Classic bureaucratization, really... when the buyer and the seller of something (e.g. a university degree) are disconnected by way of, say, a flood of cheap student loans, the incentive structure for the bureaucracy is to increase its own budget, staff, and therefore power.
It's no wonder that administration has exploded along with tuitions.
Lack of tenured positions really has very little to do with it.
Lower subsidies led to a reduction in tenured positions to reduce educational costs as well as to a rapid expansion of administrators whose job it is to obtain funds from donations, grants, and corporations. Unfunded government mandates like Title IX and so forth have also led to the expansion of the administration and increasing education costs.
The main point is, professors don’t need life-time protection in many fields where research is increasingly focused on obtaining results in short term, and has become money driven. The gap between the type of research in academia and industry is not that much in many areas.
Perhaps a 5-years contract model would work better: a performance review every 5 years. Professors get some job security if they want to pursue problems sometime ahead of the industry. The duration could depend on the field.
A French CDI contract doesn't mean job security. You can be fired for low performance, or for economical reasons. You'll get a few months salary in the process, a couple of months notice, but they'll fire you if they want too.
Nobody agrees on what this looks like. So you're just asking for a big fight about that - exactly the kind that already happens for admissions.
Well, what kind of knowledge do you have of university internals?
Most people here on HN who want to get rid of university admin are on the outside looking in, and find it very hard to understand what all the admin do.
In my experience, when I start to explain that a university is more like a town than a school, and "admin" are in fact the people who run the town and implement the services, it becomes very hard to identify where the cuts should be. The library? IT? Health center? police? The arts complex and associated services? The sports complex and associated services? The transportation system?
And before you say these aren't the prerogative of a university, because a university is just a school, and it shouldn't offer these things, I have two responses. One, you're thinking of a "college". Two, if universities get rid of these services, often times the local town cannot replace them. So how are they to manage?
So if you're having trouble understanding why a university can't simply cut or automate all the administrators, it could be because you don't have a clear understanding of their role and why they are crucial. Universities require bureaucracies and they don't scale linearly with the size of the student population.
Per https://mndaily.com/193678/uncategorized/statistics-show-inc... between 1999 and 2010 admin jobs increased 75% across universities.
Per https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-... over the last 20 years, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.
So were universities in 2000 providing unacceptable level of admin service or was the level of service just fine and they got bloated because they could, not because they needed to?
Or put another way:
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it explains the vast majority of the bloat.
Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately they demand greater services.
Implicit here is that there is or should be some sort of linear or sublinear relationship to admin and the student body. If the number of admin grows faster than the student body, is that strange, and is it bad?
1) is that strange?
It's not clear this is strange. First, Universities are highly modular organizations, so there's a lot of duplicated effort. Let's say it takes 5 faculty, and 3 admin to run a department that services 10 students. We open a new department and double our students, so we have 10 faculty, 6 admin, and 20 students. But now with all those students, we need two Teaching Assistants. Turns out that hiring an admin to manage the teaching assistants frees 2 faculty to do more research, so we hire another admin to do that. Student population stays the same. The students need a health center now because the local health facilities are insufficient, so now we need to open a whole health center and that requires 3 new staff with 2 admins. So admin has grown again with no new students.
You see how this can go? For a place line Yale or Stanford, which offer full hospitals, law schools, giant sport facilities, manages dozens of buildings, hundreds of programs and degrees, food services, safety services, IT services, library services... all of these things require coordination and management, and that can easily balloon without adding a single new student.
2) is that bad?
Now, the argument is usually that the students don't need all these things. Well first of all, the standards are much higher than they were even when I was in school in the 2000s. Back then research at an undergraduate level was optional, these days it's required or you are not competitive as a candidate. What does that mean? It means more undergrads in research, so we need more faculty support for undergraduate research experiences. That means freeing up faculty time with services like graders, research offices, legal offices, tutoring support, student services, and all the administrators that go with that. But it frees up faculty time to work 1:1 with students, which, was the goal.
However if you look at that from the outside, you see "administrative bloat". Take all that away without understanding the why, and you end up with fewer administrators, but the faculty have to do more work now chasing grant money and grading. If you don't want them to be doing that, we need to figure out as a society how to dole out research grants, but until then, it is what it is.
Secondly though, universities aren't just for students. My argument is in fact they are towns, and they are there for everyone there. Students, faculty, staff, admins, the general public, the cafeteria workers, the IT people, the librarians, police, the children at the campus daycare, program director at the arts center, the sports facility managers... everyone. A university is a livable, walkable, self-contained town where everyone is focused and oriented on the pursuit of higher education. What a great thing to have in our society, which by and large is oriented around the pursuit of profit.
I think the more our society becomes focused on profit, the more universities will be forced to grow their scope. If we want them to dial back, let's invest in our local communities.
First, find a way to accurately, fairly, and unambiguously define and measure those qualities.
This would be great, but I will present without comment the fact that lots of large universities are suddenly getting rid of standardized-test-based admissions, which is by far the best way that we know how to do ability-based admissions.
You must understand the dynamics behind that decision to understand why it isn't currently legally/institutionally feasible to have merit-based admission.
Is this for any institution of higher learning? Or just public institutions (ie, institutions that receive public/federal money)?