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...
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...
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...
Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.
You can find smaller scale versions that operate on similar principles. https://hbr.org/2013/11/hierarchy-is-overrated
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.
So, it looks like a duck and smells like a duck to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very sad that a Dem aided and abetted this.