
The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities - Fede_V
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/01/booming-university-administrations/
======
beloch
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.

~~~
dthal
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?

~~~
siyer
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.

------
danieltillett
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.

~~~
gamblor956
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.

~~~
calibraxis
Or maybe you have no idea. Consider how absurd it's gotten
([http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-
decl...](http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-
rate-of-profit)):

 _" 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."_

~~~
gamblor956
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.

~~~
tensor
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.

~~~
fluidcruft
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.

~~~
tensor
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.

~~~
fluidcruft
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.

~~~
niels_olson
I can tell you I have seen new directors whose not-so-qualified spouses
magically find jobs in other departments. Nepotism, pure and simple.

~~~
fluidcruft
That's a different topic and is frankly even worse in the private sector.

~~~
niels_olson
Not really. Gotta keep expanding the admin jobs for the spouses.

------
baldfat
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

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
narrator
This sounds like more evidence the new and growing phenomenon of "bullshit
jobs" [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/) .

~~~
rhino369
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.

~~~
ghaff
No they're not. Parkinson' Law
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_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.

~~~
spiritplumber
One of the few management books that are still current after fifty years.

~~~
ghaff
And the most fun to read of the bunch I'm sure.

------
benbreen
[http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=1760...](http://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=176001479&Title=Course%20Mentor%2C%20Political%20Science)

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.

------
alexggordon
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.

~~~
1971genocide
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.

------
unabridged
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.

~~~
cowsandmilk
not to mention the benefits (e.g. retirement and insurance) and longer term
employment rather than single semester contracts.

------
apdinin
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.

------
shiven
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.

------
programminggeek
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.

------
perfunctory
[http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf](http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf)

------
winsich
In other industries administrative bloat gets disintermediated. That's been
hard in academia. It might not be forever.

------
spiritplumber
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.

~~~
jacalata
Oh hey, it's that sociopath dude again.

~~~
spiritplumber
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?

~~~
jacalata
Walked away? I don't think I'm the slightest bit interested in ever
collaborating with you on anything, sorry.

~~~
spiritplumber
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?

