How Many Bureaucrats Do You Need To Run A University?
I have many friends who are professors, and the younger ones, especially, do not make a lot of money -- and yes, even those in hard sciences. This is after spending years getting a Ph.D.
But, check out who's raking it in on the college campus -- the administrators. From a Bloomberg piece by John Hechinger, "The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio":
J. Paul Robinson, chairman of the Purdue University faculty senate, walks the halls of a 10-story tower, pointing out a row of offices for administrators. "I have no idea what these people do," says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its 16 deans and 11 vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Ind., makes $125,000.The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade--almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. "We're here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible," says Robinson. "Why is it that we can't find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?"
Purdue is among the U.S. colleges layering up at the top at a time when budgets are tight, students are amassing record debt, and tuition is skyrocketing. U.S. Department of Education data show that Purdue is typical: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. "Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education," says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas. In a 2010 study, Greene found that from 1993 to 2007, spending on administration rose almost twice as fast as funding for research and teaching at 198 leading U.S. universities.
Somebody has to pay for all this, and I've done more than my share.
A degree is no longer the ticket to earning a million dollars more over your lifetime versus a lifetime of menial drudgery.
I'd like to see administrators legislatively capped at ten percent of the full time faculty with their pay capped at that of the lowest paid department head.
MarkD at November 27, 2012 4:18 AM
Every now and then, when I was on active duty, DoD, in response to Congress, would ask the services to survey their "tooth to tail" ratios. For us in the operational side of the Air Force, that meant we had to look at the proportion of troops involved in flying, fixing, or protecting the planes versus those involved in the more mundane support tasks, such as running the headquarters.
I wonder if the states ask their university systems the same kind of thing, and how the support "tail," administrators, associate deans and the like, impacts college cost. I would suppose they do ask, but I wonder what kind of answers they get.
Old RPM Daddy at November 27, 2012 4:49 AM
"Tooth to tail ratio"...much of the military "tail" actually performs essential work, like fixing the airplanes, feeding the troops, managing the spare-parts pipeline, etc...Is this equally true of the academic "tail"? I doubt it. While some of these university bureaucrats do necessary things, I'd bet that a significant % of them are totally useless or even harmful.
david foster at November 27, 2012 4:56 AM
"'Tooth to tail ratio'...much of the military 'tail' actually performs essential work, like fixing the airplanes, feeding the troops, managing the spare-parts pipeline, etc."
That was an argument we always had. A navy aircraft carrier crew, for example, could be considered "tooth" regardless of the jobs they did, because they were on a ship. But some airmen, stationed on nice, dry air bases, were considered "tail," even if they did the same jobs as the sailors. It was a stickier problem than it looked.
I suppose university administrators would make vigorous arguments about how vital they are to the educational environment. Who has the political clout and courage to challenge these arguments? What would be the impact of any cuts that might result?
Old RPM Daddy at November 27, 2012 5:15 AM
Who wants to bet that some group of administrators at the college set the pay rates?
Assholio at November 27, 2012 6:23 AM
A very high specialization/division of labor among people doing the direct productive work has tended, historically, to be associated with a high administrative overhead. For example, if you were running a manufacturing business in 1910 and decided to replace the "craft" method of production with a more "Taylorized" approach, with most direct employees restricted to performing single simple tasks in predefined ways, you would probably save on direct labor costs...but you would also find an increased need for industrial engineers, production planners, tool-crib inventory people, etc etc. The bureaucrats are needed to knit the specialists in a coherent whole.
What has happened in academia is that there has arisen a very high degree of academic specialization...and there are a lot of bureaucrats...but there is, in most institutions, nothing resembling a coherent whole.
david foster at November 27, 2012 6:31 AM
The problem with cutting the 'crats out is that they are smart enough to start with cutting the services students actually use, so that the students demand more 'crats again.
spqr2008 at November 27, 2012 7:54 AM
Is this anything at all like upper management at publicly-traded corporations?
clinky at November 27, 2012 7:59 AM
I would have more sympathy if many of those people weren't there for functions that the faculty itself demanded. The Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate Change, and his staff of quislings and apparatichiks? If you took a facult vote on whether to keep or get rid of that office, they'd vote "keep", overwhelmingly. Because without a Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate Change, you're just a podunk school. It's the price of admission to the kook kidz's clubhouse.
Cousin Dave at November 27, 2012 9:57 AM
Sure, it's sweet - but it's not as sweet as $457,000 to be the chief of a 30 officer police force!
http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t4#/video/politics/2012/11/26/ac-pkg-lah-police-chief-corruption.cnn
Aaaanndd ... he's suing to have his pension bumped to around a half million a year ... and he wants severance pay.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at November 27, 2012 12:19 PM
Once a bureaucrat realizes they can build a staff of people that effectively do nothing they hire people by the gross.
They then justify their positions by supervising the staff they have. I think this happened at most colleges.
Jim P. at November 27, 2012 8:27 PM
I suspect this issue will be resolved, with a great deal of pain in the next five to ten years. These administrators are mostly funded by states, that are rapidly going broke, and student loans which are now drying up.
What can't continue, won't.
The private colleges are in even worse shape. Half of them will be in a death spiral of rising tuitions, and lower enrollments for degrees that will, for the most part, put you a hundred k in debt to become a stocker at Walmart. Petroleum engineering is still a good bet. Pharmacy probably also ok. Med school, with Obamacare coming, not so much.
Isab at November 27, 2012 8:46 PM
Parkinson's Law: The size of any bureaucracy will increase by an average rate of 2.5% per year, regardless of the amount of work done or even whether any work is done at all.
Conan the Grammarian at November 28, 2012 10:34 AM
This is a public university.
Could these excess people, perhaps, be patronage employees?
Just a thought.
Mike at November 28, 2012 1:50 PM
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