintenance, or housekeeping: this is vital infrastructure that should work seamlessly and hidden in the background. (I'm a behind-the-stage kind of person, though.)
But, given how I've seen some bureaucrats complain about the cost of housekeeping, I guess anything's fair game. And don't even get me started on the unavoidable cost of maintenance...
The idea is not that university don't employee experts for specific areas, but that everyone has to teach and do research. The experts who are maintaining the network should be teaching students and doing research so that everyone is involved in the core activities of the university. When people have something to do with their time other than make administrative work for others then the mission of the university can be pursued by all.
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.
I actually miss being an academic. I loved teaching and research, but I hated all the administration. I was lucky in that I had the ability to leave, but if I could spend 80% of my time on research and teaching and 20% on administration instead of vice versa I would probably still be an academic - what I was not willing to do is waste my life on pointless paperwork.
My interview and job description was very different from what my day to day activities. I would get in trouble for being with students (In my job description) to do paper work (not in my job description unless the catch all "whatever is required by your supervisor). Loved working with students and teaching in the classroom, and even supporting others in their classroom. The other high stress because someone decided I can do 12 small items every week which equals two days of paper work was extremely frustrating.
> a proposal that we get rid of all administrative staff and replace them with academics
This is similar to how Colleges in Oxbridge are administered. They do have full time administrative staff but only the bare minimum and the academic staff has more administrative responsibilities. This arrangement is very effective at keeping red tape under control. Example: at a German university if you need a new printer, you have to fill endless forms (finding out which can be non-trivial) and you have to wait weeks for the approval. I you want to order a printer in November or December, that's simply impossible because of end-of-year accounting. At the college in Oxford where I worked, I went to the IT person and said that I need a printer. He gave me a new printer right away and I was good to go. Not even a signature was required. I have many more such examples. It's not clear though to what extend this common-sense-driven approach to administration can be scaled up to bigger institutions like universities.
It is a little off-topic but why did you give up a tenured position? Don't those take literally years and a great deal of work to earn? Or did you mean to say tenure track professor (which is still an achievement, but most people drop off of tenure track than out of tenure).
Wow I am surprised the attention this post got. Yes I had full tenure and yes they take many years to get. I actually don't know of any other relatively young academic that has given up tenure.
I left because I had the opportunity to do so. I was always a bit of an unusual academic as I had founded a company after my phd rather than do a post doc. When I became an academic I kept my company and ultimately went back to it.
I do miss science and in an ideal world I would still be an academic scientist. Unfortunately science is far from ideal.
I went to a small uni, and about half those jobs were held by students. There was an ancient mailing list server some kind soul set up in 1994 or so, where you could go to swap cleaning duties in case you wanted to stay in a particular department, to get a chance to "tackle" a prof and ask them stuff.
School is STMU in San Antonio, TX by the way. I ended up a workstudy in the proto lab, and left with my degree AND about nine tenths of a machining certificate.
I think you need to check your dictionary for a proper definition of "administrative". Nobody has been bemoaning the exponential expansion of janitors and cafeteria ladies on university campuses.
Title really should be consequences of business models in education reform of higher education. It showed a consequence of selling scientific research and less tenure for the scientist and researchers looking for a job outside of college.
Was a former faculty member of a college as a librarian. Colleges have nothing on Public School Administrators.
My city of 120,000 went from
2003 = 8 administrators and 4 high school principles for two high schools.
2014 = 32 administrators and 16 high school principles for two high schools
This culture believes that management and finance are the most important and valuable things in the world - more important than science, more necessary than art, more powerful than physical reality.
This culture is spectacularly wrong, and will be discovering exactly how wrong over the next few decades.
My brain can't handle neon yellow background, but I don't think bullshit jobs are a new phenomenon.
I think there was a huge bloat in bullshit jobs from the 1980s-2008. A lot of jobs that should have been lost due to productivity gains because of computers and networking were converted into bullshit jobs.
We went to so long with a real significant recession, it was like a forest that hasn't had a fire to clear the brush out.
In 2009, the company I worked for fired 1/3 the office staff and we actually improved the collective productivity of the office. And it wasn't forced overtime, the office staff had a 40 hour week max even for salaried people.
No they're not. Parkinson' Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law is the adage that "Work expands to fill the time allotted to it." But Parkinson's original book looked humorously but semi-seriously at actual administrative growth such as the growth of the British Civil Service and Admiralty staff even as British overseas colonies and navy were shrinking.
Revolutionary Road[1] by Richard Yates, published 1961, prominently features passages about how useless most of the jobs in the protagonist's office are, including his. Aside from the specifics of how the office operates (paper versus email) it could have been written today.
Replying to myself now that I have the book in front of me, but my edit abilities have expired.
A taste:
He had to think, and the best way to think was to go through the motions of working. This morning's batch of papers was waiting in his IN basket, on top of last Friday's, and so his first action was to turn the whole stack upside down on his desk and start from the bottom. As he did each day (or rather on the days when he bothered with his IN basked, for there were many days when he left it alone) he tried first to see how many papers he could get rid of without actually reading their contents. Some could be thrown away, others could be almost as rapidly disposed of by scrawling, "What about this?" in their margins, with his initials, and sending them to Bandy, or by writing "Know anything on this?" and sending them to someone like Ed Small, next door; but the danger here was that the same papers might come back in a few days marked "Do" from Bandy and "No" from Small. A safer course was to mark a thing "File" for Mrs. Jorgensen and the girls, after the briefest possible glance had established that it wasn't of urgent importance; if it was, he might mark it "File & Follow 1 Wk.," or he might put it aside and go on to the next one. The gradual accumulation of papers put aside in this way was what he turned to as soon as he was finished with, or tired of, the IN basket. [...] May of the papers in [the resulting pile of "important" work] bore the insignia of Bandy's "Do" or Ed Small's "No," and some had been through the "File & Follow" cycle as many as three or four times; some, bearing notes like "Frank—might look into this," were the gifts of men who used him as he used Small
— from Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, any errors probably mine from transcription.
The shipping on my strikemag order is 30 pounds on a 20 pound order, for paper. This is ridiculous. protest.
Edit the funny thing is, I can get "product" from China due to a bilateral shipping agreement, but knowledge from the UK, well that is expensive. If only Strikemag had their shit printed in China and shipped to the states. Then it would cost zero.
This (utterly depressing) academic job ad is, to me, the worst example yet of the trend toward recasting professors and teachers as "service providers" overseen by better-paid administrators. Featuring requirements like "Bring the course of study to life with engaging live webinars or relevant recorded webinars that enhance expected competencies" and the demand that the "course mentor" pays for their own conference travel and academic journal subscriptions, and responds to all emails from students within 4 hours, as well as an injunction to "Communicate with positive regard, respect, and solution- focus with members of other departments."
I can't get behind the bashing of all academic administrators, but whoever wrote this job ad strikes me as a pretty good example of what is going wrong in university administration right now.
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.
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.
Combine this with the rise of adjuncts over professors and you find that most of the teaching staff is making much less than their administrative support. I find it insane that as an adjunct you would be lucky to break $25k while seeing job postings at the school for a Benefits and Insurance Coordinator that can make up to $66k.
I'm not convinced the accelerated growth in administrative positions is entirely a result of corporatization. FWIW - I'm commenting as someone who has served on a few committees at a top 50 public, Research I institution. Not a single meeting ever included anything remotely resembling the phrase "we need to decrease costs in order to increase revenues and line our pockets!"
In the US (which is all I can speak to), the growth in administrative staff seems more like a response to increased layers of political bureaucracy. For example, schools are scrambling to add Title XI administrators because the federal government requires them in order to get federal funding (including student loans). Faculty don't want to be responsible for the associated administration and paperwork, so someone has to do it.
Regarding increases in tuition prices, most if not all states are slashing higher education funding. That shortfall has to be made up for somehow.
The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy.
Pay Post-Docs like shit, but hire another Vice-Provost with a 100K+ package! Welcome to modern higher education and research where people doing the research get paid worse than the those BS'ing in 'administration'.
How do I know? First-hand experience being at the wrong end of the table.
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.
I once had an argument with one of these people (Not being a grad student, I was not allowed to take a class that taught cluster computing, on a cluster that I had built and had written about half the linux distro for).
So I gave the guy a hug.
A professor had to come over and persuade me to put the admin guy back on the ground again a few minutes later.
I took that class and got a B+.
Lesson learned: Punch less, hug more, remind useless people that their proper place in life is as high up as they want, as long as it's out of my way.
Thereby justifying the existence of yet another "useless" administrative position, that of Title IX coordinator who reviews the incident as possible sexual harassment.
A lot of staff growth in all organizations is related to changing expectations (and sometimes legal requirements) related to human resources and management; you don't need nearly as many managers if don't care about things like treating everyone fairly or their professional development.
At the time, I felt that a bear hug was the best way to avoid an actual fight, and it worked. If you want to co-write a post on de-escalation techniques, I'd genuinely love to! What would you have done in that situation to defuse it?
So, you wouldn't have gotten what you wanted, and the other person would've gotten the wrong lesson from this episode. Got it. Given your tactics, I don't think I want to collaborate with you either. Maybe a discussion/debate?
The episode I related above was from either 2005 or 2006, I forget.
The last time I was in a fight, was in August of 2013, someone in a very altered mental state came at me with a knife. I believe at that point a therapeutic hold (bear hug and lift) is more than justified :)
I'm a big guy and that gives me some power. Power comes with responsibility, like "don't call the cops and potentially get some crazy person killed when you can handle it yourself and then call an ambulance".
Thanks for the advice! I have, generally, followed it.
This idiotic policy pressured us to spend more in pricey restaurants and avoid cheaper street vendors (Try explaining to a thai street vendor that the receipt has to have your name on it). Similarly, it was easier to claim a $50 cab ride than a $5 subway fare. Add in the cost of paying people to scrutinize our every receipt and I'm sure the University tripled the cost of conference trips. Success? Absolutely, at least for the sleazy admin who tripled the staff reporting to him, likely by claiming students couldn't be trusted to keep costs down.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it illustrates my point: Treating people as dishonest by default carries a heavy price, payable in bureaucrat salaries.