The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more details would be really helpful. For example MIT and CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy, but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.
I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.
There's some examples in the first link, with the implication they're representative (unknown whether they are, yet, "detail about the distribution")
> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”
> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
I have a suspicion that as an entity such as a University (or government, or business, etc) gets larger, its bureaucracy/administrations needs grow (at a much faster rate)
Both of those links (thanks for providing them) only talk about raw numbers, no real in depth analysis of whether the administrators are needed at those levels, or not, nor even how they classify someone as being an administrator.
I don't have any serious evidence, but the idea of "bloated administration" has been a meme for many years and I remember this humorous article describing it as a new chemical element floating around since around a decade ago: https://meyerweb.com/other/humor/administratium.html
Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers"
That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the first place.
I know a current professor who has been in the same department for 15 years and the admin bloat thing is definitely real. Just tons of new people employed for who knows what. Maybe the numbers are out there maybe not (who is looking at them?) but it’s definitely not an imaginary thing or made up for political purposes.
It’s not feels when admin has grown massively in staff while other staff, faculty and students remain the same lol. It’s really not interesting talking to someone who actively and proudly places their head in the sand.
You don’t seem to be able to distinguish between an anecdote on feelings as opposed to anecdote on facts. That’s unfortunate but it’s not something I can help you with. So I will just leave you with your head in the sand.
Now you’re backing up to false claims lol. Seems to me you are clinging on to a hot take that you will do anything to defend. No point in a discussion with you.
Your false claim is that somehow I have my head in the sand for daring to point out that you are providing anecdotes which are feelings based (there are zero hard facts in your claim, no numbers, no examples, just "looks like more people")
The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you, because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that you could get away with BS, but you got called out instead.
If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable, you can post them at any time.
You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
