{"id":5526,"date":"2024-02-07T02:19:50","date_gmt":"2024-02-07T07:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/?p=5526"},"modified":"2024-02-07T04:56:38","modified_gmt":"2024-02-07T09:56:38","slug":"death-by-a-thousand-emails-how-administrative-bloat-is-killing-american-higher-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/features\/death-by-a-thousand-emails-how-administrative-bloat-is-killing-american-higher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Death By a Thousand Emails: How Administrative Bloat is Killing American Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An
Drawing by Alfonso Garcia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In recent years, Yale has achieved the unfortunate distinction of having more administrators and managers than <\/span>undergraduate students<\/span><\/a>. For its fewer than five thousand undergraduate students, Yale proudly employs an army of over 5,460 administrators. Like many of its peer institutions, Yale faces an epidemic of administrative bloat: a self-perpetuating ecosystem of expensive career administrators who are far removed from the classroom. In the last three decades, the number of administrators and managers employed by American colleges and universities has ballooned, dwarfing the growth of student and faculty populations. <\/span>From 1987 to 2012<\/span><\/a>, 517,636 administrators and professional employees were hired at colleges and universities across the country\u2014an average of 87 hires for every working day. After disproportionate growth, these oversized administrative states needlessly increase costs and encumber the operation of institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg <\/span>describes in his book<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>The Fall of Faculty<\/span><\/i>, the American university has undergone many evolutions in its lifetime. As recently as the 1970s, schools were heavily influenced by faculty ideas and concerns. Top administrators were typically drawn from teaching staff and many mid level managerial tasks went to faculty members. These academics typically participated on a temporary basis and cycled in and out of teaching roles. Because professors were so involved in university management, presidents and deans could do little without faculty support. The college\u2019s core educational mission was hard to ignore with administration composed primarily of semi-retired academics. Administrative tasks were a means to an academic end. As demand for services and the complexities of modern administrative requirements grew, however, a professional management class rapidly emerged.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Compared to academic leadership of the past, today\u2019s professional administrators view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience and come directly from management degree programs or other non-teaching roles in higher education. The Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey\u00a0 (<\/span>IPEDS<\/span><\/a>) defines administrators<\/span> as \u201cstaff whose job it is to plan, direct, or coordinate policies [and] programs, [tasks that] may include some supervision of other workers.\u201d The IPEDS further states that although \u201cPostsecondary Deans should be classified in this category as well,\u201d the vast majority of administrators do no teaching or research. In many cases, their jobs are unrelated to the most crucial university functions. <\/span>These career managers serve a bureaucracy that is fundamentally disconnected from the classroom experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first problem with this self-reproducing professional class is its overwhelming cost. Administrative costs account for nearly a quarter of total spending by American universities, according to <\/span>Department of Education data<\/span><\/a>. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) <\/span>found that<\/span><\/a>, across the entire higher education landscape, spending on administration per student increased by 61% between 1993 and 2007. This growth extends even to public universities, like the UNC System, which \u201csaw a<\/span> nearly 50 percent, inflation-adjusted increase<\/span><\/a>\u201d in 11 short years. This growth is unsurprising given administrators are exceedingly well compensated compared to faculty. Presidents at both public and private universities <\/span>often make comparable salaries to business executives<\/span><\/a> of similar size institutions, and receive extensive perks typically associated with corporate executives. Within middle management, armies of deans and provosts typically make salaries comfortably in the six-figures.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ginsberg describes the case of a Purdue administrator: a \u201c$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\u201d who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating \u201c\u2018[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what\u2019s going on in the other committees.\u2019\u201d Consider a <\/span>recent state audit<\/span><\/a> of the University of California system that revealed the Office of the President had \u201camassed substantial reserve funds, used misleading budgeting practices, provided its employees with generous salaries and atypical benefits, and failed to satisfactorily justify its spending on system wide initiatives.\u201d Between fiscal years 2012-13 and 2015-16, the Office of the President\u2019s administrative spending increased by 28%, or $80 million. And 10 executives in the office whose salaries were analyzed by the audit made a total of $3.7 million in fiscal year 2014\u2013$700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest-paid state employee counterparts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These lavish spending habits are especially alarming at a time when tuition for private U.S. colleges<\/span> has risen by 144%<\/span><\/a> over the last 20 years\u2013including a 212% growth for in-state public school tuition. In fact, <\/span>over the last thirty years<\/span><\/a>, the cost of college has increased at five times the rate of inflation. Even with this rising tuition, over 150 non-profit public and private four-year and two-year colleges have collapsed in the last ten years; in many cases helped by growing administrative cost burdens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Given administrative spending generally accounts for a quarter or more of school\u2019s annual spending, it makes sense that the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) <\/span>found<\/span><\/a> \u201cincreases in per-student spending on instruction, administration, and student services were each correlated with an increase in tuition for the next academic year, even after controlling for levels of appropriations and institutional characteristics.\u201d Net prices also rose annually, suggesting student aid and discounting is not keeping pace with this tuition growth. That new \u201caccessibility coordinator\u201d might just be making your university less accessible to the average tuition-paying student.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As schools rapidly add high-paid administrators, they face the choice between decreasing funding elsewhere and raising tuition\u2013and often do both. The percent of total university spending accounted for by instruction<\/span> has decreased f<\/span><\/a>rom 41% to 29% since 1980, even as the portion of administrative spending has remained steady. According to <\/span>Department of Education data<\/span><\/a>, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Ginsberg reports from 1975 to 2005, the number of \u201cadministrators increased 85 percent, and the number of administrative staffers by a whopping 240 percent.\u201d The scale and cost of college administrations are increasingly overshadowing the teaching faculty at the very core of higher education. <\/span>A recent Department of Education study<\/span><\/a> finds the proportion of spending on faculty has slightly decreased over time, with little to no increases in average salaries and an increasing reliance on part-time faculty.<\/span> As the <\/span>New York Times<\/span><\/i> notes<\/span><\/a>, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who actually do the teaching in American higher education are quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, universities are <\/span>shrinking tenure opportunities<\/span><\/a> and barely paying part-time adjunct professors to boost their bottom line. <\/span>A report from the American Federation of Teachers<\/span><\/a> found over 25 percent of adjunct faculty rely on public assistance and 40 percent struggle to cover basic cost, with nearly a third of those surveyed reporting making under $25,000\u2013the federal poverty line. While colleges gleefully add six-figure salary administrative roles\u2013for instance the nine administrators serving on <\/span>Harvard\u2019s Task Force on Signage<\/span><\/a>\u2013their courses are increasingly being taught by <\/span>part-time temporary faculty<\/span><\/a> being paid starvation wages. It\u2019s no wonder American universities are facing a <\/span>wave of faculty strikes and labor demonstrations<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fewer full-time faculty directly harms the quality of instruction received by students. Amid <\/span>America\u2019s largest urban housing crises<\/span><\/a>, adjunct faculty increasingly are forced to work multiple jobs to cover living expenses, compromising their ability to focus on instruction. Taken together, American college students are increasingly being taught by inexperienced and overworked part-time staff who must juggle the demands of often multiple classroom roles. This is simply not a recipe for academic success, nor is it necessary in a country with many universities charging students well over seventy thousand dollars per academic year. Instead of union-busting and cutting classroom instruction costs, universities should consider looking to huge administrative structures for savings. <\/span>Ginsberg describes the problem<\/span><\/a> as such:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are filled with armies of functionaries \u2013 vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, assistant provosts, dean, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants \u2013 who, more and more, direct operations of every school. Backed by their administrative legions, university presidents and other senior administrators have been able, at most schools, to dispense with faculty involvement in campus management and, thereby reduce the faculty\u2019s influence in university affairs.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

As Ginsberg points out, in addition to reduced funding, classroom instruction is also undermined by reduced faculty influence in university priorities. A former Harvard dean, <\/span>Henry Rosovksy, once noted<\/span><\/a> that the quality of a school is likely to be \u201cnegatively correlated with the unrestrained power of the administrator.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Controlled by its faculty, a university is capable of excelling its role in educating and promoting the cutting edge of critical thought. As Stanley Aronowtiz, a former Stanford academic on higher education, <\/span>argues<\/span><\/a>, the administrative university reduces its purpose to vocational training and producing competent labor to supply public and private sector needs. The administrative university provides a profoundly different student experience and advocates different values\u2013potentially more utilitarian and less intellectual\u2013than it would under the direction of faculty. I\u2019m not advocating that America\u2019s sprawling higher education system should be run by part-time faculty, rather that it is worth considering the profound distance that has been created between classroom and school leadership. Investment in administrative growth is increasingly coming at the expense of academic priorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So what are these armies of administrators providing their universities? Extensive research by the non-partisan group the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that both public and private institutions spending on administration has inconsequential correlations with graduation rates, particularly after controlling for external factors such as level of state appropriations. As universities decrease proportional instructional spending and divert money into administrators, of course graduation rates don’t rise. Administrative growth crowds out instructional funding and fails to improve graduation rates\u2013all the while driving up net costs and limiting who can even attend universities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say exactly how all these administrators are spending their days. As Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor and co-author of \u201cThe Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education,\u201d <\/span>explains<\/span><\/a>, \u201cThe interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they\u2019re doing.\u201d The plethora of bureaucrats causing this administrative bloat seem to be made up of excessive administrators and unnecessary assistants with vague or purposeless job roles. David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, <\/span>has argued<\/span><\/a> that administrative staff are essentially \u201call these endless positions they\u2019re constantly making up\u2026I got hired as a vice provost, so obviously I need four or five assistants\u2026they decide what the assistants will actually do later.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span> A recent article in the Yale Review considered anecdotes of faculty experiences with University administration. Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Nicholas Christakis, argued that any growth in the administration \u201ccan often come at the expense of advancing our primary mission, [and] is therefore mis-spent and inefficient.\u201d He further noted that sociological analysis suggests that \u201cit is in the nature of bureaucracies to grow relentlessly, unless actively checked.\u201d Joel Rosenbaum, Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the Yale School of Medicine, said that the increased size of the administration adds significant red tape. Rosenbaum said that whenever a faculty member wants to alter a course or a department wants to hire a new professor, there is now much more administration \u201cto fight your way through.\u201d Rosenbaum has been a faculty member at Yale since 1967. Oversized administrations consistently become burdensome to faculty research and instruction.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is often claimed that government regulations have increased the need for administrators, which is certainly true to an extent\u2013Title IX reporting and financial aid compliance are both important functions that necessitated administrative growth in the last couple decades. However, Paul Campos, a Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and an expert in the economics of higher education, <\/span>argues<\/span><\/a> that the burden imposed by government regulations is \u201coverblown\u201d and that it fails to adequately explain the significant growth in administrators. He has suggested that the main driver has been the desire of administrators to accumulate power and influence within their institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of these administrators occupy vague positions and serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. \u201cHealth Promotion Specialist\u201d, \u201cStudent Success Manager,\u201d and \u201cSenior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university\u2019s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) \u201cTask Force on Visual Culture and Signage\u201d, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators. The team produced a 26 page report based on surveys, focus groups, and 15 meetings with over 500 people total. The recommendations ranged from \u201cclarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage\u201d to \u201ccreate a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.\u201d The recommendations ultimately led to the creation of a new, full-time administrative post, the FAS \u201ccampus curator\u201d and a new committee, the \u201cFAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.\u201d Regardless of the project\u2019s potentially noble intentions of fostering inclusivity, this investment of remarkable time and expense only led to more administrators and a few vague recommendations. It is hard to imagine the FAS Task Force of Visual Culture and Signage having produced any tangible benefits to the educational experience of Harvard students.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As is the case in most industries, higher education administrations quickly reach a point of diminishing or negative returns. Once the foundational requirements of running a school are met\u2013no easy task it should be noted\u2013administrators risk becoming redundant at best, or burdensome and restrictive at worst. The proper amount of administration is highly subjective and of course varies by school, but these institutions’ tremendous yearly growth reflect a new bureaucratic class in American universities. <\/span>Recently published Penn State research<\/span><\/a> finds the number of full-time administrators grew at nearly four times the rate of employees engaged in teaching, a 39.3% increase in administrative staff from 1993 to 2007. As the researchers explain, \u201cIt now takes 39.0 percent more full-time administrators to manage the same number of students than it did in 1993<\/span>.\u201d <\/span><\/i>At Harvard<\/span><\/a> there are approximately 1.45 administrators for every academic employee and 3.09 administrators when considering only faculty, combining for a total of 7,024 total full-time administrators in 2022\u2013only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This administrative growth reflects the culmination of a wide range of pressures on universities. Today’s students demand unprecedented student services\u2013mental health counseling, career advising, and more. Perhaps today\u2019s students, raised by video games and helicopter parents, are unable to function on their own like previous generations and require micromanaging administrators and hundred-person residential-life offices to engineer their social interactions. Either way, driven by intense\u2013and often arbitrary\u2013criteria used by higher education rankings, schools must scramble to implement these wide ranging and expensive services. As Ginsberg explains, an arms race to offer new and more comprehensive student services has led to a vast array of administrators and \u201c\u2018other professionals\u2019\u2026[who] work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.\u201d Title IX and other equity initiatives also have justifiably required more administrators. However, these developments only account for a fraction of administrative growth rates, which obviously have drastically outpaced student population and faculty growth. It\u2019s possible bureaucrats have taken new discretionary funds and hired more bureaucrats; elite schools have more money to spend these days thanks to increased federal subsidies and huge pools of domestic and international applicants willing to pay full price tuition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

American universities have also seen their cultural and political roles dramatically expand in recent decades. Education is by nature highly political in its content and impacts, but American schools have recently doubled their efforts to rectify historical injustices. Schools have nobly attempted to become forces of social consequence, leaving behind their pasts as instruments WASP social dominance to instead be forces of equity in American society. Increasingly diverse schools have also sought to increase their offerings to help acclimate underrepresented students. To do so, schools must build out extensive admissions, residential-life, community-outreach, and other forms of administrative oversight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, universities are being asked\u2013or deciding\u2013to dramatically expand in their scope. Administrative growth is a byproduct of universities taking on more and more responsibilities. The American university is redefining the role of higher education in students’ lives and society alike. To balance these wide-ranging goals, schools should strive to build infrastructure that serves students while also keeping administrations lean enough to avoid interfering with academic affairs. This does not necessitate a radical overhaul of higher education, but rather a thinning of its administrative ranks and more intelligent expansion in response to future growth in student populations. Schools should evaluate whether they truly need that ninth housing cohesion coordinator and consider increasing funding to hire more faculty at higher wages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To preserve the integrity of higher education in America, it is imperative we direct funding and bureaucratic authority back to classroom instruction. Leaner school administration promises more money for instruction and instructors alike. It returns control of academic matters to those closest to the learning process and eliminates unproductive bureaucratic hoops. Freeing funds from costly administrators could better serve goals of diversity and equity by increasing financial aid and decreasing class sizes. More underserved students could afford to attend higher education in America, and smaller class sizes and increased access to instructors would decrease the likelihood of students falling through the cracks. The funding being used to pay for dozens of administrative coordinators could potentially better serve students when applied more directly to areas of inequality. It is clear keeping university bureaucracy lean will be essential as schools continue to broaden their scope beyond the classroom. Managing administrative bloat is essential for the future success of American higher education. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent years, Yale has achieved the unfortunate distinction of having more administrators and managers than undergraduate students. For its fewer than five thousand undergraduate students, Yale proudly employs an army of over 5,460 administrators. Like many of its peer institutions, Yale faces an epidemic of administrative bloat: a self-perpetuating ecosystem of expensive career administrators […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":643,"featured_media":5572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,550],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-features","8":"category-higher-education","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/643"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}