"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...
School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).
You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.
"Methodology & Definitions
Staff Headcount
Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."
In the US, many Medical schools are schools only in the technical definition of schools. In reality they are more like research and medical centers that also do a bit of teaching on the side. Staff to students ratio could easily be in excess of 10:1
A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school revenue and budget. I remember raising my hand and asking the Dean if tuition was so little, why not just make it free. He gave me a death stare and just danced around the question.
The post you responded to was about how medical schools are “schools” in name only. You may be correct that administrators are useless, but your kid’s experience, assuming they are in medical school is not really evidence because they don’t see more than a sliver of what the school does (and needs to do, by law).
In this case, you've been refuted by an explanation that the growth is almost entirely at the school of medicine, and most of that increase has been in staff that are providing care. And you're continuing to advance the point anyways.
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
Hospitals attached to universities aren't in general "tacked on" but are a part of the educational environment. They exist not only to serve patients but to educate students.
No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.
Total staff numbers are only marginally useful without further breakdown, as that article points out.
A family member works for an eatery at a large university. Technically they are employees (staff) of the university, but pretty much in name only. They work for a business unit which receives no financial support from the university. They are profitable on their own and if they aren’t, they would close down. They are provided benefits via the university, but it is part of their budget.
Including them in the count relative to students is about as useful as including the employees of the (independent) Starbucks on campus.
(It’s not Stanford, so I can’t speak to that specific institution)
What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.
Externally funded research also come with many compliance, reporting, and other requirements [1]. Administrative staff are the ones who handle these responsibilities. If funding agencies want fewer administrators, require less oversight.
> Stanford also has unique characteristics that create high staff headcount, former Provost Persis Drell told the Faculty Senate during a May 2023 meeting: Unlike other institutions, Stanford requires more staff to maintain Stanford Research Park, a large housing portfolio and other facilities.
from one of the sources [0] that paragraph linked to:
> It’s also important to understand how Stanford defines terms used in headcount growth since those definitions vary widely among research universities, Drell noted. For example, clinician educators, which have grown significantly in number, are categorized as “staff” at Stanford, while at other universities they are often counted as “faculty.” In addition, and in contrast to many other institutions, Stanford has chosen to focus more on hiring staff in many areas rather than using outside contractors whose employees would not count as Stanford staff.
and from [1] also linked in the above paragraph:
> We recognize that stable, affordable housing is critical for student success. Stanford guarantees housing for undergraduates for all four years and provides housing for over 70% of graduate students. We also provide as much as three times more student housing than large universities across California in similarly constrained housing markets.
given the context, it seems perfectly reasonable that Stanford would have more "staff" employees than the University of Southwestern North Dakota, even normalized for different numbers of student enrollment.
It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environmental health and safety, IT support, etc etc.
A more useful comparison would divide staff into "supported by tuition" (should be related to student count) and "supported by external grants and clinical income".
This idea that costs have increased because of administrative staff expansion is a popular one, but one that ignores what R1 universities spend money on, and where that money comes from. (Ironically, I suspect that the university may be spending more money on research, because of limits on indirect costs.)
> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our
> collective knowledge together with its students.
> That’s it.
Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.
Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.
No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.
You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.
Is it? I disagree. The university I went to has a mission to “conduct research, provide education, and engage with the community to improve the lives of people and the environment”. MIT’s is to “educate students and advance knowledge in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship”.
It’s not a problem. You just have a narrow view of what you think our higher ed institutions should be.
> This has had several consequences for the governance of universities: 1) the role of shared governance has receded in importance in the day-to-day governance of universities; 2) the balance of power and authority has shifted toward administrators; and 3) faculty have been subjected to a series of performance measures that disproportionately values productivity over shared governance participation.
Publish-or-perish and shoddy research is a direct result of this shift in the mission, as measurements became all but expected.
By the time I entered uni the 1990s, things were shifting negatively in higher institutions.
I've worked for both big R1 Universities as well as top-tier independent research institutes. I ran computing facilities that supported bioinformatics facilities, and spent my day interacting with both research leaders (PIs/faculty) and administration.
I don't believe point #1 - I have been involved in shared governance bodies as a student and staff, and at least where I've spent time, these bodies are strong.
For point #2, I never saw any shift of authority to administrators. In fact, I left academia because I was given a mission to centralize computing resources to ensure we're responsible stewards of the data we held. Instead, PIs would end-run around shared computing facilities, spending their own grant money on high end workstations, USB drives. I left and went into big tech because I was tired of fighting with essentially 50-100 small fiefdoms. The administrators were powerless, and if they tried to force the PIs to submit, they PIs would simply go someplace else.
For #3, while "impact factor" took on a larger role, I did not see a problematic shift in how we did science. Everyone was given adequate resources to participate in governance. If anything, the outsized influence individual PIs had over how they did their research made it more difficult to ensure data was stored safely, analyses were reproducible, and so on. That, to me, is a greater risk than the fear that administration was telling researchers what to research.
There are problems with higher ed in the US, but I don't understand how to equate a perceived shift away from "shared governance" with deep fundamental issues in the mission of our higher ed system. We need both a focus on educating young people (need to have fresh minds and bodies to keep the research machine churning) as well as basic AND cutting edge research to keep progress moving forward.
For #2, are you saying the administration doesn’t hold the purse strings?
Why the resistance to the top-down approach?
Nobody resists if it means more resources; and faster procurement of resources.
Instead it seems researchers are forced to navigate politics and raise funding.
Or do you mean that each department has its own IT department and it’s resisting consolidation?
For #3: It’s not about resources but about how “impact factor” is measured, and whether it’s useful a useful metric.
Often, for example little attention is given to confirmation of a suspected dead-end. That still requires in-depth knowledge of the subject, is still research, and advances knowledge.
For #2, yes - the administration doesn't hold the purse strings. Each PI gets their own grants, and thus can control how much of the money is spent, barring overhead. I had to make a value proposition for the PIs to explain to them why they couldn't afford NOT to modernize their data storage. Unfortunately, it's cheaper to go to Staples and buy a USB drive than it is to pay for properly archived storage.
The resistance to the top down approach was, to me, misunderstanding the risks of storing their data outside of a safe place, and a fear of losing control of their data.
The last institute I worked at was focused on basic biomedical research - dead ends were what we chased all day!
This is also the fallacy of looking at one metric.
Do staff include productive researchers producing net positive incoming?
Other comments mention the medical school. Are these staff providing patient care (and billing insurance)?
University staff aren’t necessarily just your traditional educators. A whole lot of productive stuff (both for the university and everyone else) can potentially benefit from “staff.”
Universities run small cities. That staff number includes the people who mow the lawn, cook food, clean dorms, work security, maintain their networks, etc the list is massive.
This seems like a low-value comment without some data. For example, can you identify the specific jobs which you consider resort-like and how much of the growth they contribute to?
Without knowing more about the numbers, the only one I have an issue with is the number of students. These universities should be doing everything they can to increase enrollment and let in more students.
I went to a smaller school in my city, but at the time most everyone I know who applied got it. I would not get it today, and people end up wait listed, etc... IMO, that is the failing of the US higher education system. Next is cost to the student.
Didn't those already exist before? Is there lot more of that type of work? Or shouldn't it be done more efficiently now? Also aren't those increasingly out-sourced so shouldn't count in that stat?
I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
Universities try to hire grad students as TAs to help them out, but sometimes hire outsiders as TAs. It could be because the undergrad major has lots of students but the corresponding graduate major has few.
Obviously this varies from university to university and I know nothing about Cornell.
>I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
virtually every sector of the economy has 'excess staff;' it is not confined to higher ed. It's the obvious conclusion of decades of automation not being realized as less working hours, but in the dilution of responsibilities into more complicated and larger corporate apparatuses. Some of them are called "bullshit jobs" some of them are given credibility, while being utterly purposeless ultimately. This is largely ignored as a general trend because it is usually contextualized to a narrative within each company (as is the case here) rather than seen as a larger phenomenon.
This is the inevitable conclusion of unprecedented concentration of capital, which is not new but only being revealed during a time of seemingly limitless automation potential.
We might need to know the FTE values to understand what this means. Are staff positions full-time FTE? Are faculty positions full-time, tenure positions? Have they added part-time staff, adjunct faculty, etc.?
The other insane thing is 10 students to one teacher? I don't understand that because when I went to SJSU, I was almost always in a class with 60+. For CS, it was around 30 people in the room.
So you're saying the ratio has improved? An education improving their ratio of faculty to students seems like a good thing.
Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?
Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.
Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?
Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?
It could also just mean they do more research and less education. But hey, let's quickly jump to conclusions, that seems to be a popular hobby nowadays.
Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.
Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.
Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.
"Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other."
I want what you're smoking because that might be one of the biggest fabrications I've heard in a long time.
lol I have never worked as hard as when I worked for an R1 university. My big tech job is way more like a resort vacation, complete with snacks and drinks.
I found 2. One is an ongoing lawsuit and the other seems mostly like stupidity because people keep falling for the stupid AI grift. I can barely trust AI to produce basic boilerplate and they are trying to verify novel research with it?
In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff.
In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff.
In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff
The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1
This is insane.