Something feels really off when I read that for 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrators.[a]
[a] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptabl...
Are administrators exclusively for administrative work? Or does this also include people like teaching aides, lab assistants, etc. which aren't exactly "faculty" but also aren't doing, well, administrative work?
On the face of it, this number sounds completely bonkers. So bonkers that I suspect that there's some nuance to it and that these "administrators" are doing more than just "administrating". Maybe not, but really needs some more detail than this.
These schools really are bureaucratic monsters. They need to make more money so they can hire more fundraisers so they can make more money etc.
1. https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/princeton-university-is...
Um, lots.
Very much not niche, not tiny firms catering to the even more stupidly wealthy than any individual human: customers aren’t always natural persons.
It’s the faculty that are replaceable. Students go to a university because they like the administration. It’s like a resort.
(The faculty may be adding value by being in academia at all, but it doesn’t matter for students which particular ones you meet. It could if you wanted to enter academia yourself, but you definitely don’t want to do that.)
Only if a "bad year" is one where the majority of college-age students in the world are precluded from applying to college due to natural disasters or the like. A realistic "bad year" would mean that the same number of students are admitted, but Stanford breaks some informal non-poaching agreements with Harvard / Yale / Princeton, or perhaps admits some students at a lower bar than the administration was hoping.
But https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts shows somewhat different numbers.
https://reason.com/2022/12/01/students-at-yale-faced-mental-...
But digging in it seems they may have been a little sloppy in their statement.
From memory (the last time this came up) That number includes staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (a National Lab, Stanford University Medical Center (which runs two hospitals and a bunch of clinics), Stanford University Press, and all of the research administration needed to manage the (many) grants Stanford gets.
These are admin-intensive things: federal contracting involves lots of paperwork, healthcare + insurance is a nightmare too. Plus, many of these involve staff that aren’t students (nurses at the hospital, scientists at SLAC, etc), all of whom still need “normal” admin things like parking, HR, and payroll, so the per-student denominator is a bit misleading.
And they have their own police force, own thousand of houses, and all the infra too (including streets, roads, sewers, etc).
Stanford is immensely rich, just considering their land holdings alone...
Major universities aren't primarily about educating undergraduates, and of course graduate students (about half of that student population at Stanford) are essentially "employees" from a economic production perspective. So really it's about 8k kids paying to learn near the activities of 10k researchers and academics, and the 16k administrators are just the staff needed to keep those 10k workers productive. Which... sounds about right to me?
PS. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Even though I disagree with you, I find your comment valuable.
That's the same logic you see on Fox Business when guests demand that we defund the entire federal government because something they don't agree with got funded. Whether or not you personally see value isn't really the issue here. You get that, right?
Even granting that the post is likely to ineffective and silly (something I'd agree with, FWIW) lots of people at the school value things like inclusion, community and "integrative learning" and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Also post-secondary tuition has been beating general inflation, but lagging many other areas. This link says it's been growing at 4.63% for the last decade, which is less than most real estate markets. The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
Over the past four decades, the rise in the cost of post-secondary education has outpaced everything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_...
The cost attending a comparable elite university in other countries is often multiple times lower. For example, tuition at Cambridge University for British citizens is ~$9K/year: https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergra...
The only people I personally know who think bureaucratic bloat isn't a big problem at elite universities in the US are themselves members of that bureaucracy. All the college professors I personally know think bureaucratic bloat is a problem. All the college students I personally know (mostly relatives) also think bureaucratic bloat is a problem.
Because the costs are hidden. Ask them if they'd continue to fund that bureaucracy if they knew that cutting it would cut their tuition in half. I think you'll see a very different result.
> The idea of tuition being "out of hand" is mostly just a meme.
You're in a bubble. US tuition is the most expensive in the world.
Probably true. Although you might find considerable disagreement as to what, exactly, “community” means.
> and want to see the school prioritize it in its staffing decisions.
Prioritize how?
If you mean that hiring for unrelated positions should be require DEI statements, I think you’ll find this is an unpopular view.
If you mean that one should choose one’s hires inclusively such that one preferentially hires people of specific races, ethnicities, etc, then you may find that this is unpopular, or illegal, or dubiously legal, or maybe even unproductive for the purpose of improving the degree to which one’s staff is a representative sample of the population.
If you mean that a university should hire such that the student community feels like a community, then I bet many people agree but may feel that the universities are not actually succeeding.
It makes it trivially easy to bait mainstream liberals into seeming to embrace wacky ideas. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
That may be true, but why would you do that here?
There is literally no genuine reason why any of this has to exist at the scale it does. Standford's 16,000 administrative staff are not solving problem core to what a University does; they are solving problems they invented, or they're simply not actually solving problems at all, but will nonetheless defend their paychecks with their life.
Diversity & Inclusion is a totally reasonable thing to want. What impact have they had? In 2021, Stanford's admissions statics were: 28% white, 25% asian, 18% hispanic, 7% black. Compare that to US-wide statistics: 75% white, 19% hispanic, 14% black, 6% asian (its multiple choice). 65% of Stanford's admissions did not come from California, so this is a more fair comparison than just California's population.
What someone with a title in that department would say is: well, we've made progress, but there's clearly still more work to do. Internally; they're likely just as frustrated as anyone; because they'd know better than anyone that the system is wholly rigged against their ability to make equity a priority. The system, in any organization, optimizes only for one thing: Revenue. Any change which could hurt revenue (in Stanford's case: maybe reducing international admissions) will never be given serious consideration.
That's the critical piece: when a Fox News rightwinger says they want to defund the federal government, or a leftwinger says they want to defund the police: Absolutely, they're overreacting with respect to the scope of their specific issue with the system they're criticizing. But our systems have become too big within which to create meaningful change and these systems' reward functions are so perverted to any generally optically good goal that what little people can influence them is always implemented through the lens of that reward function (in nearly every case, the reward function is revenue, but there are cases like the Police where the reward function is more-so something like "keeping officers safe"; ultimately this is the same reward function though, its "keeping the system's insiders happy").
Its worth being abundantly clear about this: these giga-systems like Stanford or the Federal Government are another symptom of the low interest rate environment. Its always macroeconomics. Every good and bad thing that has ever happened has macroeconomic causes. If we end up entering a decade+ period of more expensive money, you'll slowly start wondering if your statement that "the school should staff someone dedicated to inclusion and community" makes sense. The fact that they are capable of hiring people to review the guest lists of parties is a problem of excess; not a symptom of the system approaching an ideal state.
Universities are a tremendously interesting case study on what impacts cheap money has had on our macroeconomic system; because there's literally nowhere else with cheaper money. Students bundle up on loans, which they can't default on, and thus there's zero acceptance criteria for loan eligibility. What isn't paid for in loans comes from donations and investment returns, during the largest bull market in the history of economics. All of this will come crashing down in the next five years, and Universities which let themselves balloon up to solve problems that few of their customers (students) actually care about will have a substantially harder time adjusting than one which, say, never hired twenty people to review the guest lists of parties in the first place.
My point was exactly the converse: let's look at evidence for the "general problem of systemic bureaucracy" instead of using ridiculous job titles as a stand-in straw man to beat up.
Laughing at a woke job title is a logical fallacy. If you want to make a broad point that Universities spend more on administration than necessary, I'd want to see numbers comparing them to similar private organizations, etc...
At the department level, there were of course deans, provosts, counselors, admissions people, etc etc etc, but even that departmental overhead wasn't more than maybe a 1:8 ratio compared to the number of grad students.
I'm sure there was similar or even greater proportional administrative staff once you got to the university level, but even if you include every single employee in big departments like Research and Graduate Admissions, it wasn't anywhere close to even half the number of students. I know this because the entirety of the administration fit into a few old buildings in half the campus, while the rest of the buildings on that half and all of the buildings in the newer part of campus were filled with labs and classrooms.
So in the ensuing twenty years, administrators have either gotten massively worse at their jobs and required far more of them to accomplish the same things (running directly counter to the general trends in worker productivity in that time), or they've created an immense amount of new make-work for themselves and their colleagues. Articles like this point pretty strongly at the latter explanation.
I feel that since they have no shortage of money, they don't feel the pinch of hiring more admins. Thus the number of admins has increased.
Only if you close your eyes and shut your ears and not count any of the facilities, HR, finance, legal, admin, media, procurement, and janitorial staff.
I personally haven't seen a lot of SWEs spending much of their time paying the power bill, laying out offices, cleaning toilets, or sending out W-2s.
In another place we had maybe 30-40 two person offices, and 3 of them were occupied by HR/finance/admin/facilities etc...
So 1/100 does not sound very realistic (maybe for all-remote orgs?), but 1/10 I can easily believe.
Outsourcing the tail doesn't mean it doesn't exist (it might make it slightly more efficient, or it might just be a convenience bevause it gives you someone else that is liable in the event of a mistake.)
Of course, there seem to be a lot of administrators these days if all the articles are right, so perhaps there are now extra ones doing nothing particularly useful or administrators whose job is to make policy.’
There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks.
I'd say an alternate time[0] (up to ~50 years ago) rather than an alternate world.
That said, domestic servants are still common today in some parts of the world.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liaise
amluto notes: >"There is no administrator that actually helps students with daily tasks."<
We graciously thank you for pointing out this oversight and shall take measures immediately to correct it and ensure it never happens again!
As sad as it may be, Poe's Law[0] really is a thing:
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that,
without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any
parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers
for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
There guest list two weeks in advance seems useless for that.