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Stanford and other top institutions can't really be compared to other schools, students fees are not how these institutions make money. There are massive business arms tying in to fortune 500s, political think tanks, government institutions, etc. It's a whole different game for schools at this level.

To understand administrative bloat in the US it's much more instructive to look somewhere like University of Idaho where the business of charging students for services rendered is the main game in town. It's there you can see how administrative services have drastically ballooned costs for just the education.

Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital and real estate firm which operates a school on the side for the tax exemption. Back in the early 1990s, Stanford split off their endowment and land operations into a separate company, the Stanford Management Company. That worked out very well. They had startup money in Cisco, Yahoo, Google... Over time, the SMC tail came to wag the SU dog.

> Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital and real estate firm which operates a school on the side for the tax exemption

You forgot about the massive hedge fund – and the professional sports teams.

Also, the top institutions also offer substantial need-based aid, so the top-line tuition number is really only applicable to households with income over ~$200-$250K. At Harvard a family with $150K income will pay $15K, see https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet I think this is typical across the Ivies. That's basically in-state tuition at UMass https://www.umass.edu/admissions/undergraduate-admissions/co...

Great find. You missed the best part: <<Families with incomes between $75,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0-10% of their income...>>

That means for income <= 75K, Harvard tuition is free! That is impressive. Their system looks fair in comparison to other US universities. This system looks similar to progressive taxation (higher income pays more taxes).

For readers not familiar with US university system: This will not include "room & board" (housing & food).

For Harvard, that's not true – financial aid covers the cost of room and board.

(There is a student contribution of ~$3,000/year, which is fairly easily met through on campus jobs).

Cripes! That is even better.

Yes, but the foreign students pay full price, AFAIK.

Per Harvard's page linked above: "Foreign students have the same access to financial aid funding as U.S. citizens."

well, good thing I added the AFAIK. It's not as simple as I thought.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

https://www.collegexpress.com/interests/international-studen...

Tax-funded universities are less generous, though.

That doesn't rule out indirect influence, no? The likes of Stanford are what other universities aim for, so if the implicit message is 'If you want to play in that league, you need a massive administration and pretty facilities for them', then you shouldn't be surprised to see other universities, who don't necessarily have the same financial means, trying to mimic that.

> students fees are not how these institutions make money

"Student income" was 15% of Stanford's $7.4B budget (excluding capital improvement and hospitals) in 2021-22.

So... only $1.11 billion or so.

source: https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances/

They can be compared since universities are direct perfect substitutes.

Price sets expectations. If you tie your service to lower tier pricing , you are indirectly communicating that your service value is substantially lower.

This calculus is literally happening in administrators minds. They so much have admitted this in the past.

Just want to caution that the legalese is really important here. I know that at Stanford all the IP and patents stay with the researcher. Meaning that they keep all the money from their discoveries. Contrast this with the UCs where you have to sell the UCs your patents and IP for $1.

> Stanford and other top institutions can't really be compared to other schools, students fees are not how these institutions make money. There are massive business arms tying in to fortune 500s, political think tanks, government institutions, etc. It's a whole different game for schools at this level.

Then they are welcome to stop charging students fees.

From what I'm seeing online Stanford has about 22k students in 2022. 2700 does seem like a large number compared to the student population, and given it seems like it isn't meant to house all the administrative staff, that does seem like a lot.

That said, Stanford is private, so I'm not sure they're a good example. Various state universities seem like they would be a more apt target to look at to see what this is like in reality.

According to the internet:

Stanford University has 24,916 employees.Jul 11, 2022

That might include grad students? See below from https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/staff/

In 2021 15,750 staff members supported teaching, learning, research and core operations at Stanford ...This includes ... 1,603 staff at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory .. Includes clinical educator and research staff.

Makes sense: 2300 professors, and then a butler for every student.

Does that include TAs and faculty?

Yes, and note that the clinical staff who instruct students are also counted in the employee numbers. I can't find a number for Stanford but Yale has 1,729 "continuing" medical faculty: https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts I would not be surprised if Stanford had the same or more.

Anecdotally I just looked up the number of municipal employees for 2 random towns with populations of about 28,000 people. 1500 employees. I believe that's including teachers, police, etc. not just administrators.

Terrific insight.

Higher ed's admin:student ratios are closer to resort hotels.

My local uni has definitely transformed into a resort.

One of the consequences of charging full enrollment are the customers now expect a comparable (material) experience.

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

Eh, that number is misleading.

SLAC National Accelerator, a National Lab that Stanford happens to run, employs about 1,600 people. They don't necessarily need to interact with students; other national labs are run by corporations (e.g., Sandia is run by Honeywell).

Stanford has a massive medical system, including an adult and children's hospital. They are teaching hospitals, and so part of the point is to train medical students and residents, but they also need all the staff of a regular (actually, top-of-the-line) hospital: doctors, nurses, techs, porters, billing, payroll, etc.

On top of that, Stanford also has a massive research program funded by grants from (e.g.,) the NIH, NSF, and DOD This requires people to actually do the research (heavily-funded profs rarely teach, plus postdocs and research scientists) and support it (animal health techs, machinists, etc). There is also a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting, doing, and accounting for that work. It certainly depends—in part—on grad student labor, but it's also not directly linked.

All in all, big research-intensive universities do a lot more than classroom education and the staff sizes reflect that. I'm sure there's room for improvement (I work at one and purchasing is currently a nightmare), but staff/students is not a great metric.

None of that is at Ark B in Redwood City. That location is entirely administration.

Some of that is administration. Medical research (legally) requires all kinds of oversight committees: DSMBs for clinical trials, IRBs for experiments involving humans and IACUCs for work with animals. The Sponsored Research folks help prepare proposals and make sure that work is done and money is spent in compliance with the sponsors' policies. I'd bet many of those forks are at Redwood City.

The rest of it takes administration. The folks at SLAC need to get paid. Someone needs to check that the doctors and nurses at Stanford Medical are appropriately licensed; once they are, someone also needs to find somewhere for them to park.

They list what's out there: https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory, which also includes Stanford University Press and the Tech Transfer Office.

From the original comment:

> "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human resources, development and Land, Buildings & Real Estate. Stanford will be the city’s third-largest employer in Redwood City."

Administration for the school of medicine is literally the first group cited.

Stanford Medical is everywhere around here.

As a sibling commenter noted, these figures around "staff" employees are super misleading and tend to cherrypick the most egregious examples of administrative bloat. For example, I worked for several years as a staff researcher at Harvard; along with ~30 other "staff" employees and a few members of faculty we published papers and built open-source software. Firing 9 in 10 staff employees - as the author of the article wants to do - would completely gut a huge amount of the work that big research universities do.

> Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators.

Mmm... I read an article once that pointed out that there are two basic schools of thought on "why college is so expensive today". Some people say it's more expensive to run a college, and so tuition has to cover that. And some people say it's more important to have a degree, or easier to get your college expenses financed, and so tuition expands to meet demand.

It's very easy to distinguish between these two theories at a basic level: one of them says that prices have gone up because supply has fallen, and the other says prices have gone up because demand has risen. But the article pointed out that, while these two causes have the same directional effect on prices, they have opposite effects on quantity sold: if supply has fallen, you see fewer purchases at higher prices, whereas if demand has risen, you see more purchases at higher prices.

And it's very clear that colleges are in the second scenario, with prices and enrollment rising in tandem.

But "it's because of administration costs" is a supply-has-fallen theory. It would make more sense to explain Stanford's luxury campus for administrators by saying that Stanford has so much money coming in, the administrators can afford to help themselves.

It’s just out of comfortable cycling distance. It’s built to attract talent from peer institutions.

> libraries and archives

This is a legit function of a university.

Meanwhile TAs, instructors, or anyone in faculty without tenure gets paid how much again? Less than $20/hr?

TAs are paid like 3000$/m for 20h/w. So more like 30$/h.