People are often surprised at how adamant I am that cutting administrative costs is a huge part of making college less expensive. Surely, the administrative costs– which means, to a very large degree, the salaries of administrators and the number of administrators employed– can’t be that much higher than they once were, right?
They can be. And it’s a huge, huge problem.
Here’s one of the saddest stories I’ve read about in ages. The University of Georgia’s student run newspaper, The Red and Black, is a no-bullshit great student newspaper. Or was. Yesterday the entire student leadership walked out, thanks to a paternalistic and heavy-handed Board of Directors who are uncomfortable with actual journalism. In a heartbreaking open letter from the former Editor in Chief:
The newspaper has always been a student-run operation, but recently, we began feeling serious pressure from people who were not students. In less than a month, The Red & Black has hired more than 10 permanent staff with veto power over students’ decisions.
In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial director at The Red & Black,” a member of The Red & Black’s Board of Directors stated the newspaper needs a balance of good and bad. Under “Bad,” it says, “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism.’ If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.” I took great offense to that, but the board member just told me this is simply a draft. But one thing that would not change is that the former editorial adviser, now the editorial director, would see all content before it is published online and in print. For years, students have had final approval of the paper followed by a critique by the adviser only after articles were published. However, from now on, that will not be the case. Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take “grip and grin” photos and compromise the design of the paper.
It’s totally disgraceful for a great, student-run– and thus student-centered– program be forced to bow down to ten pencil pushers who almost certainly got their jobs because they know somebody with connections. And for it to happen in a way that threatens journalistic independence is shameful. (For context, my public high school’s student newspaper was also quite acclaimed, and we enjoyed more editorial independence than is described in the letter.) Why is this happening?
It’s hard for people outside of the university system to understand just how many layers of useless bureaucracy have been added in recent decades. There are more buildings filled with more people with vague and redundant titles at the average university now, it’s incredible. Completing minor tasks gets you shuffled through the byzantine architecture of a vast bureaucracy. Jobs that were once performed as part of the duties of the professoriate have now been shuffled off to administrators who have no educational experience and no educational credentials, resulting in a massive hiring binge; meanwhile, the ranks of tenure track faculty continue to shrink, to say nothing of stagnant wages among the actual educators.
The bureaucratic takeover is more pronounced in public universities because of the explicitly political nature of recent changes in their structure. Republican state lawmakers realized that public universities could be a tool to enforce their political ends, but first, they needed to stack the deck by filling them with cronies. And fill them they have, as typical estimates for the increase in the number of college administrators from the late 1990s to the late 2000s are typically between 30-40%. This court-packing has multiple benefits for conservative state apparatchiks: college administrative jobs are a nice bit of influence to peddle, and these administrators can act as loyalists when there is a conflict with faculty and students. I’m afraid that, if there’s a major change in a university in the last decade, it’s more likely to have come from a petty functionary than from someone in the actual faculty. You’d be amazed at how much control these administrators truly have.
This article from the Washington Monthly gives you a good overview; it’s an adapted excerpt by Benjamin Ginsberg from his book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. If you’re interested in these topics I highly recommend it.
Update: Here’s the actual, disgraceful memo. “I guess this is ‘journalism.'” “Things we will not tolerate: Liable.”
Update II: Twitter has suspended the account the editorial board started, @redanddead815. No word as to why.
Bostondreams
As a Florida Gator, I normally would chortle at bad news from UGA, but this is just infuriating. Our own Alligator is feeling similar pressures. I hope that the students fight this, somehow. What can be done?
Cassidy
They might as well learn to be corporate shills early. Just go ahead and pop that cherry before they get out of school.
raven
I can tell you that the managing editor is a great guy and the students that have worked with him hold him in the highest regard.
raven
Also, it is not a “program” it is a business that is separate from the university and is located off campus.
raven
Update: Here’s the actual draft, disgraceful memo.
Jim Pharo
Perhaps you have no newspapers or internet in your world, but this administration-ization has long ago taken over most of the rest of society, from corporations to hospitals to government. So it comes to academia. Surprised? Really?
Also, why do student journalists give a fig what the administration says? I ran an entirely student run and student owned HS newspaper. The school’s only leverage was to threaten expulsion, but in those days the US Constitution was still in effect. I wonder if I were a student today if I might not be tempted to see if at least the 1st Amendment was still operative….tough call.
raven
Here’s the Facebook page of the Red and Dead
doxastic
Hey Freddie, a while back when we were in a contract fight, I wrote about administrative bloat specifically @ URI.
Todd
My inclination would be to say do a general strike. How do you produce a student newspaper without articles from uncompensated students? They can buy some lame national content, but ad revenue will collapse, so the students have the ultimate trump card.
Todd
My inclination would be to say do a general strike. How do you produce a student newspaper without articles from uncompensated students? They can buy some lame national content, but ad revenue will collapse, so the students have the ultimate trump card.
beltane
This transfer of resources from teaching staff to administration is not only going on in academia but in local school districts as well. We have become a society where grifting is rewarded at the expense of everything else.
The story about the University of Georgia brings to mind tales of commissars, censors, and petty officials from a state ministry of propaganda. Very Soviet-style in some ways.
raven
@beltane: This has NOTHING to do with transferring any UGA resources.
artem1s
I work at a private university and see some of the same problems. I will say that the growth in administrative staff has mostly been spurred by the centralization and digitization of routine operations (payroll, accounting, IT, etc.). While it may have been fine to have the professors keep the books in their departments when those functions were all on dead trees and relatively simple, in the 90s, those functions began to get shifted to computers and then online. We had a massive pushback from Luddite tenured faculty who just wouldn’t catch up with the 20th century. We had some departments who were still keeping the their books in ledgers (and this is a highly touted tech school) well into the 90s. Plus we had a whole raft of ‘secretaries’ and ‘executive aids’ whose jobs amounted to sitting at a desk (reception via denying access) and occasionally answering the phone. Most of them could type but a lot of them couldn’t use a computer to save their lives (or a complicated phone system). Walking into certain offices on campus was akin to traveling back in time to the 1950/60s.
On the other hand, the opportunity to hand out jobs to ‘managers’ to oversee the administrators who are now handling the computers has become a bizarre exercise in job title word salad. And certain positions require overseeing a certain number of untermenschen. So hiring one manager in a newly invented position often results in hiring 1-3 other support staff. This, in order to justify the pay grade of someone who really won’t be doing any work as much as being a ‘director’. My favorite so far has been the newly invented title of ‘Associate Dean’ to describe the heads of the fundraising staffs of the professional schools. These people often don’t even have masters degrees. It’s an insult to the actual academic deans, in my mind, to hand out the title like so much candy on Halloween. And of course, they are getting paid nearly as much as the real Deans (and some more).
cossacksare
According to the editor’s open letter, The Red and Black has not been independent of the university since 1980. What’s happening there makes me sick, but it seems to have little to do with the bureaucratic takeover of universities (except insofar as it presents a parallel situation).
Suffern ACE
Well at least the policy is clear. If on the whole you are a good person, why should your reputation be tarnished by the bad things you do? What do those bad things have do with anything at all?
Steve
It’s been 25 years since I went to college, bUt I feel like navigating the bureaucracy of a school with 40,000 students was actually great training for real life. Not to disagree with Freddie’s point, mind you.
Bobby Thomson
Because Twitter sucks ass and has a long and proud history of censorship?
Nutella
This destruction of student journalism is outrageous in principle but did you notice one particularly amazing feature of the story? It takes ten paid administrators to censor one student newspaper. That’s the clearest example of administrative bloat ever.
techno
If The Theory of the Leisure Class is true here (and goodness knows it probably is) then the poor professors who actually do the work of the school are now relegated to the bottom of the school’s status ladder because what they do is useful. Anyone who is even mildly ambitious has been “promoted” to a more high-status administrative position where they can spend their days concocting schemes like how to exercise power over something as powerless as a student newspaper.
It took TEN of these Leisure Class scum to bring down the hammer. Oh well, the Leisure Classes aspire to be useless. We should not be surprised when they succeed.
beltane
@raven: But when you have a bloated administration it is inevitable that these people will seek to expand their power any way they can. It would be one thing if administration simply consumed resources and just sat there in a state of bloated passivity, but that is never what happens. In order to survive and grow, these malignant organizations need to meddle in everything and to stifle all dissenting voices. This is what our country has become and it’s no surprise that universities are not immune to this phenomenon.
If you want free speech become a billionaire.
beltane
@Nutella: Inefficiency is baked into the system. Why pay one crony when you can pay ten?
cossacksare
The UGA administration has nothing to do with this.
http://redanddead.com/2012/08/15/clarification-on-ongoing-question/
barath
There was a nice post by Charles Hugh Smith (someone I usually don’t like too much because he’s a bit too “both sides are the problem” on every issue) on what he calls the lifecycle of bureaucracy:
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec10/lifecycle-bureaucracy12-10.html
This diagram was decent too:
http://www.oftwominds.com/photos10/lifecycle-bureaucracy.png
tesslibrarian
@cossacksare: No, the letter by the former editor says they have been independent of the University since 1980. It’s been one of their larger points of pride that they don’t have to deal with the University administration.
Mike
It’s easy to point at the suits in the admin building and say, “The problem is the administration.” If “dealing with administrative bloat” is a priority — what segments of the university administration should get the axe?
Fundraising? (No tax revenue anymore. Money gotta come from somewhere…)
Student Affairs/Retention? (Academic advising, tutoring, etc.)
Student Life? (Residence life? Women’s center? LGBT support?)
Administrative support for academic departments?
Most “administrators” you’ll find at a college or university don’t exactly pull down enormous salaries. (Check out the salary for a director of a tutoring center or a hall director, for instance.)
cossacksare
@tesslibrarian: Ah, how did that “not” get in there? I meant they have been independent since 1980. Which seems to deprive this post of its point.
RSR
fyi: this same administrative build up as occurred in many large urban public school districts.
There’s just way too much money flowing through education for the greedsters to ignore. They want in, they want to offer what are essentially now patronage jobs, or they want to just build their own alternate education systems (for profit college, charter ‘public’ ed, etc) to skim money out of the existing system.
Raven
@cossacksare: I’ve been trying to tell you all that.
cossacksare
@Raven: “you all”? We’re on the same team! I just edited badly the first time. Though what happened is disgraceful, I’m not sure it justifies some larger point about administrative bloat at universities.
Raven
@cossacksare:I meant to say “ya’ll”.
Snarki, child of Loki
The student journalists need to walk out and start a new, COMPLETELY independent paper.
It’s not like any student paper runs its own printing operation, so the job is mostly one of writing content, lining up ad revenue, sending the result off to a printer, and distribution. All of which can be done out of univ. control.
This has happened on other campuses, after a year or so of roasting in the flames, admins back down.
Steve
@Mike: I don’t think anyone is suggesting we need to be like Rick Perry and start axing entire departments.
YellowJournalism
My favorite part is the line about misquotes, errors, typos, and lack of journalistic standards being a no-no, which is included in a professional memo littered with typos and a message that the paper no longer wishes to practice basic journalism. This memo basically says the paper will become an extension of the public relations department and should strive to cater to the whims of people who don’t understand difficult or challenging subjects, only reflecting what is popular or positive.
So, basically, they’re preparing the students for the real world of modern journalism!
greennotGreen
Whether or not this incident is an example of administrative bloat at universities, bloat has occurred, and I see it everyday I go to work at a private institution. A department that was once run by three people using paper for everything is now run by seven using computers.
An overabundance of caution is part of the problem. Not only do I have to fill out a form online every month (not hard,) I also have to print it out and sign it and walk it down to the office (two buildings away.) Every year I have to take HIPAA training (how to securely handle patient information) even though I have NO access to patient information. These things take up not only my time but somewhere in the organization a person to monitor them. Multiply this logic by many thousands of employees, and it certainly contributes to bloat.
YellowDog
The administrative takeover was one reason why I was happy to leave academia. I was on the faculty of a Big Ten university in the 80’s. We called it “Corporate U.” The university was hiring MBA administrators at twice the average salary of tenured faculty. I left for a government job that doubled my salary. Money was not my motivation for being an academic, nor was it my reason for leaving, but it highlighted the disparity in how my value was judged and rewarded. I gave up a lot of freedom, but I also knew who was making decisions about my work environment. The decision makers were down the hall, not in the inaccessible administrative tower sitting in the middle of the campus. That building was designed in the 60’s, to be easily defended against student protests. It became a symbol for the faceless administrators that really ran the university.
Someguy
@techno:
Professors? Do you mean the tenured profs, who live okay, or the un-tenured, associate professor worker bees who work for a couple thousand per class taught, no benefits, no office? The universities can’t afford to hire more teachers. All those administrators don’t pay for themselves, lad…
Someguy
BTW, “Liable” used in that way is a good neologism. It looks to me like it describes any action which results in potential exposure of any type for the university. No libel, but speech which leaves the university liable to be criticized, sued, made an object of controversy. As Freudian typos go, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen. Bless you, autocorrect!
TerryC
Not a fan of what’s happening there, am on the students’ side with what knowledge I have, but this: “who almost certainly got their jobs because they know somebody with connections” is not my experience as an employee of a very large higher education institution, which I’ve been in and around in various guises since 1973.
cossacksare
@Snarki, child of Loki: They already did that in 1980. The Red and Black is independent of UGA. It says it both in Marinova’s open letter and in another post on Red & Dead.Do you people actually read the links included in the post?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@greennotGreen:
Having once worked in a secretarial position at UCLA Medical Center, I’ll kinda-sorta defend your administration on this: a lot of people don’t realize that, if they’re a hospital employee, just saying, “I saw so-and-so in the lobby” is a potential HIPAA violation because you don’t know if that person was there because they’re the patient or because they’re there with a friend/relative.
Obviously, it was a bigger deal at UCLA since celebrity patients were pretty common, but that’s the rationale for everyone having to get HIPAA training.
Celeriac
@YellowDog: OT–and profuse apologies if this seems excessively weird–but One of my areas of research is on the reaction of campus architecture and planning to the student protests and I’m super curious about the building you referenced . . . Would you be willing to email the school/building?
Raven
From a UGA journalism prof
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@greennotGreen:
Also, G (who currently works in healthcare) reminded me of another reason why you, who is not supposed to have any access to patient information, ends up having to sit through this training every year — to remind you that you’re not supposed to have any access to patient information. Apparently the salespeople at his office get HIPPA training every year and yet still are constantly asking for things like patient censuses for their sales calls even though they’re not permitted access to any patient information.
bg
@Bostondreams:
The Independent Florida Alligator went off campus during the Viet Nam war when I was a student there. They have provided terrific student-run journalism for 40 years since then. (One of my kids was a writer & editor while he was at UF). But now the University is taking control of the Alligator’s distribution on campus. It’s shameful.
Walker
@Someguy:
You mean “adjunct”. Associate profs are tenured. And there has been enough backlash against adjuncts that the area really seeing an increase is contractual lectures. Nice salary, full benefits, but no tenure.
chauncey1186
They lost me @ “Liable”.
Redacted
Perhaps the most invasive, time-consuming, and largely useless administrative initiative brought to bear on my university is our ever-escalating, emergency preparation plan. Yes, it’s a good idea to have a disaster recovery plan which is why I’ve always had one, but the detail and scope has gotten insane. We have people who spend their days thinking up crippling scenarios, and we have to find a way to function through them. Identify every piece of infrastructure, equipment and personnel that is required to function at minimal and optimal standards. A WEEKS long exercise as we must catalog everything we do and use. Ironically, this exercise is itself a crippling scenario forced upon us.
“How do I get operational if my machine room is destroyed in F4 or F5 tornado?” Sure, I have off-site back-ups, but mostly I’ll have to wait until someone BUILDS ME A F***ING BUILDING!
Zach
Who leaked the Washington Post’s journalism standards guide?
Loneoak
Case in point: if I need a $2 box pens at my UC campus and take a quick jaunt down to the campus-owned bookstore, it costs $30 in administrative labor to reimburse me for it.
Amir Khalid
Over s lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Amir Khalid
Over s lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Amir Khalid
Over a lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Amir Khalid
Over a lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Amir Khalid
Over a lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Amir Khalid
Over a lifetime of readership and two decades at The Star, I watched it gradually morph from a scrappy, populist rival to the New Straits Times (the ruling-party-proxy-owned establishment English rag) to an NST clone with a red logo on the front page. It’s not quite the same story as what happened here. But I sense a similar infestation of MBA’d pointy-haired boss parasites and their bullshit “professional management” unconnected to the journalistic mission.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I misspelled HIPAA, like, three times, didn’t I?
Oh, well. I haven’t worked in healthcare for at least 8 years, so I guess my brain decided it didn’t need that info anymore.
Prospera
Someone who doesn’t understand the difference between ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’ has no business imposing journalistic standards.
Rex Everything
I wonder why there’s any confusion re what’s happening to the American university. It’s totally obvious what’s happening. It’s being corporatized. We’ve all seen tuition skyrocket while actual professors remain overworked and not terribly well compensated: where’s the money going? Admin, branding, marketing, property expansion, etc most definitely, but there’s a bit more to it. Getting students into massive debt is a highly desirable goal for the lending class, which finds fewer and fewer investment vehicles as demand for credit continues to dry up. It’s a major win for the 0.1% when the 40%, out of concern for the interests of their progeny, sells them into a life of debt peonage.
“Administrator” in the college context will soon be indistinguishable from “loan administrator.” He’s someone who facilitates your 6-figure purchase, for profit. Soon “public university” will mean they’ve issued an IPO.
mzrad
This sounds like that little girl from Scotland who took pictures of the lame food served at her school cafeteria and published it online. They tried to shut her down but it didn’t work.
Why don’t the students start up their own paper and call it the Black and the Red and keep doing what they’ve been doing. Blogging is free and freedom.
!!
TerryC
@Celeriac: Hi, one of my areas of interest is architecture and planning on college campuses. I would love to know more about your work. As would, probably, the American Clearinghouse on Educational Facilities (ACEF). Campus security is one of their primary interest areas.
Celeriac
@TerryC:
Hi! Sure–shoot me an email (omtoast[at]mac[[dot]]com*. I’d love to hear about yours!
*that email fiddling doesn’t actually work, does it? Ah well.
cossacksare
@mzrad: They did. The Red and Black is an independent paper, and has been since 1981. Thank you for the advice they already took 31 years ago!
Kris
I am a lecturer, teaching at a CSU school
I added up by pay and benefits and calculated how many students I was teaching to make that pay.
I figured each student was paying me, per class, about what I paid for yoga classes. Most CSU schools are heavily taught by lecturers, many of us with PhD’s and decades of experience.
Education is cheap. It costs about as much as yoga lessons, maybe 10-15 dollars for an hours lesson, with the time for prep, office hours,, grading, etc, thrown in for free.
But college is incredily expensive. Figure that.
CSU faculty salaries have been pretty much frozen for a long time, while the cost of college has sky rocketed, It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out that tuition money and aid to the states is flying out the door for nothing. Administrators, buildings, student services have all gone insane with cash,
Here’s a stastic:
CCSF (a non CSU school in San Fran) has about 39 administrators and (roughly) 100,000 students. Actually CSU ran into an accreditation scandal because they had too few administrators. They probably should have 75-90.
Most CSU schools have several hundred administrators. Many have more administrators than they have faculty. And at most CSU schools the average administrator makes more than the average faculty member.
The situation is so bad that CSU schools are losing money and contemplating cutting enrollment and classes. This is the exact opposite of a what the solution should be. The solution is to add classes, add teachers, add students, and cut admin down to near CCSF levels.
PJ
As you say, this has been going on for decades. I half remember a quote from the 1950s made, I believe, by C.S. Lewis, to the effect that “the college now hires dozens of people to do the work the president used to do in his spare time.” I certainly saw it in the 1980s. I went to a very small college (400 students), where the faculty were poorly paid, yet the school continued to add administrators every year for jobs which had not existed before and for duties which were incredibly vague (none of which had to do with any switch to computers or any kind of technical work whatsoever.)
SiubhanDuinne
@YellowJournalism:
What I noticed about that line was that it came at the very end of a three-page memo, almost as if striving to eliminate typos, misquotes, and errors of fact were an afterthought.
Which it probably was.
luck-kess
I really think a large and often over looked part of the problem is the drop in public funding. I dont believe it to be the entire root of the problem and I don’t know the background at UGA, but at my local U its a big part of the issue. Extra administration is being added on to help attract businesses and most especially donors. I know our U has almost an entire new department dedicated to bringing in the private sector to support its activities. And when one hyper wealthy donor or corporation can mean a brand new building with the Presidents name on it then you can be darn sure that the top administration is going to smother anyone and anything who might aggravate said donor.
SiubhanDuinne
Also, on page 3, one of the things “We will not tolerate” is “Liable.” Can they possibly mean “Libel”? WTF?
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Aaaand, I see Someguy #37 got there first, and better!
Sloegin
Overpriced admins, yeah that does happen. Missing the larger point much? You betcha. The lion’s share of skyrocketing tuition at state schools is due to states yanking their funding support.
@ my U? Overall school spending has dropped when compared to inflation. Yet tuition is now crazy high because state support dropped from 70% to around 10-20%.
Fat cat admins? Not so much here, everyone is in the 6th year of a pay freeze.
ymmv.
Martin
I don’t dispute that there’s a problem here, but don’t paint it with too broad of a brush. University administration has increased for other reasons – not the least of which is that student/parent expectations have increased and spending in other areas has declined.
Capital spending for instruction has seriously lagged enrollment growth, and campuses are literally lacking seats to put students in (if you want to know why the CSUs look the way they do). The result is that the amount of administrative time needed to put the registration puzzle together has gone up enormously. And that’s true in many many other corners of the institution as well. The number of applications to read is way, way up as institution growth has lagged demand. How many new 4-year public universities have been built in the last 20 years? I can only think of a handful. California alone built dozens just in the 60s. More applications in the same review period is more staff. The number of financial aid students is way, way up. Again more staff. There are more international students – more staff. There are more students with emotional issues due to the economy and everything else – more staff. These problems beget other problems, so even if we say ‘fuck it, we won’t work so hard to fit everyone in the classrooms’ you just have the pay the cost later when students are stressed out because they can’t get their classes and you have to talk them down off of the tall buildings.
Universities are expected to provide vastly more services now than even 10 years ago, let alone 20 or 30. Parents decided that if they’re going to pay $10K per year for the public university over $100 per semester as it was 20 years ago that they’re going to demand private school like services. They think it’s criminal that we don’t have full technology in every classroom, but it costs at least $100K to outfit a classroom. A medium sized campus will have 200-300 classrooms. They expect wireless everywhere. They expect cellular everywhere. These all cost – and they all cost at the staff level.
I’ll buy the argument that administrative costs shouldn’t be going up when someone can convince me that a classroom with sliding chalk boards is adequate in 2012. That might be true in writing programs, but it’s not in STEM programs. And it’s not even true in writing programs. And wishing it were still so is the same kind of nostalgic wanking that the GOP engages in – thinking that birth control should be holding an aspirin between your knees and how much simpler the world was when the black people stayed in their own damn neighborhoods and the gays stayed in the closet. Sorry, but education is changing. Maybe not for the better, but it’s changing in ways that society is demanding, like it or not.
But the epitome of the low administration cost education system was always the junior college and teaching universities – and they’re dying under the state budgets. The only institutions doing well are the high administrative cost research and privates because all of that administration is generally devoted to replacing taxpayer dollars with extramural dollars – either through sports, or research grants, or patent pools, or branding/marketing initiatives, or corporate partnerships.
These are quite simply the outcomes we’ve purchased. The high administration setups could have been avoided through proper state funding, but that’s been universally rejected in this country. The alternative is to either go private, or do this. UCLA gets 7% of their funding from the state. If you think that they hire as if they were a humble public university, that’s just completely unrealistic.
I’m not sure where the ‘administrator cronies’ bit comes from. Maybe in other states, but in CA very nearly all of the senior administrators are faculty notable in their field. I don’t know how you squeeze cronies in through that system.
moon
The Red and Black is a terrible paper and I’m surprised to see people defending them. When I was a student (2003-2007) they mostly reprinted press releases from the University verbatim, and trolled the student body with “discussion topics” like suggesting a student body that was 90% white was produced by affirmative action and when they couldn’t fill the space with sports puff pieces, ran random AP stories. They are such an embarrassment to the school I’m not surprised the company that runs it wanted more oversight. Its plagued with bad editing, not just typos but things like above the fold:Rape Center Hopes For More, below the fold:funding. Probably the best outcome for everyone involved is that they just shut their doors for good. As a UGA alum, Athens resident and liberal, I hate the R&B with all the hate I have available, and any bad outcome for that “paper” is a good outcome for the UGA community. I don’t understand why they have such a good reputation, maybe running on goodwill left over from the 90s?
Raven
@moon: The managing editor came right before you finished and has done a fine job improving the paper. Read the comments from the people who know him.
Kris
Martin,
“campuses are literally lacking seats to put students in (if you want to know why the CSUs look the way they do).”
Plenty of empty rooms all day long all over the place where I teach.
Classes can also be offered on Saturdays. Summers, too.
Instead, the CSU thinks teaching classes is expensive and will cut enrollment. That’s as dumb as saying “I need to serve fewer customers in my restaurant because I’m losing money,” No. You need to have the cooks and waiters working, while firing the useless 7 hosts working the door.
You’re right that the reasons for rising costs in education are legion. Maybe some are justified. Most clearly, clearly aren’t.
SFSU just spent 140MM on a new library, when the old one was just a bit dingy. You’re right about the classroom tech, though.
Caz
What you’re complaining about is a result of liberal policies where the govt subsidizes education such that universities can jack up their costs indefinitely and the govt will just continue to shell out loans. It causes costs to skyrocket. And most of academia is liberal, meaning the costs are raised by liberals to pad the pocketbooks of liberals, including professors and administrators.
This is a problem of your own party’s making. Of course, conservatives cooperate and go along with it, so both parties are to blame, but the few that do stand for lower costs, competition, efficiency, etc. in education tend to be republicans, although they bear little resemblance to the mainstream republican party. I guess it’s just easier to get elected as a republican, so they aren’t going to be independents, libertarians, or other.
Like the housing bubble, our govt is creating an education bubble. The more govt gets involved in something, the more out of control it gets, the less efficient it gets, the more corrupt it gets. I can’t believe you can’t see that. It’s plain if you just open your eyes.
Raven
@Caz: You are such a FUCKING MORON.
moon
@Raven:
it always seemed to me that they backed Adams attempts to take control of the University and direct funds to stupid construction projects. Departments involved in educating or helping current students got budget cuts, while Adams land developer buddies (who just happened to be big republican donors) get paid. If people are complaining about administrative bloat ITT, the Red and Black is a (small) part of the problem. Also they always worked hard to reinforce the UGA student body’s already conservative politics. Also for a school where sports are so important, the sports coverage was lousy too. The Romanesko link doesn’t really say anything about how things have “improved” it just quotes all the players involved and notes that the University itself is not involved.
Raven
@moon: I was talking about the comments from the people that know the managing editor as a journalist and mentor. The big complaint here is that they are taking the previous editorial control away from the students. That means that whatever editorial stance the paper had as far as the politics of the students it was a reflection of them, not the owners or professional staff. Anyone who has been her for six months knows the student body is conservative. When you have a Hope Scholarship that is a tax on “the stupid” to educate the white suburban kids what else is the place going to be.
You don’t have to explain the budget situation to me but I appreciate it.
Kris
Caz,
Private not-for profits and private for-profits are actually wasting more money per pupil than state schools and community colleges. Kaplan is a ripoff and Phoenix isn’t exactly cheap, compared to many local, comparable community colleges.
Also, lots of private industries waste even more money than education: see the practice of medicine, health insurance, and health research in the USA.
The fact is, parents and kids lack the information or ability to shop for a good, price-efficient education. And they know (or believe) that the prestige of the school they go to matters a lot for future earnings. So they are willing to pay through the nose for “prestige.” In fact, they’re willing to pay more and more every damn year.Nothing controls costs in a free market in medicine because demand for medicine is, well, infinite. People are willing to pay anything for their health, and so prices sky rocket. The same is true for education. Private markets will only worsen the problem of educational costs.
Moreover, parents and students don’t even know what prestige in eductatuon looks like. So they rely on the awful US News rankings and a general sense of “how rich the campus looks” and what kind of “services ir offers” on the basis that a rich-looking campus with fancy grounds and and services must be more like Harvard than a dingier looking school. This means campuses compete for students who are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, but the competition creates no incentive to improve the quality of what goes on in the classroom. (Number of prospective parents or students who has ever asked to sit in on my class to see what it is like equals zero in ten years of teaching intro classes.)
This has created an arms race amongst administrators to make their school look more appealing to this sort of parent. That means spending too much on things that have nothing to do with education.
At the sane time, administrators have been busy administering these new projects. But then they get together and have meetings to decide what to do next. And they come up with ideas. And those ideas lead to new projects. Those projects require meetings where administrators meet to discuss what to do. Eventually, they decide to hire more administrators to help out. But those new administrators need to justify their pay by showing they are doing something, so they find new tasks and have meetings, startingq the whole process over again. This is classic, classic administrative bloat.
The adminstrators aren’t bad people. They’re just acting rationally, trying to do things to help the school and asking for pay. But no one is telling them “Most of what you actually do on that project isn’t productive” and no one is telling them “We need tocut your expenses, hours, and costs.” athere is no market mechanism and no political push to keep administrative costs down because parents are willing to pay more and more.
It’s a mess. It’s a huge story and I’m glad Freddie is on it.
AA+ Bonds
LOL, this memo says that they should do more coverage of freshman scholarships and people writing on Twitter
AA+ Bonds
The real truth that none of these pieces even touch is that a lot of that administration exists so that universities can enslave students who can’t afford to go to school there, honk honk
And if it goes away, so does work-study
AA+ Bonds
Man you can tell this guy has never worked at a corporation or a military agency
AA+ Bonds
@Kris:
Really, because those 7 low-paid employee equivalents on campus are often students who are working to pay the obscene tuition and fees
I suppose they could work in restaurants, except they aren’t hiring and restaurant pay barely covers textbooks nowadays
AA+ Bonds
Administration cuts that aren’t pegged to tuition cuts (ideally to zero) will be made by cutting jobs given to students for work-study, grants and scholarships with work requirements, etc.
raven
Here’s is a statement by the publisher of the Red and Black.
YellowDog
@Celeriac: @Celeriac:
I’ve been traveling all day, so apologies for the late response. The answer to your question is in the movie “Red Dawn.”
mclaren
Administrative costs have skyrocketed in the last 40 years in both K-12 and higher education.
Since 1970, student enrollment in elementary and secondary school has risen by 7 percent while the number of secondary and administrative staff has risen by 83 percent. In 1950 more than 70 percent of K-12 staff were teachers, but by 2006 teachers made up less than 50 percent of K-12 staff.
Meanwhile, test scores for K-12 students haven’t budged since 1970.
As a result of this administrative bloat, inflation-adjusted spending per student has skyrocketed from $2,065 in 1950 to more than $11,000 in 2006.
We see the same pattern in higher education. Between 1993 and 2007, the ratio of full-time administrators to students in America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.