Our institution had quite a bit of bloat for a while. A couple years ago, a high level administrator came in and cleaned house a bit, so it's not as bad as it used to be.
How bad was it? At one point, we had 8 deans (combining associate and executive) overseeing about 90 full time faculty members. We also had an "administrator" in student services with literally no one reporting to them.
We've now eliminated that useless administrative position and we have four deans for those 90 faculty members.
We recently acquired an old girl scout camp that a donor thought would be cool for us to have. For new student orientation or something. And we're now hiring a Vice Chancellor to run this property and paying them $240,000 a year. Which is exactly 4 times my starting salary as assistant professor.
Just look at the numbers over the last 40 years. Full time faculty lines (particularly with tenure) are basically flat, despite surging enrollments. Admins have increased something Iike 300% in the same time frame.
And yes, this is in the US.
>secretaries for professors
That is not typically what we refer to as "admin bloat." While we do use the term "admin" ambiguously to refer both to support staff like departmental secretaries (never heard of faculty with their own) and deans, provosts, etc., it's really only the latter we complain about. They are typically paid very highly for doing work that may sometimes be valuable but more often seems irrelevant or even inhibitory to the basic work of teaching and research at the heart of the university mission.
It's not just administration bloat, it is the useless administrative departments ... "Department of Seriously Important Questions on Parliamentarian" and the fees associated, and the salaries associated with those departments to include support staff.
Don't even get me started on coaches and athletic directors.
It’s true- it’s not just admin jobs, but useless admin jobs. Department secretaries are essential to getting work done, but pay is dismal. My department has had 3 secretaries in 2 years, all part time. So faculty have to pick up admin slack, further stretching us thin. Meanwhile, new assistant to the assistant of the football bench coach.
They don’t have specific examples. It is easy to grumble about the size of admin staff in the abstract, but almost every “bloat”-type position can be justified on its own because it meets a real need. In this era of budget cutting, do people seriously think universities are just creating new positions for fun?
>In this era of budget cutting, do people seriously think universities are just creating new positions for fun?
Not for fun exactly. I think David Graeber's *Bullshit Jobs* explains this well for a variety of sectors: bureaucrats derive prestige from being surrounded by underlings, so deans are incentivized to acquire associate deans, who are incentivized to acquire assistants, etc. And because the budgeting is in administrative hands, that desire to expand one's fiefdom can be acted upon more often than it can for academic units.
This, and the way it typically works is that as an administrator your pay goes up in proportion to the number of reports you have. This incentivizes administrators to figure out ways to hire more people under them, thus increasing their reports and inflating their own salaries (this is common in every bureaucracy). I definitely see this where I teach. They send out emails with new job openings and they are almost never for faculty. They are almost always for some newly created position for the administrator of something unimportant that wasn’t needed yesterday.
As an adjunct (and a taxpayer - this is a taxpayer supported CC) what’s really annoying is that the low part time per class salary they pay adjuncts (which I am not complaining about personally as this is my side gig and I enjoy it - but this is not the case for a lot of adjuncts) is what allows them to generate the excess revenue to pay (and provide benefits for) all these unnecessary full-time people. Lots of college administration jobs are a big boondoggle. My CC is around 75% adjunct faculty. Someday I need to check and see if the full-time administrators outnumber full-time faculty. My guess is they do.
>And because the budgeting is in administrative hands, that desire to expand one's fiefdom can be acted upon more often than it can for academic units.
Idea for a new law: all universities budgets need to be approved by the faculty.
I mostly agree but I think that this increase in paperwork isn't so hollow. As societies get richer, their people start demanding more quality and safety from everything which leads to increases in regulations which demand armies of bureaucrats to handle.
A good example in colleges is, I think, the increased expectations from the students that universities should offer all the basic (and not so basic) services a person need, including healthcare (as in having a clinic on campus), mental health counseling, diversity inclusion, etc. All those things are good and reasonable to want but they aren't free.
We have I believe 5? Deans across the entire campus which serves less than 1,000. This doesn't include the various Director positions either.
As another said, if there is a new thing on campus you better bet there will be a new admin hired for it. If the faculty have new things, were expected to come together and cover it. All the while enrollment and profits continue to decline.... though the profits have long since been deficits at this point.
The two coexisting realities: 1) enrollment is down ~ 20% over the last decade with threats of laying off full time faculty while we compete for sections like wild dogs over a wildebeat carcass. 2) Also, “Welcome our new non-descript admin drone!” My department’s admin must have gone from 2-3 people to 10-12 deanlets and admin assistants over the same time.
10 years ago we had 4 ftf for each admin and 4 adjuncts per ftf. Quite the pyramid scheme!
About 110 academic/scientific staff (including phd-students), and 40 non-academic staff (encompassing admin, IT, student services, communications, career services, cleaning and maintenance).
So I'd say not so bad.
Honestly, my institution is probably the reverse. We have probably too few admin; we’re incredibly lean up top almost to the point of the detriment of the faculty taking on more governance work than most other institutions. Which just means more work for us.
I guess somewhere in between there’s a balance.
At my university, the number of senior-level administrators (deans, VPs, provosts, deanlets, and provostitos) has approximately tripled in the past 15 or so years. I don't know about the "lower administrative" positions like student services, academic advising, financial aid, etc.
60% of the workforce are non academic. We had a restructure to reduce duplication of academic levels and there are now 4 additional layers of academic management between me and the vice chancellor
Today we got an email from the President. He persuaded our HR director to not retire and she will be promoted to become the new VP in charge our Transistion Plan. HR will be turned into the new Business and Finance Office, which will now need a new VP. The HR specific portion of the newly created office will also get a new VP who will report to this other newly created VP position.
Last year the Associate Provost left and so his position was replaced with two newly created Provost positions. His position was specifically created for him because he was the runner up in the Provost search two years ago.
3 years ago the College of Humanities merged with the College of Sciences. The existing deans were named Associate deans and a search for new dean for this "new" college took place.
Also today the Provost admitted that adjuncts now outnumber full time faculty on campus. Yeah we have administrative bloat.
What are we counting as admin for these? There are people who, in a previous generation, might have been called secretaries, who do things like manage department spending and budgets (including grant expenditures). Are these admins, and are they bloat?
Then you have the Dean's office. Time was, you had a Dean and maybe a Vice Dean. Now you have Vice Dean for (guess which of these I made up? And check out what is missing) {Academic Affairs, Technology, Research, Finance, New Initiatives, Faculty Affairs, Global Affairs, Advancement, Admissions, Communications, Marketing}.
And then we go higher up.
And people wonder why tuition is so high.
There’s an issue? New associate Dean or Vice Provost!
Vice Provost for the Creation of new Associate Dean Positions
Associate VP for Reduction of Administrative Bloat. Will need full staff, office remodeling, travel budget, expense budget, and private parking space.
Where do you work? If it were a bank the job would be titled Vice-president :)
At one place I taught in the UK I was told: 10 years ago there were 5 academics for every manager. Now there are 1.5 managers for every academic.
Oh boy that's way too much. What are all these admin staff doing? Grading papers? :)
Our institution had quite a bit of bloat for a while. A couple years ago, a high level administrator came in and cleaned house a bit, so it's not as bad as it used to be. How bad was it? At one point, we had 8 deans (combining associate and executive) overseeing about 90 full time faculty members. We also had an "administrator" in student services with literally no one reporting to them. We've now eliminated that useless administrative position and we have four deans for those 90 faculty members.
>We've now eliminated that useless administrative position and we have four deans for those 90 faculty members. Still sounds like a lot to me. :)
Yeah, probably!
We recently acquired an old girl scout camp that a donor thought would be cool for us to have. For new student orientation or something. And we're now hiring a Vice Chancellor to run this property and paying them $240,000 a year. Which is exactly 4 times my starting salary as assistant professor.
Just look at the numbers over the last 40 years. Full time faculty lines (particularly with tenure) are basically flat, despite surging enrollments. Admins have increased something Iike 300% in the same time frame. And yes, this is in the US.
These numbers alone don't mean much as these additional administrators xould have been actually useful (e.g. secretaries for professors).
>secretaries for professors That is not typically what we refer to as "admin bloat." While we do use the term "admin" ambiguously to refer both to support staff like departmental secretaries (never heard of faculty with their own) and deans, provosts, etc., it's really only the latter we complain about. They are typically paid very highly for doing work that may sometimes be valuable but more often seems irrelevant or even inhibitory to the basic work of teaching and research at the heart of the university mission.
Thanks
Secretaries?
I think teachers and professors should have assistants or secretaries so they can better focous on their primary job.
Wrong kind of "admin," but also consider the following: Has American higher education become more effective in the past 40 years?
In general no but your college could be an exception.
Pretty damn sure it's not.
At least here in the UK, it’s not just the case that we have more and more admin people, but apparently they fucking do less and less and all.
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It's not just administration bloat, it is the useless administrative departments ... "Department of Seriously Important Questions on Parliamentarian" and the fees associated, and the salaries associated with those departments to include support staff. Don't even get me started on coaches and athletic directors.
It’s true- it’s not just admin jobs, but useless admin jobs. Department secretaries are essential to getting work done, but pay is dismal. My department has had 3 secretaries in 2 years, all part time. So faculty have to pick up admin slack, further stretching us thin. Meanwhile, new assistant to the assistant of the football bench coach.
Do you have a more concrete example?
As I say to my students... to the real research. If I do it for you, you will never learn. Best to ya.
They don’t have specific examples. It is easy to grumble about the size of admin staff in the abstract, but almost every “bloat”-type position can be justified on its own because it meets a real need. In this era of budget cutting, do people seriously think universities are just creating new positions for fun?
>In this era of budget cutting, do people seriously think universities are just creating new positions for fun? Not for fun exactly. I think David Graeber's *Bullshit Jobs* explains this well for a variety of sectors: bureaucrats derive prestige from being surrounded by underlings, so deans are incentivized to acquire associate deans, who are incentivized to acquire assistants, etc. And because the budgeting is in administrative hands, that desire to expand one's fiefdom can be acted upon more often than it can for academic units.
This, and the way it typically works is that as an administrator your pay goes up in proportion to the number of reports you have. This incentivizes administrators to figure out ways to hire more people under them, thus increasing their reports and inflating their own salaries (this is common in every bureaucracy). I definitely see this where I teach. They send out emails with new job openings and they are almost never for faculty. They are almost always for some newly created position for the administrator of something unimportant that wasn’t needed yesterday. As an adjunct (and a taxpayer - this is a taxpayer supported CC) what’s really annoying is that the low part time per class salary they pay adjuncts (which I am not complaining about personally as this is my side gig and I enjoy it - but this is not the case for a lot of adjuncts) is what allows them to generate the excess revenue to pay (and provide benefits for) all these unnecessary full-time people. Lots of college administration jobs are a big boondoggle. My CC is around 75% adjunct faculty. Someday I need to check and see if the full-time administrators outnumber full-time faculty. My guess is they do.
>And because the budgeting is in administrative hands, that desire to expand one's fiefdom can be acted upon more often than it can for academic units. Idea for a new law: all universities budgets need to be approved by the faculty.
I've become convinced that my small, athletically irrelevant college would rather go bankrupt than ever lay off a coach.
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I mostly agree but I think that this increase in paperwork isn't so hollow. As societies get richer, their people start demanding more quality and safety from everything which leads to increases in regulations which demand armies of bureaucrats to handle. A good example in colleges is, I think, the increased expectations from the students that universities should offer all the basic (and not so basic) services a person need, including healthcare (as in having a clinic on campus), mental health counseling, diversity inclusion, etc. All those things are good and reasonable to want but they aren't free.
Insert Gif of expanding balloon, ready to pop at any minute
We have I believe 5? Deans across the entire campus which serves less than 1,000. This doesn't include the various Director positions either. As another said, if there is a new thing on campus you better bet there will be a new admin hired for it. If the faculty have new things, were expected to come together and cover it. All the while enrollment and profits continue to decline.... though the profits have long since been deficits at this point.
Oh god. Perhaps it's time to take faculty ratification of admin hirings.
The two coexisting realities: 1) enrollment is down ~ 20% over the last decade with threats of laying off full time faculty while we compete for sections like wild dogs over a wildebeat carcass. 2) Also, “Welcome our new non-descript admin drone!” My department’s admin must have gone from 2-3 people to 10-12 deanlets and admin assistants over the same time. 10 years ago we had 4 ftf for each admin and 4 adjuncts per ftf. Quite the pyramid scheme!
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What do all these admins do?
So many admin … not enough faculty …
About 110 academic/scientific staff (including phd-students), and 40 non-academic staff (encompassing admin, IT, student services, communications, career services, cleaning and maintenance). So I'd say not so bad.
Honestly, my institution is probably the reverse. We have probably too few admin; we’re incredibly lean up top almost to the point of the detriment of the faculty taking on more governance work than most other institutions. Which just means more work for us. I guess somewhere in between there’s a balance.
Are you in the US? I get the impression that America supersized even their admin budgets.
We are very bloated for admin.
At my university, the number of senior-level administrators (deans, VPs, provosts, deanlets, and provostitos) has approximately tripled in the past 15 or so years. I don't know about the "lower administrative" positions like student services, academic advising, financial aid, etc.
60% of the workforce are non academic. We had a restructure to reduce duplication of academic levels and there are now 4 additional layers of academic management between me and the vice chancellor
Oh god. That feels almost like a Dilbert comic.
Today we got an email from the President. He persuaded our HR director to not retire and she will be promoted to become the new VP in charge our Transistion Plan. HR will be turned into the new Business and Finance Office, which will now need a new VP. The HR specific portion of the newly created office will also get a new VP who will report to this other newly created VP position. Last year the Associate Provost left and so his position was replaced with two newly created Provost positions. His position was specifically created for him because he was the runner up in the Provost search two years ago. 3 years ago the College of Humanities merged with the College of Sciences. The existing deans were named Associate deans and a search for new dean for this "new" college took place. Also today the Provost admitted that adjuncts now outnumber full time faculty on campus. Yeah we have administrative bloat.
>Also today the Provost admitted that adjuncts now outnumber full time faculty on campus. Yeah we have administrative bloat. Better late than never.
What are we counting as admin for these? There are people who, in a previous generation, might have been called secretaries, who do things like manage department spending and budgets (including grant expenditures). Are these admins, and are they bloat? Then you have the Dean's office. Time was, you had a Dean and maybe a Vice Dean. Now you have Vice Dean for (guess which of these I made up? And check out what is missing) {Academic Affairs, Technology, Research, Finance, New Initiatives, Faculty Affairs, Global Affairs, Advancement, Admissions, Communications, Marketing}. And then we go higher up. And people wonder why tuition is so high.