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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted. This is a real problem that is palpable for anyone that has worked in higher ed since the 1980s as most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. The reasons for this move are complex, and one result is a rise in well-paid administrators and low-paid adjuncts with a decline in tenured faculty.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-b...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu...

https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-wor...

> most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities.

I think this reflects a larger trend.

Most institutions are taking on the rituals of the dominant organizing principle in society: the corporation.

I believe this is why church groups are having "annual general meetings" and that formerly not for profit institutions are mimicking the organizational structure of corporations: meetings, hierarchical teams, layers of administrators etc...

Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?

That is how large INCOMPETENT organizations are run. And yes, large organizations have a trend towards incompetency.

Walk into a meeting, look around. Add up everyone's per hour salary. That is what having that meeting costs. Now look around and consider what each talking about the relevant bits to everyone else would take until a decision was made without the meeting. That's potentially how much more not having the meeting costs.

You'll conclude two things. Meetings are crazy expensive for the organization. Meetings can be worth it when the alternative is even more crazy expensive. But the meeting should be as efficient as possible. And you want people to only be in them when there is positive value from doing so.

I just ran a standup. I do this every day. 8 people for 15 minutes. Let's suppose their average salary is $50/hour. That's a $200 meeting. I spend another 30 minutes per day summarizing it, making notes available, and elsewhere keeping a status page up to date so that other people don't have to ask about that meeting.

That extra work keeps another 5 people from showing up. That keeps me from having to have another set of meetings with those people. That keeps the meeting from ballooning to 30 or 45 minutes per day.

In a good organization you want everyone thinking about meetings like I just did. Yes, lots of meetings are needed. Yes, important people will spend most of their time in meetings. But make it efficient. And eliminate any meeting, and any person from any meeting, that doesn't pull its weight.

I don't see how your point is anything against a 'corporate structure' with multiple layers of heirarchy. You are just describing how to run a good one.

My point is against justifying having more meetings and deeper hierarchies over time on the basis of, "Oh well, that's how large organizations should be run."

Organizations should be run with the necessary minimum of meetings, hierarchy and administration. Universities have entirely lost sight of that. And our response should not be a complacent excuse that this is how it should be for any organization of that size. Our response should be to call them out on being severely incompetently run, with no excuse other than the self-aggrandizement of useless bureaucrats.

Competent self-managing sub-organizations.

Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.

A 'sub-organization' is just an alternative description of a heirarchy. Those sub-organizations will have to come together to make macro decisions, like which departments need more funding, how to handle building expansion and shared facility use, etc.

In my experience, smaller flatter organizations rarely require a synchronous large meeting for those issues.

Our largest organizations don't have pervasive hierarchy and meetings which break down at extreme sizes. Markets for example are self organizing around price. Countries may or may not be even larger scale organizations.

You can find smaller scale versions that operate on similar principles. https://hbr.org/2013/11/hierarchy-is-overrated

A market isn't an organization, and how would a university organize itself like a market?

Your begging the question by assuming things without hierarchy are not organizations. Look at the shifts in say the Chinese economy as overall planning was reduced and it was far from a 100% binary transition. Or in a larger scope countries are organizations with leadership but rarely low level direction.

As to Universities Students already self organize around major creating an internal market. Some Universities try and limit the sizes of various Majors, but that's far from necessary. You generally allow professors to seek outside funding for post docks etc without command and control oversight.

You could use internal markets to make various decisions such as funding allocation. Though self organization is often just as efficient.

Net result, you can easily have a University without a president/CEO. Their are even plenty of historic examples of this.

Markets aren't organizations.

US Doctors are a clear counter example. The group chooses it's own members and kicks people out.

I would disagree that's a market.

Doctors are not recruited and trained like McDonald's workers. The barriers to entry and barriers to retention put current and potential doctors in direct competition with each other. The field also deals with people moving on to something else.

So, it looks like a duck and smells like a duck to me.

That doesn't sound like a market at all.

There’s a notion that much of the hierarchy that exists in the world is unnecessary, and perpetuated only because it’s the status quo. A university for example doesn’t strictly need to manage the professors - you could have a very large university where the professors primarily manage themselves, with only a small administrative group. An organization arranged in this way wouldn’t need many meetings.

How would you decide budgets for those professors? How would you determine which departments are growing and where you need more resources? How would you budget things like building expansion, maintenance, shared facilities?

A student and faculty congress. There is precedent for this, many such bodies already have authority over millions of dollars.

I think it's worth trying. A 100% faculty based university, with student employees and contractors doing the more low level administrative work. The faculty would take on the high level admin work, e.g. the IT or CS departments managing computer systems in partnership with the students.

In my church experience part of the annual general meeting isn't imitating a corporation meeting - it _is_ a corporation meeting. This is because the church has wisely put its earthly assets (mostly the building and operating money) under a corporation.

My experience comes from presbyterian churches which have some highly analogous features to corporations deriving from theology and predating by thousands of years the modern corporation. Thus there is a annual "Congregation and Corporation meeting", which is really two meetings for convenience held at the same time but which are formally started and ended separately. Participation is almost identical save that the "Congregation" can have communicant members that are minors and therefore not legally voting members of the earthly corporation.

Well, naturally. Your organization has a revenue stream (donations). It has expenditures (church upkeep). To avoid embezzlement, wasteful spending, & getting scalped by necessary services, you conduct group review of budget goals & the books.

> most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities.

At my alum mater, the state cut support to the state universities to practically nothing. Voters saw how much money the big universities were making on college football. They consistently voted to cut the money to the university system.

Only problem? Most state supported universities did not have a football program.

My university:

* turned to Chinese/Indian nationals (no financial aid/full price)

* raised everyone's tuition (went from low-cost school to higher-end)

* raised other fees

My university is in a part of the US that has low cost of living. So at the very least, the profs are unlikely to be homeless - yes even at the wages specified.

You basically typed out what I would have typed, but got lazy and just said "reasons are complex."

There's something of a joke/quote in university circles about how universities went from "state funded to state supported to state located." When you get <= 5% of your budget from the state, the state support means nothing and this is the situation for most big state unis.

Also, you forgot the Saudi Arabian nationals whose govt fully funds their US education (though this program is becoming more restrictive in recent years with the Saudi govt selecting specific eligible degrees). I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but my personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply, this fact was known by the administration, but the giant full-price checks were essential to keeping the lights on.

Other Fees: Yes, the rise of fees that are starting to rival tuition. Fees are a convenient way to lower the sticker shock of tuition while keeping the total cost the same. My former uni made a big promise about "freezing" tuition for years at a time, but all they ended up doing was jacking up the fees to compensate.

> My personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply.

I'm just curious, could you elaborate on this? Are you referring to them not being able to cope up academically? Or the cultural difference or racism.

I've known a couple of these students back from my college and they seemed to be doing alright.

This sounds like something people could perceive about Clemson so I'll use them as an example.

In SC funding went down while tuition went up and lottery scholarships went up. The university budget is around $800 million / year and the athletic department across all sports is about $80 million / year. Of that budget, it's entirely self sustained but it's also almost entirely spent. It's performance has no impact on the rest of the university except for alumni engagement/excitement. Even if it were making a $20 million dollar profit it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the total university budget.

At the same time, applications are through the roof and there's not enough room to take everybody (but they are investing in new buildings to increase capacity). The ratio of in state to out of state has always remained close to 60/30 though.

Admin costs have increased but the prestige factor has gone up significantly as well. Clemson went from being the #70 something PUBLIC university to a top 20 in the span of 2 decades.

The cut in state support coincides with a successful propaganda campaign that turned the public against academics and science.

I didn't think of that ... but not surprising. The cuts in my state started in the Bush era under a Democratic governor.

Very sad that a Dem aided and abetted this.

I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals.

I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget.

I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.

In my experience (former PhD student and instructor and my spouse is a full-time faculty and program director), if you're a tenured faculty member at a R1 university, then grant writing is your job. You're expected to be self-funding and the only way to do this is to grind out grants and pass the work onto graduate students and staff. And, you pay a ~50% tax on your grant award as 'overhead' to the university, so you have a lot less money to work with than the sticker value that gets awarded.

At the university level, arguably the second most important person in the administration is the President of the Foundation and they don't even technically work for the university as the foundation is a separate legal entity. This person has a massive private army of fund-raising staff that shakes the alumni money tree looking for gifts large and small.

But, that doesn't mean that universities don't also have money chasers. My former uni had a special division in the recruiting/admission office that focused on high-value future alumni, aka, children of rich and famous parents. These kids were brought in for tailored events, private meetings with faculty and admins, and received a general red carpet treatment to try and lure them to the university.

Related, Malcom Gladwell has done some great work dissecting the money making machines of the administrator class who go after $100M+ gifts (far more money than 99.99% of researchers could acquire in a lifetime of grants). And, how this gift giving continues to pile on at elite schools while starving everyone else of gifts.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

Many of my social circle work as grad students at a private R1 institution, and I've seen a vast difference in the experience of students with a PI who self-funds and writes grants all day - less interaction, most of the teaching and mentoring is done by postdocs - and a PI that has an alternate source of funding like clinical work - grants are still needed but less often, much more hands-on input to projects, much more direct mentoring. It seems like the top universities could definitely chip in to help ease that load on the researchers: science as a whole stands to benefit.

> I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

At least at my university, there were a few technical writers that would help out writing grants and papers. AFAIK they were underutilized. It may vary by field and from PI to PI, but, in general, PIs wouldn't accept anyone else's writing. Everything that was penned by a technical writer was rewritten.

> most of the teaching and mentoring is done by postdocs

Or (best of all, in my experience) some older tenured full professors that don't care about getting funding anymore (or funding is thrown at them because they're famous). A few professors in their late 70's would spend entire afternoons helping me get something to work.

That may be further evidence that the real drain on mentoring is the constant need to write grants. Sad that some really enjoyed mentoring younger people but they couldn't until they were about to retire.

> I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

Who would pay them?

Presumably they'd pay for themselves because the universities would bring in larger future grants, because the output would be increased, because the academic staff would be better utilized.

The amount of money the university got from those grants would be lower, though, because they'd have to pay the grant writers. That sounds bad. What if instead the professors just applied to larger grants and worked overtime? That's what they do right now, and it works.

Some of the Ivys take around 65-70 percent, and a few places (admittedly with very specialised facilities) are over 100%--spend a dollar on research, spend another (edit: had written two) on admin.

To be clear, a 60%-70% overhead rate implies that the university is taking 37-42% of the money (for each dollar spent, another 0.60-0.70 goes to university). In addition, other expenses like tuition and equipment have no overhead taken out.

Tuition/stipend for grad students and equipment most definitely has overhead, at least from my experience in the UC system.

Tuition is funny money though, it's money the university is charging itself for nothing. You pay tuition to take a 3 credit class that never meets, doesn't have an instructor, and has no assignments. It's just there to justify the $10k a semester or whatever the university wants to charge the grant. Grad students in CS at least are expected to provide their own equipment, also.

Sure, but it's almost always quoted as a rate like this.

Equipment is a special case in that "capital" equipment is usually exempt from most or all overhead. Smaller things are often not though, and some things are very difficult to charge to a grant at all.

This is wrong. 50% overhead means for every dollar in, an additional 50 cent "tax" is paid as overhead (thus, out of 1.50 total, 1.00 goes to the research, 0.50 to the overhead).

A cynic might think failure is success for them.

"Don't worry, we can have an adjunct professor do it on the cheap."

And then they come to us for tax dollars, while also slashing their involvement with local communities. Why should education tax money go to universities that are so woefully inefficient and bloated with money when it could be spent on primary and secondary education, or better access to preschooling?

I dated someone who worked an administrative position... she would complain of coworkers who would do nothing all day. She said her job was being done by three people when only one was needed. The lack of oversight and actual work being done was alarming. Who administrates the administrators? No one.

It seems like there should be a market for low overhead small schools with high paid teaching staff.

Right? I've thought about this as well. My guess is that:

1) Nearly all university students are making their decision when they're 18, so a lot of them are mostly interested in non-academic aspects of their school

2) It seems really hard to actually start a new university. Anecdotally, every university I can think of is quite old.

3) This is probably related to (2). The benefits of universities aren't really dependent on good professors. The advantage of top schools in both educational progress and student outcomes can probably mostly explained by signalling, filtering out weak students before they arrive, university culture, and networking. None of this has much to do with professors.

> filtering out "weak" students before they arrive

This has a huge effect on pushing schools to the top. You can take a public institution (eg University of Washington, since they're notorious for this), put an artificially high bar on entering a program (eg UW CSE since, again, notoriety), and take in all the public money you want while only admitting the top 10% of students. The school is happy for the brain blast, the state is happy to fund a "prestigious" university, and the people are happy to fund so many smart students attending their university instead of another. Everyone wins, right?

Wrong. One of the many problems with this technique is how a university quantifies what is considered a "weak student". Is it low test scores? Bad entrance essay? No planning on the part of the student? Whatever Pearson Hall or McGraw Hill will set on their outsourcing offerings? It's a giant can of worms in terms of what individual strengths and weaknesses are, and how they can either enhance or limit academic performance.

For the university "market", the only game in town is prestige, which teaching quality plays into very little, if at all.

That's especially true for some professions (like law) but less true for most others.

For other fields, school prestige can help you get that first job, but the value of being able to say you were educated at X drops quickly once you start working. Once you've been working for a while, your portfolio, social skills, professional network, and track record are far more important than the issuer of your degree.

They're called “community colleges” (faculty are paid less than universities, but they still have a comparatively high-paid overall teaching staff because the faculty get all the teaching duties, none of it is farmed out to really low-paid grad students.)

And, yes, there's a market for them.

(This is also what a lot of private, non-research schools sell themselves as, and some actually fit the bill without being abusive frauds, though the money available and historical ease of getting away with being an abusive fraud in that area has made it hard to find the wheat among all the chaff.)

They were looking at doing this at my last job (small private university).

We already outsourced custodial and food service. Do student accounts and financial aid really define us as a university? Are they part of our core competency? Do we do them particularly well relative to competitors?

Of course not. So why not outsource them?

Please please please tell me where these schools are. I have two teenage sons on college tracks in high school, and absolutely terrified at the bankruptcy inducing sums bearing down on me like a freight train.

Several years ago in the animation industry things like Animation Mentor, AnimSchool, etc. popped up to provide cheap(er) classes that were much higher quality than what was offered at almost any big 4-year institution. They were able to do this by paying working professionals side money to generate content and provide student feedback. Code bootcamps seem to be a continuation of this theme.

I believe this is the model Olin tries to follow. In general, institutions that don't offer graduate programs can afford to focus on undergrads. You can see this with the small liberal arts colleges, although they generally fail at low overhead and tend to succumb to the donor-industrial adminstrative complex.

Couldn't agree more. It's not so much about the prestige but guaranteeing good employment options.

The admin staff is a problem but does not seem to be the main problem: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m....

Universities are like dictatorships where only staff has a vote on if the top executives should stay in their job. Since professors are tenured and are therefore not beholden to anyone, the top executives are highly incentivised to increase the pool of voters that they have leverage over in order to create a stable coalition. This pool is administrative staff.

This problem is further aggravated by the fact that students often choose Universities based upon reputation and are therefore rather insensitive to price increases, so extra spend on administrative staff is easy to find. In addition to this the government gives away student loans that matches rising tuition costs and because you can't get rid of student loans in bankruptcy it is an attractive asset class even for private lenders.

I work for a university and while I think there's some justification for increases in some roles - many universities desperately need internal equivalents of an 18F/US Digital service type entity among other things.

Other situations are complex - grants/external funding impose substantial administration requirements (while being larger and larger shares of revenue) or require substantial administrative expertise, often require things like outreach programs which PIs don't want to deal with, etc.

But at the same time, I think administrative salaries are frequently unconscionable.

Exactly!

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

"...some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance."

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