I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia...
"Academic staff: 2,219
Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC
Students: 16,430"
Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.
"Academic staff: 2,219
Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC
Students: 16,430"
Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.
That data point could change the student-employee ratio from 1:1 to 2:1
Universities have two roles: Teaching and Research. You are welcome to your own thoughts about whether or not they should be grouped together the way they are, but that is the current situation, and it turns out that Stanford is a big research university.
It is, and it doesn't get as much formal recognition in the research world. Some folks are trying to change this [0], but unfortunately for the moment research software engineers often end up more of a happy accident than a deliberate decision on the part of labs. Part of this is due to weirdness in how funding is allocated for research positions at universities- instead of research programmers being funded through operating expenses like a secretary, administrator or many (but not all) librarians, most lab positions are dependent upon soft money (i.e., grants) that could potentially evaporate unexpectedly. I had a friend at ${BAY_AREA_UNIVERSITY} who almost had this happen to him recently, but fortunately his PI got another grant so he didn't need to get furloughed/laid off. When I was living in Ithaca, I noticed a similar trend of non-faculty taking sabbaticals due to funding issues and then returning 6 months to a year or so later in a different department [1]. That sort of instability in employment is part of what scared me into moving to a major metropolitan area- I still work for a university, but I know I have options (although I'm currently not funded by soft money- last job was though).
[1] Possibly more of a perception than a reality.
My only complaint would be that the pay is a little on the low side. Otherwise the work and the work environment are both excellent.
They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0]
[0}https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financi...
How many of them have their parents paying anyways?
> Administrative staff: 452
> Students: 8000(approx)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applie...
Is this considered extreme even in america?
I live in eastern europe and I was trying to remember what kind of administrative staff I encountered in my 6 years of university.
Apart from the people who handle the paperwork for admissions and cleaning ladies I honestly can't think any.
Pretty much everyone who is drawing a salary, and is not a lecturing professor is administrative staff. If your university consists of a dozen lecture halls, and a storage closet, you don't need any administrative staff. The more facilities and services you have, the more administrative staff you will have. Stanford probably has a lot more facilities then your university did.
If you just want to lecture to people, education can be incredibly cheap. If you want to lecture to people, and have them use expensive lab equipment, and have them live on campus, and have hundreds of people, with teams of assistants doing research... It's going to be expensive.
* a large enough headcount that you need an HR department,
* a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants,
* a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space),
* a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff,
* a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.),
* a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools,
* a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities),
* and several other functions.
For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases.
FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.
Also, pay attention to what the bill/referendum is for. Any competent district will have a website explaining to the public what the funds are going to be used for.
In particular, be careful about voting against bond issues that are placed on the ballot within one or two years of the maturation date for a similarly sized bond. Because those are basically a continuation of the status quo, and voting them down can mean costly deferred maintenance and/or dumb financial trade-offs.
Real example: firing a whole bunch of people this year to pay for asbestos removal in cash money (because the bond issue wasn't passed and this NEEDS to be done in order to use the building), and then re-hiring a bunch of people the next year. Because the bond issue failed and the bond issue is literally the only legal way to amortize the cost of the asbestos removal. So, I guess no amortization, we pay upfront and fire a bunch folks for a year in order to afford it. (BTW, we all know from the software industry what happens when you lay off a bunch of people -- you lose your best folks and it becomes difficult to recruit good people).
Think of it like this: school districts in many states literally can't amortize their capital costs without coming to you with a ballot initiative. By voting "no" carte blanc, you're basically saying "I carte blanc disapprove of my local school district using amortization". Which is pretty unreasonable.
My unit in the university has:
Academic staff: 10
Administrative staff: 70
Students: 0
Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.
Also I doubt if it is a case where researchers just perform the main rituals and others do all the remaining work.
If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc.
If we have to do this, lets put the saddle on the right horse.
That's often how it works these days. Means the university can keep most of the workers on lower pay scales and avoid having to grant them tenure.
Well yeah. Professors are like business unit leaders/managers, acquiring funding for research and setting the main outline of what to do. Then the others (usually, although not always, designated 'administrative staff', or grad students/post docs) execute the work. I'm not sure I would call them 'real workers', that implies that others (i.e., managers) don't do 'real work'. I mean I understand what you say - you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
The thing is its always easy to see who 'produces something'. When you start talking about 'creating the circumstances', you trigger of a chain of helpers, who help helpers, who ... and so on. Until you arrive at a point where there is a whole hierarchy of people sitting just to approve things, keep records and pass memos.
Most universities only distinguish between "academic" positions and "staff" positions.
At most universities, "Academic" positions are something rather specific: usually only the faculty proper, Ph.D.-holding researchers, and maybe a few other student-facing roles (e.g., librarians).
Here is my quick two-part litmus test that's probably pretty accurate for most universities. Assuming you don't know for certain that you are in the "academic" or "staff" bucket, consider these two questions:
0. Are you a Ph.D. student with some funny title like "research assistant"? You are a student. You are not "staff". You are not "academic". You are a student.
1. Do you hold a Ph.D. AND listed as a co-PI on grants? If yes, you're most likely in an "academic" role. If not, you're most likely in a "staff" role (unless you're working with someone who has a shitload of clout).
What happens often in reporting is that "academic" and "staff" numbers are reported, and we assume "staff = administrative".
See the Stanford numbers, for example. Notice how there's no category for "non-administrative non-academic staff". You're either a member of the "academic" group or you're an "other", and the "other" group is not broken out into "administrative" and "not administrative".
Hopefully, this helps. It's all rather confusing and political and, in many cases, institution-specific :)
Or would you prefer tenured professors doing all that work, instead of teaching, or research?
If that's what "administrators" means, then fair enough - but my understanding of the title "administrator" is people who organize the curriculum, schedule staff, students and classrooms, maintain the website, conduct student intake, that kind of thing. And those are the jobs that I would expect to be streamlined via computers.
Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go?
Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there.
The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away.
I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".
12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
If so then based on how large the campus is, it could still make sense. But I doubt if those sort of jobs are covered in that term.
Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.
That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments.
And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).
There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!".
A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.
The US is currently at record low unemployment rates, for the last couple decades, so if we start doing these things now, then unemployment will go up by only a couple percent.
And over time those unemployed people will get different jobs. As that's what happens today when people lose their job.
Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc...
Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment.
Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too!
But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.
For example, my university had a very extensive dining system, all within a block of town, which was full of restaurants. The dining halls were more expensive than the restaurants. But everyone had to buy a super-expensive meal plan, to prop up this ridiculous side-business of the university.
You'd probably be right up to about 80%. Then all of the edge cases come in and it falls down, having a real impact on students. If you want to operate a university on the Pareto Principle, then fair enough, but there's a whole lot that goes on that requires tweaks and human consideration which breaks fundamental systems, usually when students need them the most.
Or why did the university need a whole administrative department to cater to the “needs” of every kind of minority you can think of (one department per kind of minority)?
Remove the financial incentives for inefficient work and you will get 10,000 ways to make universities more efficient.
Who cares?
Nobody is owed employment. Nobody is owed financial stability. If they have real, useful skills, get a job somewhere else, if not, they can go back to school. It will have just gotten a little bit cheaper.