The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio

The first result for a "Dean of the University College and Library" in Ft. Lauderdale.[2] You can read it, but it seems to boil down to:

1. Ability to communicate.

2. Previous management experience.

3. Knowledge of finance (for budgeting).

4. Knowledge of libraries, and technology.

But actually I find this exercise too depressing, so I will stop here.

1 http://jobsearch.monster.com/search/university-dean_5

2 http://jobview.monster.com/DEAN-UNIVERSITY-COLLEGE-LIBRARY-J...

Edit: this one looks good, too: http://jobview.monster.com/Associate-Dean-Academic-Affairs-J...

For example, at my public law school (1,000 students), there was the dean (who many suspected had an alcohol problem and appeared drunk at commencement) who makes $330,000 per year. His job is to just go around the country/world selling the school to "recruit" (we don't actually need more faculty) in order to boost our "prestige" so we can climb up in the almighty US News rankings. He doesn't engage with faculty or students at all.

Then below him is another Dean, who is a prick. He makes something like $280,000 and also doesn't do much at all. He is also a "recruiter." At least he answers emails when you have a question.

Then there are other Deans, like Dean of "Student Affairs." She makes $130,000. Mind you this is just for a law school of 1,000 students situated on a larger university campus that will have its own Dean of Student Affairs as well. I have no idea what she does. She does get dressed up every day in fashionable clothes and walk around the building chatting up people. That's all I ever saw her do.

Below that is the "Director of Student Services" or something like that. This guy works his ass off, has a mediocre basement office, but literally runs the school. What does he earn? $80,000. Anytime anyone had a question, they had to go to him. After exams, he gets a pile of USB keys, one for each exam. Takes each grade for each class and logs it, curves the grades, reports them, etc.

It's all a big scam. A big one. Tuition at this school has risen every year -- they want to build a new building (Why does a law school need a fancy building? All you need is a room and a professor). They think it will boost their "ranking." Nevermind that "ranking" doesn't do anything for the local job market, which is still stagnant, and every year new graduates enter it looking for work to pay their $150,000 in loans (at 8% interest, non-dischargeable).

This school isn't even that bad compared to the other law schools out there, namely the private ones. Even a top school like Columbia states on its own site that students will spend $250,000 for their law degree (this includes a conservative housing budget).

The only thing more mind blowing than the scam itself is that we all sit around and don't seem to care as these people eat our young alive. In fact, they worship these institutions. It's their "alma mater," after all, it's like family, isn't it? Some even DONATE to them! The federal government enables the scam by flooding the industry with easily obtained credit, with no restrictions on tuition charged, and even letting for-profit "schools" get the money if they want.

This is a racket that is in big need of disruption. Where does it start? Perception. Once we stop perceiving these degrees as meaning anything, once we stop valuing prestigious names as absolutely required, and look more at individuals themselves when hiring, the racket will die.

Take course scheduling for example. Are there any well known open-source course scheduling solutions out used by many universities? If not, why not? Every time we see an industry with a dearth of open source tools, we should be worried and be asking why.

“This is a $2.2 billion operation—you’ve got to have some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it,” he says. “We’re about as lean as we can afford to be.”

As Acting President Timothy Sands stated, they need people to manage things for the entire university. The university itself, however, is comprised of many different schools. Each of these have their own admin to function.

Some schools, however, overlap in what they teach and do. Other schools don't have the same demand as they used to. Others have difficulty in being self-sufficient (i.e. difficulty fundraising) and rely entirely on state funding. The same goes for departments within schools, which also tend to have their own admin. For all of these cases, it makes much more sense to consolidate in order to reduce reptition and overlapping work as well as costs. So why hasn't this been done? It does happen, but, as you can probably guess, bureaucracy tends to get in the way. Each school/department formed for a reason, and they don't want to be "acquired" in a sense, especially the admin because their jobs will be at risk.

I remember being told about a discussion between several deans and an alumni of the university who went on to become a billionaire. They were discussing several things with one of the topics being the budget and the university's future. The alumni suggested a plan to form a new school by consolidating a few of the schools and departments since what they did was overlapping or complimentary. No one agreed to it.

The piece isn't really "journalism"-- it's basically an op ed. You are told the opinion up front and then given some supporting facts. In this case vague and with not much detail.

The work you are describing used to be done by secretaries and office assistants -- you are quite right, and those jobs for the most part no longer exist.

When you ask what a dean does, it rather depends on the position. If we're talking about the dean of a particular college (say, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at a state university), then the answer is: _everything_. Every department with a problem comes to you, expecting it to be solved right now. Everyone always needs more money, and you have to figure out some way that no one's budget explodes (you will be talking to the Provost or Vice-Provost quite frequently). Oh, and you also have to fight all the other colleges over funding as well. And find out how to attract new faculty to your departments. And make sure that no departments are self-destructing, as they do every once in a while. Or perhaps the History Department has decided to phase out an antiquated method of teaching that has got some old fart alumni all riled up about a loss of traditions. Guess who's getting called? You.

The idea that an organization of 1,000 faculty and two or three times that in staff [1] would have no greater administrative worry than class scheduling is, frankly, laughable. Would you expect a corporation of that size to get by with no managers?

The positions that the original article bemoans (which are also deanships) appear to be higher up the food chain, and are almost certainly the result of severe bureaucratic bloat. And don't get me wrong -- it is in the nature of a state university to be incredibly bureaucratic, and they could always use a bit more slimming. I just wish HN wouldn't always take the bait of "OMG HIGHER ED IS SO BLOATED TEAR IT DOWN TEAR IT DOWN", which scans rather well but, as with any oversimplification, ignores all the interesting parts of the argument.

[1] e.g. a decently-sized college at a state university

Tech could be used to remove layers of management and empower the actual workers (as you mentioned you'd expect in 1960), or deskill workers and strengthen managerial control over production. David Noble wrote about these things.

And some of it is just featherbedding. When the University of California hired Denice Denton as the chancellor for its Santa Cruz campus, one of her conditions for taking the job was a tenured appointment (with a $192k salary) for her partner. I personally know two other people who got their spouses university jobs this way, so I think it's pretty common.

Raising money. Grant money and donations and similar sources of income don't show up by themselves, someone has to hustle their asses off to get those. And by all accounts it's getting harder and harder to pull in each dollar.

Going to meetings about the need to write mission statements and assessment reports, to file for the accreditation team to read when they arrive in four years. They can't move up the dean ladder without good reports from the accreditation team.

On the plus side our tuition is only ~7k. In that regard I have no right to complain compared to many of the USA universities.

For programming, at least, I think it's partly just historical. That's how it's always worked. In a different setting, like a factory, this makes sense as no factory worker is going to have a big positive effect on productivity while a good manager might. But for programming, the ratio of productivity between programmers and managers is much less biased towards the latter.

I guess more progressive software development companies actually are changing this, paying programmers relatively more and reducing the amount of management. So perhaps it's just a matter of the industry adapting slowly.

I think there are going to be many parallels between professors and programmers, so the two questions probably overlap a fair amount. On the other hand, there are also many differences, so perhaps that sort of work is more (or maybe less) important in a university than in a software company.

By comparison, college deans have a job which is less attractive in a lifestyle sense, a job market which is not by nature inundated with candidates, and skills which readily transfer into (and thus are priced by competition with) management of for-profit enterprises.

For similar reasons, a professor of computer science who is not good at grant writing (+) will earn substantially less than whomever is in charge of making sure the campus bittorrent delivery system doesn't go down.

+ Compensation for all employees at a university is, like all employees everywhere, very sensitive to "I have individualized skills which demonstrably bring more money into this organization." A CS prof who teaches CS101 and spurns grant writing will have a fairly unhappy career path. The successful CS prof will try to get CS101 taught by someone more junior to them and then spend time trying to nail 7 or 8 figure grants.

That doesn't justify the salaries of the administrators but it does partially explain why Professors aren't typically paid spectacularly.

Instead the dean and the department heads spend their time dealing with continual budget cuts, assigning people to committees that they don't want to be on (see above paragraph). In a publish-or-perish world, most academics do not want to give up publishing for a little extra money. So the universities must make it tempting enough of a position (pay, essentially) in order for the professors to give up their freedom of schedule, having to be on campus 5 days a week, and the added headache of trying to herd a bunch of academics who are lost in their own thoughts.

Also keep in mind that professors do not typically get the salaries that they could get in industry. Tenure is great until they delete your department. My wife does sociology, which really means she does a lot of statistics. There was a time 5-7 years ago when I found her some job postings that she would be qualified for as a statistics analyst and the pay was 50% greater than her academic salary to start. She coldly informed me that there was more to life than making money and that she enjoyed her work. So I did the good husband thing and shut up.

What numbers are you using when making that statement? Do you think that the additional cost of administrators is anywhere close to the amount in reduced funding from the state?