Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.
It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?
If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.
It's at least as much related to government subsidies and financial programs that exist as band-aids over the accreditation crises in the American labor market, a result of elite overproduction.
> If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years.
A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it.
But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product.
We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment.
The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.
If the money was to go somewhere, any sane institution would be pouring it into either facilities or the school's endowment. Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away. Trustees need to put their foot on the neck of this beast before it grows even more.
> Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away.
True, but this is also mostly true of the facilities and the endowment.
Don't imagine the dean thinking "I need to spend all my revenue or something terrible will happen" and choosing compliance officers as the right way to accomplish that goal.
Imagine the dean thinking "hey, revenue is higher than ever" and a bunch of people asking him for funding and mostly getting it because the money was there. Growth in compliance officers occurred because the funding was available, not because anyone other than the compliance officers thought it was a good idea.
If you leave food around in your kitchen, you will get insects. If you leave sugar water or bread around, you'll get mold. And if you leave money around an organization, you'll get administrators. You'll get those things regardless of whether you want them.
> Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away.
Aa member of a university faculty, this line is something routinely parroted here on HN that I must disagree with.
Yes there are many layers to the bureaucracy at any University. But in many cases those layers are vital to the functioning of the system and make my function as a professor easier.
For example, we run a tutoring office, which requires administrators. But this office reduces the need for TAs and office hours, which means more students get competent help, and I have more time for research. Far from saving anything, getting rid of this office would be an act of flushing money away.
Other examples abound. The research office helps me write grants which bring in money. They cost dollars to run but also bring in a lot of money.
The IT office is a huge bureaucracy, but I doubt anyone here on HN would be advocating the elimination of IT on campus, because everyone here understands why they are there and how they help the community. Yes they cost money, but getting rid of them would make everything way worse.
Unfortunately, because HN isn’t an education forum, not many here have experience with academia beyond being a student at some point. Therefore, the utility and efficacy of an office like Student Support Services is discounted if the individual never had to rely on the office. The critical role they play on campus isn’t recognized, and their elimination is advocated in the name of cost savings.
Sometimes these offices exist to fortify failing city infrastructure. My university runs a bus service, a police department, and a health clinic. These things cost a lot of money, but they exist to keep students safe and healthy. Parents send their students to us with the expectation that we can do this, and so relying on city services that are underfunded and oversubscribed doesn’t work. They won’t appreciate a reduction in tuition if we tell them the savings came from eliminating EMS services.
All this is to say that “it’s the administrative bureaucracy!” is not the end of the story. It’s far more complex, and the discussion here on HN is typically very shallow and mostly wrong on this front.
It is entirely possible that these two things are not related at all, and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result so no, that isn't the conclusion to draw.
> It is entirely possible that these two things are not related at all
Well, no, it actually isn't possible that revenue and expenditures aren't related at all.
> and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result
Sure, but that would be a coincidence with no explanatory power, and prices would have risen by the same amount anyway. You should always assume that prices are in equilibrium unless you can explain why, in the immediate term, they are out of it.
> The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.
The fine article directly refutes this assertion: "Universities say that a boom in regulations under Barack Obama’s administration increased the need to hire more bureaucrats of every kind. But one study found that for every dollar spent to comply with government rules, voluntary spending on bureaucracy totalled $2 at public universities and $3 at private ones."
I don't really see why schools should need most of their bureaucrats personally. I know a few people who work in admin at schools and it seems their jobs mostly revolve around writing a few emails a day. A school need some groundskeepers sure, a small IT department, a secretary for a department probably, and a small general admissions / bursars / financial aid department. I would warrant all other departments could be cut as they are not within the primary scope of teaching.
They need more bureaucrats because they’ve grown dramatically in scope. Schools used to be primarily about education. Now they’ve become Club Ed. A 4-year vacation paid for with unsecured loans. Full of gyms and climbing walls and aquatics complexes, libraries and recreation centers and football stadiums.
Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs.
This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.
But Universities have always had that kind of stuff. At the uni I went to, the sports facilities, fields, pools, gyms, tennis courts etc. are all run by a non-profit society that had been operating for more than a century. All the food outlets were owned and run by the Union (although more are being outsourced with chain franchises appearing now), not the University itself.
The corporate bureaucracy was growing, but it didn’t have much to do with those student services or facilities because that was all separate.
This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp.
This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.
I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement.
I was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.
> It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more.
Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach?
Astronaut 2: Never has been.
Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.
This is the kind of rigid formalism that obscures accurate analysis of universities as economic entities responding rationally to the infinite money spigot that the government has inserted into them. Just because their formal tax status says one thing does not mean that it's not better to analyze them as businesses just like any other.
This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically.
Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places.
(And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)
So the more income, from student tuition and higher enrollment numbers, that a university has then it just hires more bureaucrats instead of... more faculty to teach more students?
It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?