More and more often, large institutions like bloated corporations or swollen universities feel like giant holes where people go to mine money. The American Dream is to have all of your paperwork in order so you can set your tent up right above a rich vein.
I think that’s a really, really good way to put it. The American Dream has moved away from pioneering new value streams to acquiring pedigrees/credentials that enable you to extract cash from an existing stream.
I sort of agree but I don't think we're quite there yet.
The only time I here anyone speak favorably about owning a business that's protected by regulation or milking a professional license is if it's part of some grand scheme to make a ton of money and then cash out of <coastal state goes here>.
Oh, it gets better. A person's mind doesn't have a "nop" instruction. People won't just sit quietly with hands in pockets, they need to have goals, leaders, followers, outcasts, competing dog packs... So what we are witnessing right now is a birth of a de-facto religion with its dogmas, saints, sinners, witches, indulgence salespeople and the Holy Inquisition.
And, honestly, I liked the times of building shit much more.
This seems like a leap. Admin has increased 45% in the same time faculty has increased 56%. And the timeframe is 20 years. Is there too much bureaucracy? I don’t know. But I don’t think this article is enough to say so. The faculty quotes don’t offer any concrete information, unless you’ve already decided what you’re going to believe, I guess.
I definitely have already decided what I'm going to believe, and I read this article as confirming my prior beliefs. But it's not just universities--government agencies and large corporations (both of which I've worked at and with) both seem to fall into the practice of "defending a huge pipeline of cash flow and allowing the properly-credentialed to siphon off larger amounts". It's not just the increase in administration that's lead to this; I would say that the increase in administration is actually a symptom of this.
Without details about what roles these new administrators are being hired for, it's impossible to say whether this is justified. For example, the quote from the university president suggests the growth is due to hospital staff:
> University President Peter Salovey emphasized that the administrative growth has been proportional with the growth in faculty size and in University revenue. He reiterated that the growth in the Yale School of Medicine’s clinical practice has been a significant and worthwhile cause of the administration’s increased size.
Whereas the reactions in the article and in this thread seem to be focused on other positions.
Nice. Do you know any similar ones?
I've been trying to find one in similar vein I read once, which among other things mentioned force exchange through morons if I recall correctly.
Best I could do was an image search that didn't have many good ones honestly. I know there was one once with a nice nuclear diagram associated...maybe under the alternate name "administrontium"?
A lot of these positions are hidden support for students. Faculty often think “administrator” means exclusively Deans and academic leadership, but it is the IT department, the website department, the counseling center, the career center, records, archives, marketing, admissions, health services, etc., etc. that makes up the bulk of administration.
The level of service expected, especially at an Ivy League school is very different today then it was 20-30 years ago. It is a much more complex operation.
I can bet if you actually give students a choice between "support for students" with a $500K student loan vs. a library card and a basic room for $50K, very few will pay the premium.
It would be a very sobering experiment to make these services optional and independently billed.
Otherwise it sounds like the typical bureaucratic excuse for creating more bureaucracy.
Students do have the choice. There are many colleges that are more affordable with less services. Many of these colleges are going under because enrollment has dropped at these schools. Community Colleges in particular have seen a huge drop in enrollments. Students opt for the schools with more prestige, better facilities, and more services 9/10.
Oh, come on, you can't be serious. Top schools have previously earned good reputation through attracting the best talent, so their diplomas are worth more in terms of salary expectations. And they are now banking on that reputation to charge as much as they can, while using loosely defined "services" to justify the costs. A fair comparison would be 2 schools of comparable reputation having different administrator proportion and spending structure, but not in this world where the people running them go to the same golf club.
Also "community college" these days is an euphemism for "the cheapest degree one could get that formally counts as one", so it is perceived accordingly.
Top schools are top schools by general awareness and perception, which, if you want to correlate with anything probably correlates best to athletics.
Ivy League schools are tied together by their athletics league. For most Ivy League schools tuition is a nominal part of their overall revenue. Those same schools are largely free if you are low to medium income (and are able to be accepted).
You state it in your reply, “community colleges are an euphemism for the cheapest degreeone could get that formally counts as one, so it is perceived accordingly.”
A college’s precieved educational value is more important than actual educational value as it pertains to attracting students. Therefore schools cannot afford to be precieved as “cheap” or “bargain-based” if they want to have a reputation for strong academics.
I wouldn't say they are a sham. They are the services that students and their families expect. If you don't have them students go somewhere that does have them. Too many students go elsewhere your enrollment drops. Your enrollment drops, you lose revenue. If you lose too much revenue you have to offer even less services and and are unable to pay top faculty. Even less students consider the College/University. And on and on the viscous cycle goes until the College or University folds due to a lack of sustainable revenue.
This just reminds me of an episode in yes prime minister where there is a new hospital fully staffed by administrative staff and no medical personnel because it never officially opened to the public.
For a lot of these schools, it helps to look at the increase in research dollars that they're bringing in. I expect some fraction of the new administrators are necessary to manage the research funding, which has a limited affect on tuition costs. Federal grants in particular have a lot of reporting and compliance that has to be produced.
The article also notes:
> University spokesperson Karen Peart pointed out that while the University’s managerial staff has increased over the last two decades, so too has the faculty, which has grown by 54 percent.
If the faculty have increased by that much, I would hope the staff would increase a similar amount.
Neither of the experts quoted in the article are particularly focused on higher ed economics, either:
The question I was immediately struck by was "how many of those are tenured?". For the last decade+ we've seen the same flow of contract gigs rather than jobs with assured benefits proliferating higher education.
It makes our colleges' education poorer because these non-tenured contract profs are making a lower quartile salary with no benefits after 4+ years of being underpaid as a grad student while also pursuing and interviewing for tenured positions/working on their research.
Universities have two jobs: 1. teach the populous, but also 2. be a leader in understanding the corner of the world they are focused on. We have been a leader in the latter and the less we invest in it, the more problematic a future we'll face as a nation.
You've got to look at the scholarly work rather than their faculty web pages. Campos has written a number of recent papers in the broad area of higher ed economics (particularly law school), but in the grand tradition of American law professors also clearly feels entitled to write about things such as public health that are well outside of his formal training.
James C. Scott is an influential scholar on power structures and the often antagonistic relationship between governors and the governed. His book Seeing Like a State in particular is widely read and mentioned on HN frequently.
What is most interesting about this article is that there is, at least among the quoted faculty, zero support for the administrative growth and a universal sentiment that it is harmful to the University and places undue burdens on faculty and students, and the quotes are quite vitriolic (this is not normally how professors talk in public about their schools). The Administration's explanations are hilariously weak (Additionally, the growth may have partially stemmed from student requests. Hannah Peck, the assistant dean of student affairs at Yale College, told the News that the Student Affairs team added four new health promotion positions as part of the YC3 program. “Students have consistently requested more mental health support on campus and we are thrilled to be able to provide it,” Peck wrote. So, that's 4 out of >1,500!).
It really does look like a struggle for power and billions of dollars in revenue, and the faculty are losing.
> What is most interesting about this article is that there is, at least among the quoted faculty, zero support for the administrative growth and a universal sentiment that it is harmful to the University and places undue burdens on faculty and students, and the quotes are quite vitriolic (this is not normally how professors talk in public about their schools).
What I have generally seen is that the faculty aren't seeing increases in staffing that appear to accrue to their benefit, but they also aren't as exposed to the parts of campus where the increases are happening either. Universities are much more complicated than they were 40 years ago, and they are serving a much more diverse, dynamic and broad student base. Schools aren't attended by primarily upper-class white men anymore. Many of the students really benefit from the additional resources available, whether that's mental health support, academic support, financial aid, etc. etc.
Yale also has a medical school and hospital, which always adds a huge amount of complexity to the finances of the organization.
For a lot of research it is good to look at who will NOT be doing the research anymore because ... wtf;
Tenured Administrators and "Pro Tem" Faculty ... which is the Grey Poupon (tm Kraft/Heinz) way of saying the corporation administrators have turned their own HR into a "Kelly Girl" office to commoditize their complement, the schools teachers.
I think what they are trying to say that the people doing the teaching in the university are not research professors and that there is some kind of classism involved. I don't know about tenured administrators though, I don't think admins get tenure but maybe if you count Deans and Chancellors who might be faculty.
When the number of people you work with becomes the proxy you are rewarded on, the organization grows. The alternative is for management to understand the work ICs are doing, but everyone is too busy meeting with each other for that to happen.
I wonder when they will exceed one staff member per student?!
Although: “The total number of instructional staff teaching the 5,964 undergraduate students at Yale University is 1,915 . When this is adjusted to account for those with part-time status, the result is the "full-time equivalent" (FTE) count. Using the FTE count for students and staff results in a "student to instructor" ratio of 6 to 1 which places Yale University among the best concerning instructional attention.” - from another site.
I always find the US system shocking, even just up north in Canada. UBC has comparable numbers of faculty + administrative staff, and services ~4x the undergrad population. UofT has ~50% more faculty and staff, and handles close seventy thousand undergrads!
> I always find the US system shocking, even just up north in Canada. UBC has comparable numbers of faculty + administrative staff, and services ~4x the undergrad population. UofT has ~50% more faculty and staff, and handles close seventy thousand undergrads!
While your overall point is well taken, UBC is not a comparable institution to Yale. UBC has an acceptance rate of around 50%, Yale has an acceptance rate of around 5%. UBC has an endowment of around $2 billion, Yale has an endowment of around $40 billion. These are order of magnitude differences. We can debate whether Yale should have that level of selectivity or endowment, but it's to be expected that a way more selective school with way more resources will spend more on human resources per student.
If you want to make a comparison, it would make more sense to compare something like a selective large state university in the United States to UBC, not Yale.
Keep in mind that the United States has a population 10x greater than Canada, including >3,000 colleges and universities. So there is room here in the market for both highly selective institutions and not selective institutions. It's not like somebody not getting into Yale means they can't go to college.
Wouldn’t one teacher per student be the best teaching experience you could get? As that would also require some support staff I could see having more staff members than students possibly being a benefit
