I think many will agree the largest problem with colleges today is the price. I’d like to point out the immense growth in US college administration personnel size over the last few decades versus the growth of the student body and/or tuition:
“The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 year”
I think an understated point in your linked article is the following:
“I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.”
There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.”
A lot of people want to treat universities like corporations and apply a corporate model to academia, but that's not quite right; universities are more like cities, the concerns are very broad. Sometimes universities are cities (e.g. State College PA, which doesn't really exist separate and apart from PSU). Cities need bureaucracy. These discussions usually talk about "nonacademic employees" as if they are not contributing to the academic process, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
For instance, the office of student affairs will handle student emotional issues so that I don't have to. I'm not trained in that, I'm an academic, so I prefer that they handle these things. If they didn't exist, I'd have to handle every single medical issue my students have, and I have hundreds of students. Better to standardize the process for everyone, which saves times but creates a bureaucracy that takes personnel and costs money. I think the programmers can appreciate the rationale, we do it all the time in designing code.
Or take the office of research, which has a whole department to help me with my grant writing. It costs a lot to run that office but it saves us all a lot of time and makes our grants more successful, which benefits everyone including students. Get rid of that office and maybe you'd have more budget for academics employees, but they would each be stretch thinner than they would with the office of research.
Taken as a whole I appreciate the support that our non-academic administrative and professional employees provide us. Sure it can be a pain sometimes but my job is easier on balance.
Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though. The issue is that resources are flowing to ever increasing full-time administrative staff, while teaching staff are cut and reduced to adjuncts making $28k a year.
> Regulations didn't cause universities to replace educators with underpaid adjuncts, though
I don't think you intended to imply this, but just to be clear, adjuncts are educators as much as any other faculty. I work with adjuncts and they are in fact underpaid. I agree it's a position that should be used less, although adjuncts are useful in filling in gaps during the year (e.g. a professor has to take a leave for a semester. It's not worth hiring a full faculty member on a 3 year contract; it's better just to hire an adjunct to cover the class one time).
At the same time some universities are going in the other direction, creating well-paid full-time teaching positions, some of them even on a tenure track. We are hiring for one such position now (and actually have been continually hiring for this position for 5 years now)
As an example, here is an org chart at UC Berkeley for their "Division of Equity and Inclusion". There are 14 positions here that are just at the director level. There are many more people that work under these people. Dania, the vice chancellor, gets paid $277,027 a year.
Universities are chock full of administrators like these that they never had prior and all of these departments will continually strive to grow their budgets and employee counts in an effort to expand and prove their importance and value.
I understand that DEI offices are not appreciated by everyone, so it's easy to point to a particular salary as a waste if you don't value the service this office provides. Consider that rhetorically, I could make the same point you're making by digging up the org chart for the IT department, and claiming we could save so much money if we just got rid of this cost center. But here on HN we all know the intrinsic value of an IT department. It's hard to calculate a dollar value to prove that the IT budget is well spent, but we implicitly understand its purpose in the campus community.
If you don't understand the purpose of the DEI office, it's very easy to dismiss it as unnecessary or unwanted. But as I said in one of my other posts, universities are places where a highly diverse population comes together to achieve common goals, and while I painted a rosy picture in that post, the reality is that the process can be messy sometimes. The DEI office provides a valuable campus resource to navigate these situations. They provide learning resources, they hold events for students that are well-attended, and they provide a support network for students who are dealing with issues relating to their identity, among other things. I don't know much about Dania from UC Berkeley, but as far as our DEI office goes, it is staffed by highly qualified domain experts holding doctorate degrees, not bureaucrats. They are at the top of their field, and they come at a premium.
Again, I can understand if you're coming from corporate America you may not appreciate the concerns a typical university deals with regarding diversity of the campus population. But I just have to say, it strikes me that most of the criticism I hear regarding the DEI office comes from people who are outside of the academic community, and really have only take a cursory look into these offices and what role they play in the university community. I can't speak for all campuses, but at my institution, my coworkers and students and I appreciate the DEI office and the work they do to make campus a vibrant and compassionate environment.
> Universities are chock full of administrators like these that they never had prior and all of these departments
It's true that these administrators are new, but it's also true that the role universities play in civic life has expanded. More people than ever have access to universities, and DEI offices have been a response to that. It's not like the exist for lack of want. Going back to the IT analogy, universities used to not have IT departments but now they do. Does that mean we can go back to a simpler time without IT (think of how much we could shrink the budget!), or should we accept it's a new world and adapt?
I’ve worked in administration at multiple universities and have a masters degree in education so I am well aware of how these institutions function on the inside.
It is an indisputable fact that university administrations have become very bloated over time. This is just one example of one department that would not have existed 10-20 years ago, but it now commands a multi million dollar budget at just one campus of a large public university that has multiple campuses throughout the state.
You can describe the merits of a DEI office and we can debate whether universities were much worse off when they didn’t exist, but the fact is they add cost. Like all the other offices. Many of which are full of the university version of “resters and vesters” riding out their time to eventually collect their retirements.
I went into university administration inspired by the vision of the California master plan of higher education and the people like Clark Kerr who helped build that vision. But it quickly became clear that the culture within university administration today is sadly lacking any of that former vision and seems focused on growing department budgets while producing the most minimal amount of work.
I’m glad your opinion is informed, but absent from your response is any consideration for students, so I think we are concerned about different things. I never disputed that any of this costs money.
Why should universities be like cities? They aren't in other countries. All of the non academic services that a university provides are also provided by the private sector, and they would love to have you as a customer.
University students are adults, and their emotional issues are not the responsibility of the university any more than they are the responsibility of your employer. Medical insurance can be bought through the ACA exchanges, and the students can go to any medical provider in the area (yes this system sucks, but it's not the university's job to fix). The grant writing department is the only one of your examples that actually seems like the business of the university.
edit: they probably don't even need to buy insurance because at that age you are probably covered on your parents plan
Well I don't know about should, but many are and that's the reality of how they evolved here (I'm not going to speculate as to why at this time). I personally like it and think they should (I've never lived in a town as well-managed and vibrant as my university), maybe others disagree and that's fine. But it's harder to disagree that's where we are right now.
> University students are adults, and their emotional issues are not the responsibility of the university any more than they are the responsibility of your employer.
They are young adults, which is when they are legally but not emotionally adults. There's actually still a lot of brain development going on at 18 (especially in the prefrontal cortex, which is essentially the part of your brain that makes you an adult), and that won't be complete until after we graduate them. I understand there are people out there with the position that as soon as you're 18 you should be kicked out of your parents' house and left to fend in the world for yourself. If that's your position then I can see how a university environment might seem like it's coddling.
But here's the thing -- we don't have the same mandate as employers. This is what I mean by corporate America wanting to impose their model on academia where it doesn't apply. Our mandate is to educate students, while an employer's mandate is to increase shareholder value. Our students are not employees and treating them as such is wrong.
One of the biggest difference between corporate America and academia is that our students live and learn in the same place, and often times they don't have cars, jobs, local family, or any other means of providing for themselves. Being part of a university as a student is a 24/7 deal for ~28 weeks a year. And when they do have jobs, they are part time or pay minimum wage due to their lack of education and experience. That's something that corporate America and the labor market has decided for us. Which is fine, I don't think that's unreasonable, but it means that we can't treat our students like employees who can fend for themselves with a salary as compensation for the work they do; the work they do is actually for themselves and for society, and generates no immediate ROI for us.
> All of the non academic services that a university provides are also provided by the private sector, and they would love to have you as a customer ... the students can go to any medical provider in the area
At one of my previous universities at least, we were the predominate medical provider in the area.
> Medical insurance can be bought through the ACA exchanges, and the students can go to any medical provider in the area (yes this system sucks, but it's not the university's job to fix).
The ACA hasn't been around forever, and when it wasn't we came up with our own system to provide students with
healthcare. ACA has made it so our students can be on their parent's plan, but not all our students have parents with health insurance that would cover them. Since we've already set up the system, we direct our student to that instead of the ACA. It's a much better system with far better care than they could get otherwise, at a cost cheaper than what they could buy on the ACA. AS you say, the ACA system sucks, and maybe it's not our literal job to fix it, but it is within our mandate to teach because the practitioners that our students visit are also students themselves (supervised by professionals). So it's a win for everyone. Yes it makes the university bigger but it also works for us so we keep doing it.
> The grant writing department is the only one of your examples that actually seems like the business of the university.
I could give more examples. For instance we have a whole office of academic advising. This is useful because then I don't have to do this. As a professor of CS, I don't know the ins and outs of the course progression in the department of X. I simply can't providing advising to students as well as they can on a full time basis. That office is not cheap, but it means that students are able to get through their 4 years here without turning it into 5 due to poor planning.
We have a whole office of academic development that helps with writing and tutoring. They augment my ability to teach by offering tutoring for my classes. Students appreciate this service and are always asking for it to be expanded.
I don't think I need to mention libraries. They are very expensive to maintain. As part of the library we have the IT department, which is a massive cost center. But I think we all here understand how important it is so it's never cited as something that should be cut or outsourced.
One of the biggest org charts in our institution is the office of students. Pretty much everything there is designed to directly service student needs, and it's probably pretty bloated at this point. I could see a whole bunch of stuff to cut, but then again I'm not a student anymore, so I don't know how much these things are appreciated. But it's important that they are in fact student facing, so they're getting what they paid for.
I appreciate your insight. In general I agree, I’m just skeptical at the massive growth (which I felt the article downplayed). Especially when combined with what you said about universities acting like corporations: I believe corps also have a trend of managers hiring people to expand their team and increase their perceived importance.
I don't think price is the problem even though there is tons of debt. The problem rather is the high dropout rate. Students nowadays have so much financial aid. Unless you come from a rich family, scholarships and aid are abundant. Students very seldom pay the quoted sticker price.
But I agree that there is probably also a lot of waste too.
This is part of the aggressive financialization of everything. The most direct example is that there are whole departments for handling loans, and the cost of those departments are figured into the price of education!
I (and Claude, codex, etc) have compiled/ran wayland, X11, GNOME, KDE, and Ladybird natively on a jailbroken iPad. Hoping to release more details soon but I have a slop wiki here:
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