What about this administrative bloat in higher ed?
Universities have limited leeway to reduce administrative costs, in part because of what "we" have asked that they provide.
Americans carry an aggregate of $1.77 trillion in student debt. How much is $1.77 trillion? If that was paid off at $1,000 per day at zero interest, that’s $365,000 per year, it would take 4,849 years and three months. How did it get so massive?
Of course, there’s not a single reason for so much debt. For one, there are far more students in higher education than when I started over 55 years ago. I asked here a few months ago whether we are pushing too many kids to college given other needs and options (I went to college. Maybe I shouldn’t have.) That said, among the incontrovertible factors has been the dramatic explosion in the administrative staff.
Based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics,
between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the US increased by 92%, during which time total student enrollment increased by 78%. During this same period, however, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, due in part to the proliferation of part-time and adjunct faculty, the percentage of full-time faculty decreased from 67% to 54%….
In my piece last month, DEI: Flawed and maybe ineffective I reported that the University of Michigan counted 241 paid employees are now focused on Diversity, Equity and Incusion, with payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually.
Why has administrative staff at universities increased faster than enrollment at U.S. universities?
Universities face an increasing number of government regulations and requirements. To start, the U.S. Department of Education has added an avalanche of rules related to grants, loans, and campus crimes. Between 1997 and 2012, the number of federal requirements placed on colleges and universities grew by 56 percent.
Students and parents expect broader student support services. These services, often referred to as “wraparound services,” include mental health support, academic assistance, workforce preparedness, and initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. As universities prioritize student well-being and success, they allocate resources to these essential services.
The claim of the need to address government rules and regulations may also serve as a cover for the desire of administrators to accumulate power and influence within their institutions. David Bromwich, an English professor, sees his home institution as an example.
Yale, like many other universities, clearly now wants to be known not only as a place for teaching, learning, and research, but also as a home, a community, an innovative corporate entity. The swollen self-image requires expanded oversight, and administrators are the overseers.
Universities and bureaucracy
At the most abstract level, administrative expansion—or bloat if one wants to be more derisive—may be understood in the context of bureaucracy. Thorstein Veblen, the early 20th-century economist, is best known for promoting the notion of “conspicuous consumption” in his seminal work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Thoroughly critical of capitalism, Veblen characterized American universities as “corporations of learning’” that embrace the bureaucratic model of a well-conducted business organization.
A century later, Johns Hopkins University professor Benjamin Ginsberg made it more specific:
Ginsberg bemoans the expansion over the past 30 years of what he calls "administrative blight" as personified by what he characterizes as an army of "deanlets" and "deanlings." By virtue of their sheer number and their managerial rather than academic orientation, Ginsberg argues, these administrators have served to marginalize the faculty in carrying out tasks related to personnel and curriculum that once sat squarely in their domain.
Warning: current university administrators should be aware that the remainder of this paragraph may be hazardous to your self-esteem. Radical anthropologist David Graeber makes known his utter disrespect for non-academic university jobs in his uninhibited treatise, Bullshit Jobs, a Theory. Although not specifically about university administration, he uses that setting for examples, such as Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task, Graber sneers, appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school.
We needn’t stoop to “bullshit” to recognize the ballooning of administrative titles and functions. When I was an undergraduate at Dickinson College, these were the top executives:
President and a secretary
Dean of the College
Dean Students
Dean Women
Dean Men
Dean Admissions
Registrar
Finacial VP and Treasuer
Director of Placement and Alumni
Today, the “Leadership Team” of the college includes:
President with two executive assistants, plus
Chief of Staff and assistant chief of staff
VP, Chief Diversity Officer
VP, General Counsel
Provost and Dean of the College
VP, and Chief Information Officer
VP, Human Resources Services
VP, Marketing and Communications
VP, College Advancement
VP, Student Life and Dean of Students
VP, Finance and Administration
I’d venture that every one of these positions earns compensation two or three times that of the top officials in 1967 accounting for inflation. The Director of Sustainability at Stanford earns between $162,000 and $225,000—and this is not even a vice president on the organization chart.
Other titles that I have found in an online search of universities positions include
Vice President for Student Success
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
Director of Sustainability
Vice Provost for Global Engagement
Chief Innovation Officer
Director of Online Learning
Senior Vice President for Learning
Legitimate reasons for some growth
My objective here is not to poo-poo the need for administrative position inflation. Information Technology 50 years ago included some telephones and maybe electric typewriters. Having an IT staff today is certainly a non-negotiable requirement. I could agree about the head of online learning.
University leaders will also say—and not without some substantiation—that to be competitive they offer what parents and students expect. That is, beyond the basics of the course catalog. They have demonstrated that they are attuned to the greater society. And they must respond to the aforementioned rules and regulations So there is a need for an on-staff legal office. To cope with more than simple hiring needs, the Personnel Office has been reasonably elevated to Human Resources.
But can’t DEI principals be built into that rather than a separate VP-level hire? Chief Innovation Officer? Shouldn’t innovation be integral to planning a strategy with the faculty? Senior Vice President for Learning? Isn’t that the responsibility of the Provost and the faculty?
Director of Sustainability? At Holy Cross, the Director of Sustainability describes her “top priority” as “supporting the College's 2007 Carbon Commitment to become carbon neutral by 2040. More concretely, I'm striving to expand student engagement opportunities and outreach channels, so our community knows about the Carbon Commitment and feels confident getting involved.” Is this central to the academic mission of the university?1
Politically, sustainability likely resonates with some students. However, let’s say this office has a budget of $500,000. Just this one add-on would amount to about $660 per student over their four years. That would be several months of loan payments that could be avoided. Just this. Add in learning success and innovation, et al officers and that could be thousands of dollars per student.
There’s no free lunch
What are the implications of this trend on tuition fees and student debt?
Increased Costs: The expansion of administrative staff contributes to the overall operating costs of universities. These costs are often passed on to students in the form of higher tuition fees, making higher education less affordable for students and their families.
Budget Allocation: As universities allocate resources to administrative functions, they may divert funds away from academic programs or student services. This can impact the quality of education and student experience.
This then contributes to student debt and the loan burden on those who graduate, as well as those who don’t. Besides the debt, repayment includes interest, which can vary greatly depending on the type of loan: government subsidized, university, or private. Of course, the longer students take to repay their debt, the more interest accumulates, exacerbating the financial burden.
Among all existing student borrowers, the average student loan interest rate is 6.87%. That’s $116.8 billion annually in interest alone. What’s the impact? High student debt affects graduates’ later financial stability, delaying major life milestones such as homeownership, marriage, and starting a family.
All of this added administrative burden—or bloat to be less conciliatory—may be a benefit to society, to be sure. I’m just questioning whether many of these tangential “amenities” are needed to provide a quality education. I asked Gemini, Google’s large language AI, “Is there a high-quality university that has cut out some of the administrative frills?
Its response is that this was a challenge
Unfortunately, there isn't a widely recognized "high-quality university" that has dramatically cut administrative frills while maintaining its academic standing.
While there's a growing awareness of the issue of administrative bloat in higher education and many institutions are exploring ways to streamline operations, it's a complex problem with no easy solutions.
It added that this was a challenge for reasons I just went through: Universities must maintain a certain level of bureaucracy to comply with regulations, ensure student safety, and offer a comprehensive educational experience. It did volunteer that smaller liberal arts colleges often have a lower student-to-faculty ratio and fewer administrative layers. Yet list prices differ little with large private universities.2
Student debt is exacerbated by administrative costs we have imposed
Where I come out on this is that universities have limited leeway to trim administrative costs, though they could if they had some incentive to do so. In part, this is because of what they are obligated to provide and in part because the market requires that they meet the expectations of students and the services offered by peer institutions. However, at least let’s recognize that the almost incomprehensible level of student debt is due in large measure to costs that we—government and society—are imposing on universities, and they are just passing the cost onto us.
Final note
My take is that any sort of blanket forgiveness of student debt is misguided and terribly inequitable (if equity is your thing). I’ll leave that discussion for another Pancake.
It may be a benefit to society, to be sure. I’m just asking if this—and other such tangential “amenities” are needed to provide a quality education.
There is also the reality many of us hold of a price/quality relationship. I recall that some years ago, Albright College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, prided itself in offering its education at a tuition that was substantially lower than other liberal arts colleges in Pennsylvania. However, it sensed that it suffered from the perception that it couldn’t be offering a quality education as similar colleges that charged 50% more. So, it raised their list tuition to their level and offered scholarship aid to bring the effective price down to their old level.
Ben, you have a rare talent to raise potentially controversial topics with objective facts. This was a topic in which I had no particular interest but you presented it in a way that kept my attention.
Here's another topic - "no one is talking about" our national deficit and debt, raised during an interview with Joe Manchin - that you might consider similarly:
Manchin: The things I’ve heard so far from Kamala and her team have been encouraging — the things we just talked about. If she does more of that — lays out a broader package of how we’re going to stabilize Social Security and Medicare and protect them but also look at basically getting our financial house in order — would be something I think that people understand. Every household has to do it. Every business has to do it. Why not the government? No one is speaking about it. It’s not sexy. I understand.
Wow, such an load on the students and universities. And just who is going to make the choices of whom, or who's job to eliminate??? But a lot of the admin jobs seems BSty to me.
I left D'son with nearly $10,000 in debt, an awful lot for 1967. I could not buy a house, postponed a marriage until I'd paid some of it off, used my mother's car, which needed a quart of oil for every trip it I took, so for me personally it was just a bad as it is currently. But and here's my caveat - without that college degree I would NOT have been able to have the career and positions that I have had. So for me personally it was all worth it. However your point being that the debt load for students is way heavier ( bigger) than it was for me, which I concur with.
Thanks Ben,
Annie Odette, D'son 67