If you actually go to the source behind that figure (http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/) and scroll down, you'll find that it actually doesn't refer to the number of administrators--far from it--but rather just the total number of non-academic (i.e., not faculty) staff. Indeed, that figure includes service and maintenance staff, clerical workers, and employees of SLAC, in addition to "managerial and professional" staff, which includes research technicians, of which there are surely hundreds in the SOM alone, librarians, biostatisticians, accountants, lawyers, engineers, grants specialists, programmers, and yes, of course, administrators, among many other titles, but it's just downright wrong to say that Stanford has 12,508 administrators.
At my university the graduate students (in the engineering college, at least) were frequently research assistants. In that case you would probably be counted as an employee of the university.
That data point could change the student-employee ratio from 1:1 to 2:1
I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growth in university administration? Maybe, but I would like to think that despite contributing to the "Admin" headcount you despise I am doing valuable work facilitating scientific research.
Universities have two roles: Teaching and Research. You are welcome to your own thoughts about whether or not they should be grouped together the way they are, but that is the current situation, and it turns out that Stanford is a big research university.
> That sounds like an interesting and varied role.
It is, and it doesn't get as much formal recognition in the research world. Some folks are trying to change this [0], but unfortunately for the moment research software engineers often end up more of a happy accident than a deliberate decision on the part of labs. Part of this is due to weirdness in how funding is allocated for research positions at universities- instead of research programmers being funded through operating expenses like a secretary, administrator or many (but not all) librarians, most lab positions are dependent upon soft money (i.e., grants) that could potentially evaporate unexpectedly. I had a friend at ${BAY_AREA_UNIVERSITY} who almost had this happen to him recently, but fortunately his PI got another grant so he didn't need to get furloughed/laid off. When I was living in Ithaca, I noticed a similar trend of non-faculty taking sabbaticals due to funding issues and then returning 6 months to a year or so later in a different department [1]. That sort of instability in employment is part of what scared me into moving to a major metropolitan area- I still work for a university, but I know I have options (although I'm currently not funded by soft money- last job was though).
I love my job. Most of the projects are medium sized ones with 100-200 hours of programming involved, so I get to see a good variety. Splitting my time between C, Java Script, MATLAB, Python, Swift, PHP and R means that I am probably not an expert in any of them, but I we have a solid team of general purpose programmers who can handle almost anything the labs send our way.
My only complaint would be that the pay is a little on the low side. Otherwise the work and the work environment are both excellent.
This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford.
They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0]
But what part of that 77% represent the students receiving free tuition based on the 125k family income? I would think that 77% is also lumping students who a) have a free ride from scholarships, academic and/or sports. b) have the financial means to pay their way through.
WTF. My alma mater (Dresden University of Technology) has 6000 academic staff and 2500 administrative staff for 35000 students, which sort of matches the expectation that I had before checking.
How much does a university do outside of giving classes to students? Don't they also operate a huge research endeavour, patent administration, and operate numerous businesses all at once?
universities duplicate many services offered by businesses (and even the government, to an extent) in the surrounding area. i certainly found this convenient as a student, but i always found it a bit silly. wouldn't it be more efficient to just offer an expansive shuttle service to take the students to important places? you could even give stipends to the poorest students. institutions tend to be pretty wasteful when they implement a ton of different out of band stuff in house.
What kind of services are extraneous? The problem is that once a campus gets big enough (a few thousand people or more at a residential university), it is the neighborhood, so you have to either provide the community services, or outsource to vendors to provide services on campus. And handing out monopolies to vendors is a bad idea.
Your librarians are administrative staff. Your research assistants are administrative staff. The people who do inventory are administrative staff. The people who do purchases are administrative staff. The people who work in the cafeteria are administrative staff. The people who install, maintain, and fix the computers used by all of the people in the list above are administrative staff. The people who fix a broken door are administrative staff. The people who are managing student housing are administrative staff. On-site campus security that busts freshmen parties are administrative staff.
Pretty much everyone who is drawing a salary, and is not a lecturing professor is administrative staff. If your university consists of a dozen lecture halls, and a storage closet, you don't need any administrative staff. The more facilities and services you have, the more administrative staff you will have. Stanford probably has a lot more facilities then your university did.
If you just want to lecture to people, education can be incredibly cheap. If you want to lecture to people, and have them use expensive lab equipment, and have them live on campus, and have hundreds of people, with teams of assistants doing research... It's going to be expensive.
I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.
FWIW that can be reasonable depending on the size of the district. Ours has ~4k+ non-admin employees and 15+ physical plants. That's:
* a large enough headcount that you need an HR department,
* a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants,
* a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space),
* a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff,
* a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.),
* a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools,
* a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities),
* and several other functions.
For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases.
FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.
This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.
Also, pay attention to what the bill/referendum is for. Any competent district will have a website explaining to the public what the funds are going to be used for.
In particular, be careful about voting against bond issues that are placed on the ballot within one or two years of the maturation date for a similarly sized bond. Because those are basically a continuation of the status quo, and voting them down can mean costly deferred maintenance and/or dumb financial trade-offs.
Real example: firing a whole bunch of people this year to pay for asbestos removal in cash money (because the bond issue wasn't passed and this NEEDS to be done in order to use the building), and then re-hiring a bunch of people the next year. Because the bond issue failed and the bond issue is literally the only legal way to amortize the cost of the asbestos removal. So, I guess no amortization, we pay upfront and fire a bunch folks for a year in order to afford it. (BTW, we all know from the software industry what happens when you lay off a bunch of people -- you lose your best folks and it becomes difficult to recruit good people).
Think of it like this: school districts in many states literally can't amortize their capital costs without coming to you with a ballot initiative. By voting "no" carte blanc, you're basically saying "I carte blanc disapprove of my local school district using amortization". Which is pretty unreasonable.
Rightfully so. The school district I worked at was incredibly wasteful both staff and resource wise. Seniority, lack of being able to dismiss bad teachers and a slew of other nuecenses makes education a prime target for huge waste of tax dollars. When I confirmed just how little most administrators did for the benefit of the kids, it was difficult not to feel guilty for wasting public tax money. Knowing what I do know, I will never look the same way at the education system.
Me too. A public school district I worked at had an entire building to administration. Every person had their own office except HR people. The running joke among a few of us was that we don't have a clue why most of their jobs existed. On that note - it was also the time I read about wasted time at work. The article stated that most people work only 1-2 hours per day and the rest is just filler time with very little productivity. I started tracking my working time to see if it were true and sure enough, most of the day I did nothing other than sit around pretending to be busy. I then made it my mission to observe administrative staff (I worked in IT so I was able to do this) and confirmed that most of them did nothing as well. It was many years later when I started freelancing and billing by the hour that I realized just how few hours people work. I'd work 6 hours a day as a freelancer and I'd be totally exhausted and often thought about the easy days in IT. I think most people greatly overestimate their jobs importance.
Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.
I was a "research assistant" for several years and my senior colleagues were "staff scientists". I think you'll need some evidence to support the claim that research assistants are being considered administrators because I really doubt that.
Most universities only distinguish between "academic" positions and "staff" positions.
At most universities, "Academic" positions are something rather specific: usually only the faculty proper, Ph.D.-holding researchers, and maybe a few other student-facing roles (e.g., librarians).
Here is my quick two-part litmus test that's probably pretty accurate for most universities. Assuming you don't know for certain that you are in the "academic" or "staff" bucket, consider these two questions:
0. Are you a Ph.D. student with some funny title like "research assistant"? You are a student. You are not "staff". You are not "academic". You are a student.
1. Do you hold a Ph.D. AND listed as a co-PI on grants? If yes, you're most likely in an "academic" role. If not, you're most likely in a "staff" role (unless you're working with someone who has a shitload of clout).
What happens often in reporting is that "academic" and "staff" numbers are reported, and we assume "staff = administrative".
See the Stanford numbers, for example. Notice how there's no category for "non-administrative non-academic staff". You're either a member of the "academic" group or you're an "other", and the "other" group is not broken out into "administrative" and "not administrative".
Hopefully, this helps. It's all rather confusing and political and, in many cases, institution-specific :)
shrug I was just responding to the GP with 10 'academic staff' and 70 'administrative staff'. It's not like every professor has 7 secretaries there. Every university divides things differently. I was just pointing out that the 10/70 is not what it looks like at first, or rather, what some people here seen to think. (at least, I think - I'm not GP, maybe they actually do have 7 secretaries each).
"If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc."
Well yeah. Professors are like business unit leaders/managers, acquiring funding for research and setting the main outline of what to do. Then the others (usually, although not always, designated 'administrative staff', or grad students/post docs) execute the work. I'm not sure I would call them 'real workers', that implies that others (i.e., managers) don't do 'real work'. I mean I understand what you say - you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
>>you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
The thing is its always easy to see who 'produces something'. When you start talking about 'creating the circumstances', you trigger of a chain of helpers, who help helpers, who ... and so on. Until you arrive at a point where there is a whole hierarchy of people sitting just to approve things, keep records and pass memos.
Well yeah, sure. That's how it works when scaling any organization. I'm not sure what I'm arguing here; I know for a fact that most universities have too much admin staff, but it's not like they all sit around all day writing reports to each other (at least not most of them). Students nowadays expect a mental health program, housing- and career advisers, clubs and events, they want to see the school in the newspapers, they want to be offered international exchanges and internships. All very understandable, but someone needs to make all that happen. Couple that with the fact that universities cannot be 'efficient' in the sense that they get as much done as possible for as little money as possible (because that's just not in the DNA of universities), and you get the current situation.
It’s not about “who’s doing the real work” it’s a question of what type of work you are doing. A facilities administrator (fancy title for handyman) will have a much more hands-on part in bringing in new research equipment and setting it up. But it’s still the research staff who ordered it and will plan the experiments that get published in nature.
That depends on how you define 'admins', doesn't it. When you have two classes, 'academic' and 'admin', and only professors are 'academic' - well then everybody else is 'admin'. It may sound weird and yes it's outside of the normal usage of 'admin', but in universities it's not uncommon to have this sort of division. It's driven by two things: first the historical context where you had lots of 'academics' who were all professors and had actual secretaries, and very few 'overhead' people like those managing buildings and activities etc (whereas now that's very different, because of the different role of universities); and secondly by the recent trend of keeping the number of 'academics' low because they can't be fired and are expensive. But you still need to hire people, and if they're not 'academics', they're 'admins', even if they don't do what is in common usage seen as 'administrative work'.
I'm always extremely skeptical of this. Fundraising departments tend to claim responsibility for all but the very largest donations when in reality a lot of that money would've come to the school no matter what.
Will a computer fix a broken door? Wash out glassware? Cook 5,000 meals every lunch hour? Knock on a dorm door, when there's a 3 am party going on? Trim the hedges? Roll the AV projector out to the lecture hall that needs it? Ticket someone for parking without a permit? Wash the windows?
Or would you prefer tenured professors doing all that work, instead of teaching, or research?
Well, I think custodians fix broken doors, kitchen staff clean the dishwasher and cook meals, RAs (who are normally students as well) knock on the doors, landscapers trim the hedges, and AV techs roll out the projectors.
If that's what "administrators" means, then fair enough - but my understanding of the title "administrator" is people who organize the curriculum, schedule staff, students and classrooms, maintain the website, conduct student intake, that kind of thing. And those are the jobs that I would expect to be streamlined via computers.
How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs!
Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go?
Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there.
The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away.
I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".
The link between doing useful work and being paid for it is broken in these cases, just noone openly admits it. So why not make it explicit and stop requiring people to pretend to work to get paid?
That we should! Let's hear some concrete implementation ideas as to how we can make it work without just making swathes of people redundant without something else in place (and that can't be swept away by party politics 4 years down the line).
There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!".
A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.
Well, the obvious solution is to not do it all at once, and instead do it over time.
The US is currently at record low unemployment rates, for the last couple decades, so if we start doing these things now, then unemployment will go up by only a couple percent.
And over time those unemployed people will get different jobs. As that's what happens today when people lose their job.
It's more a wealth transfer mechanism from younger people to take out loans to fund these inefficiences. And those loans are gauranteed against a person's lifetime earnings since they cannot be removed via bankruptcy.
Remove the financial incentives for inefficient work and you will get 10,000 ways to make universities more efficient.
Nobody is owed employment. Nobody is owed financial stability. If they have real, useful skills, get a job somewhere else, if not, they can go back to school. It will have just gotten a little bit cheaper.
How nice, to leave students massively in debt so that the university can run a private welfare state for its paper pushers. All while the taxpayer is picking up a good portion of the tab.
The crux of my argument isn't that it's ideal or even acceptable, but these staff provide services for the university and in the majority of cases, directly to the students - the university would struggle to fulfil the demands placed on it without 1) radical transformation of hundreds of services (and being a part of wider community, ensuring that community is still sustainable), 2) employing more people.
Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc...
Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment.
Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too!
But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.
It has nothing to do with automation. You could just eliminate half of the administrative workforce at these universities overnight and the important parts would keep running just fine.
For example, my university had a very extensive dining system, all within a block of town, which was full of restaurants. The dining halls were more expensive than the restaurants. But everyone had to buy a super-expensive meal plan, to prop up this ridiculous side-business of the university.
Really? Not being condescending, but have you worked internally at a university?
You'd probably be right up to about 80%. Then all of the edge cases come in and it falls down, having a real impact on students. If you want to operate a university on the Pareto Principle, then fair enough, but there's a whole lot that goes on that requires tweaks and human consideration which breaks fundamental systems, usually when students need them the most.
I’m curious why you think my university needed to force students into a meal plan and have a massive workforce to run the dining halls, when the private sector could feed students better food for less.
Or why did the university need a whole administrative department to cater to the “needs” of every kind of minority you can think of (one department per kind of minority)?
Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption.
12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff.
EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine.
That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments.
And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).
Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category, they are Administration.
Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.
"Academic staff: 2,219
Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC
Students: 16,430"
Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University