
The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio - cup
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-21/the-troubling-dean-to-professor-ratio?
======
jerf
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?

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".

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.

~~~
joonix
They're honestly not doing much at all. These are quite cushy positions. Work
usually gets sloshed around and offloaded onto staff who make much less but
work much more.

For example, at my public law school (1,000 students), there was the dean (who
many suspected had an alcohol problem and appeared drunk at commencement) who
makes $330,000 per year. His job is to just go around the country/world
selling the school to "recruit" (we don't actually need more faculty) in order
to boost our "prestige" so we can climb up in the almighty US News rankings.
He doesn't engage with faculty or students at all.

Then below him is another Dean, who is a prick. He makes something like
$280,000 and also doesn't do much at all. He is also a "recruiter." At least
he answers emails when you have a question.

Then there are other Deans, like Dean of "Student Affairs." She makes
$130,000. Mind you this is just for a law school of 1,000 students situated on
a larger university campus that will have its own Dean of Student Affairs as
well. I have no idea what she does. She does get dressed up every day in
fashionable clothes and walk around the building chatting up people. That's
all I ever saw her do.

Below that is the "Director of Student Services" or something like that. This
guy works his ass off, has a mediocre basement office, but literally runs the
school. What does he earn? $80,000. Anytime anyone had a question, they had to
go to him. After exams, he gets a pile of USB keys, one for each exam. Takes
each grade for each class and logs it, curves the grades, reports them, etc.

It's all a big scam. A big one. Tuition at this school has risen every year --
they want to build a new building (Why does a law school need a fancy
building? All you need is a room and a professor). They think it will boost
their "ranking." Nevermind that "ranking" doesn't do anything for the local
job market, which is still stagnant, and every year new graduates enter it
looking for work to pay their $150,000 in loans (at 8% interest, non-
dischargeable).

This school isn't even that bad compared to the other law schools out there,
namely the private ones. Even a top school like Columbia states on its own
site that students will spend $250,000 for their law degree (this includes a
conservative housing budget).

The only thing more mind blowing than the scam itself is that we all sit
around and don't seem to care as these people eat our young alive. In fact,
they worship these institutions. It's their "alma mater," after all, it's like
family, isn't it? Some even DONATE to them! The federal government enables the
scam by flooding the industry with easily obtained credit, with no
restrictions on tuition charged, and even letting for-profit "schools" get the
money if they want.

This is a racket that is in big need of disruption. Where does it start?
Perception. Once we stop perceiving these degrees as meaning anything, once we
stop valuing prestigious names as absolutely required, and look more at
individuals themselves when hiring, the racket will die.

~~~
tim_moon
It is in need of disruption, and it's a wicked problem. There's no simple
solution and no easy starting point. Perception is definitely something that
needs to change, but unfortunately behavior is much harder to change.

Another aspect of the problem is tenure. It is (extremely) difficult to fire a
tenured professor (or admin for that matter). When things get tough
universities have a hard time downsizing if necessary.

A resulting, and somewhat funny, problem is what universities tend to do with
tenured professors who just aren't good at what they do anymore. What do you
do when a professor with tenure isn't good at teaching or research? You
promote them.

~~~
muzz
Private universities exist.

If public universities were mismanaged and inefficient, we would see private
ones providing a better product at a lower cost.

~~~
frankydp
I would agree with this statement, but the prestige situation is a self
ensured stagnation. You do see big private competitors such as Phoenix, but in
order to compete they lose out in the prestige competition.

I think the only real disruptive players in the business timelines that
Universities operate in are the technical school, but they have been around
long enough to play the prestige game also.

Phoenix for example will need to operate for 100 years to even begin to sit at
the table with the nostalgia crew.

~~~
mayneack
Phoenix is probably does more harm than good to the for-profit or at least
disruptive private college community. Their targeting of federal subsidies
that often account for ~90% of their income and the stories of them doing
things that basically trick low income people into spending more money than
they will get from the degree give everyone a bad impression. Even if these
stories are all exaggerated (which I have no reason to believe they are), they
aren't entirely false and it makes people (reasonably) dubious of other for-
profit schools. Someone should have made an elite for-profit school first that
then expanded to what Phoenix could be.

It's like google and other companies with driver-less cars. Sure, their cars
might be safer than drivers statistically, but if you get a few high profile
accidents that a driver could have stopped, they will probably get swamped in
bad PR and get delayed many years. Luckily, this hasn't happened.

random example from google: [http://www.post-
gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/vet...](http://www.post-
gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/veterans-fight-back-unscrupulous-for-
profit-colleges-are-bilking-them-of-their-gi-benefits-661697/)

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teeray
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.

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...

~~~
Danieru
Sounds like my university (University of Calgary). The library is nice but
packed. For a period they even had to reopen the old library for extra study
space. Next victim appears to be Machall which is our student
centre/cafeteria. The university is even planning to sell off unbuilt land for
development. All while we have some classrooms with painful seating!

On the plus side our tuition is only ~7k. In that regard I have no right to
complain compared to many of the USA universities.

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aidenn0
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.

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.

~~~
ams6110
It will be interesting to see what a conservative guy like Mitch Daniels does
as president. As an ag and engineering school I'd guess Purdue is not as
uniformly liberal as some universities, but he certainly won't get a
completely welcoming reception.

~~~
aidenn0
When I was there at least, it was slightly right of mainstream US, and _way_
right of the typical University.

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gaoshan
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.

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.

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.

~~~
keithpeter
Could this be perceived value of skills? Admins/managers can work outside the
education sector and so a wider market governs rates?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I've never understood what it is that university administrators can do outside
the academic sector. As far as I can tell, they're basically the most useless
bureaucrats on Earth.

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jacques_chester
Disclaimer: I'm on the "dean" side of the ledger as a contractor for an
Australian university.

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:

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/19/the-university-
coalface-...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/19/the-university-coalface-
gets-28-cents-in-the-dollar/)

He went on to discuss reform options and possibilities:

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/21/university-reform-
part-i...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/21/university-reform-part-i-what-
are-the-options/)

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/23/university-reforms-
part-...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/23/university-reforms-part-ii-the-
barriers/)

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/26/university-reform-
part-i...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/11/26/university-reform-part-iii-so-
what-can-be-done/)

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Symmetry
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.

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.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease>

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kylebgorman
I have no idea why they're using "average full professor salary" as a proxy
for comparison, since full professors are a tiny minority of faculty.

~~~
ajays
Presumably because Deans are about the same level as full professors? I doubt
that a fresh PhD would be appointed a dean anywhere.

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sarah2079
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?

~~~
aidenn0
A lot of the really high up positions are heavily involved in fundraising, and
the argument there is that "If person X can increase our endowment by just 1%
more than person Y, it justifies the huge salary"

~~~
sarah2079
Ah, the football coach argument.

~~~
aidenn0
Nah, the football coach argument is much easier: There is lots of money in
college football, and nearly all of it is banned from going to the players.
Therefore there are nearly unlimited funds for coaches.

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mtgx
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.

~~~
muzz
> And they say education needs more money. Not when so much of it goes to
> waste like this, it doesn't

What numbers are you using when making that statement? Do you think that the
additional cost of administrators is anywhere close to the amount in reduced
funding from the state?

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enh
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.

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.

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.

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mmvvaa
I see this as a direct boost of confidence to Khanacademy, MITX, and the
likes.

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001sky
_The bottom line: From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10
times faster than they added tenured faculty._

\-- Makes sense.

Non-profit=The profits go out the door in "costs"

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maked00
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.

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maked00
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.

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evoxed
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:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13vel5/im_karen_gianni...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13vel5/im_karen_giannino_senior_associate_dean_of/)

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emmelaich
Have a read of Daniel Bernstein's travails at UIC.

<http://cr.yp.to/uic.html>

It's excruciatingly entertaining.

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cafard
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.

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cafard
And let me add that there were probably too many deans 40 years ago.

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Mordor
Sounds like a bubble.

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nsp


