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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I had one professor at college who remarked on how all of the parking garages on campus used to be parking lots 30 years ago, and are equally full today that they were back then. The student and faculty population hasn't changed over that time, but the growth of administration was explosive.

I don't entirely know how much of this is attributable to each part, but my suggestions are that these administrators are driven by:

1. Increases in student services (ie sports)

2. Laws and regulations, like Title IX

3. Increased bureaucracy around government grants and research funding

4. Huge endowments that need managers

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May I suggest a fifth possibility: your core assumption is flawed and your professor hasn’t been paying attention.

Unless your college is failing, it is hard to believe that the student population hasn’t changed significantly over the last 30 years, when the US population has almost grown by 30%.

I attended UCI over 25 years ago. The student population has since more than doubled. Tuition rates, interestingly have also almost doubled.

This was at a college where indeed the student population did not change in size. The same goes for the professors, whose population grew about 5% over that time.

Not every school wants to grow the size of their student body. And there shouldn't be any reason why they would be forced to.

That's a weird thing to say since many small and rather well regarded private schools stay small on purpose.

For example, do you really think Dartmouth is failing?

Yeah, the parent comment here should have been thinking Dartmouth rather than about one of the UCs for their model school. This was Caltech.

Well, as a fellow alum, I can tell you they definitely screwed up the last two points (esp ITAR) within living memory.

Yeah, the list I provided there were areas where Caltech grew significantly. I wasn't sure if other schools were the same.

Many elite colleges have opted to keep class sizes small, and make themselves more selective instead. It is pretty despicable. It sounds like UCI is doing the right thing, although I've heard it's still hard to get into many of the UC schools because there are so many applicants.

In fairness, a dollar in 2000 is worth $1.83 today, so that would (almost) account for the tuition increase.

Those 4 aren't really adding much overhead.

For instance, I can tell you right now with certainty that at any large university the number of software devs or database admins in the IT department far outpace the number of financial analysts working in foundation/endowment. Pick any large university at random, and I'll wager that without even knowing the spread.

But here's the thing, universities need IT divisions. They also need the other large operations level bureaucracies they typically have put in place. Facilities and plant, university police, housing, etc etc. You can't pull off a large university without these divisions nowadays. So saying, "Oh we can cut them" is very shortsighted.

I worked at a large public university. The University had a large central IT team, but each college had its own independent IT team that managed their own computers, network, printers, and other technology. Each also had their own software dev teams and there was significant overlap an inefficiencies in this model.

Not every university is set up this way, and it’s not necessarily as inefficient as you think, since different colleges have different needs.

Yeah it’s easy to think centralizing IT will deliver a lot of efficiencies, but you pay the price in reduced agility on the ground.

The best balance I’ve seen involves centralizing a small number of essential services, ideally ones with lots of compliance and security complexity. Manage that well in one place, then let the departments use that infrastructure to meet their unique needs.

When I get in front of a classroom and my tech isn't working, I call a number and they dispatch campus IT immediately to my location to fix it within 5 minutes. This kind of rapid response and support isn't possible for a department to fund, especially if it's a department like History.

Face it - students have higher expectations now, professors also have higher expectations. This requires administrative staff to run. Back in the day school budgets were lower, but even when I went to college in 2005 they didn't have campus-wide wifi in every classroom. We had one professor who taught with powerpoint. Today, every student has a laptop in class.

Maintaining a modern campus takes a big IT department and centralizing it is the least wasteful way to do things.

I was at a uni with departmental IT and I certainly could do that, I knew the 3-4 IT people by name and I could just message them and get whoever was on campus at the time to help me immediately if it was urgent.

There are things better done by a central IT team like university level WiFi, but you can make that smaller and also have departmental teams for things where more agility is needed. If the people are competent it's really great.

And yes 3-4 people only makes sense because it was a large department, but smaller departments with similar mandates, for example English/Literature and History, just have a shared departmental IT between them.

Large public universities with 50k students are essentially running small cities and have to provide and maintain facilities for a city of that size ( utilities, policing, housing, facility and infrastructure maintenance)

When I was a kid my mom dropped my dad off for his college classes. When I went to school I took my car. We should micromanage college administration from the outside because of that.

I think its likely students having more money and therefore a car plus there being more students overall. Tons of colleges now most students have a car and parking pass even if they live 3 blocks off campus.

Student car ownership also didn't account for the explosive growth of parking at this school. The ratio of cars per student surely grew a little bit since the 1990's, but not nearly that much.

If the lot and garage were full, it's impossible to know what unserved population was taking the bus in either era. Let alone many other statistical questions here...

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