Rising Collge Tuition

Related to this post, we read this article about rising college tuition and what you can do about it.  Note the part about “amenities.”  Providing such fluff is not only an incentive to draw students in, it is also a justification for the rapidly proliferating administrative parasites.  After all, why does a college or university require 10,000 deans (slight exaggeration) and more “student affairs” personnel than there are grains of sand on a beach (another very slight exaggeration)?  To provide those “amenities” and “enrich the student experience.”  It’s not only the “student experience” that is getting “enriched,” that’s for sure.  And the article touches upon another issue: education inflation; today, a college degree is required for jobs that in the past required only a high school diploma.  Eventually, one will need a PhD, MD, or JD for even the most mundane entry-level job, and then even that won’t be enough.

The cornerstone article may be useful to you, so take a look.

Shared And Open-Plan Office Spaces Spread Disease

There’s been a trend for offices to be more “shared” and “open-plan” (academic laboratories at some institutions follow this model as well).  There’s probably some sort of underlying social and political motivation in this (“collective team-building” and “cooperation” – although for some strange reason administration keep their own private offices, with Deans having their own private bathrooms), as well as "cost-cutting" financial reasons, but the overall experience for workers seems to be negative. Now, we see that such “open-plan” spaces are hotbeds of disease transmission, as anyone could have expected.  Abstract:

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this study was to examine whether shared and open-plan offices are associated with more days of sickness absence than cellular offices.

METHODS:

The analysis was based on a national survey of Danish inhabitants between 18-59 years of age (response rate 62%), and the study population consisted of the 2403 employees that reported working in offices. The different types of offices were characterized according to self-reported number of occupants in the space. The log-linear Poisson model was used to model the number of self-reported sickness absence days depending on the type of office; the analysis was adjusted for age, gender, socioeconomic status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking habits, and physical activity during leisure time.

RESULTS:

Sickness absence was significantly related to having a greater number of occupants in the office (P<0.001) when adjusting for confounders. Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50% more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13-1.98], occupants in 3-6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08-1.73), and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30-2.02).

CONCLUSION:

Occupants sharing an office and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 occupants) had significantly more days of sickness absence than occupants in cellular offices.

Why Not Adjunct Administrators?

At left, is that an academic administrator? 

By http://phil.cdc.gov/PHIL_Images/20031208/87d4bff74e41427cb278526bd9cbe76a/5260_lores.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=776561

Following up on this and also on this, I ask: why not have adjunct administrators?  Well, other people have already written about this.  See this summary:

Rather than fill universities with adjunct instructors, why not replace them with adjunct administrators?

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

Worse of all, administrators isolate themselves from students behind security doors but meddle more and more in faculty and student lives.

Indeed.  A problem is that hiring and “cost-cutting” decisions are made by administrators themselves. Guess whose positions they have an incentive to protect?

Rent-seeking behavior, anyone?

The same principles apply as to why we have outsourcing and H-1B job replacement for workers, but not for management (or lawyers, economists, politicians, mass media, etc.). Economically, it's always easier for administration (of all types) to focus on the mote in the worker's eye than the beam in their own.

Dismantling Administration

 Representative of a typical administrator. By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19854440

Related to this, take a look at this article. I’ll reproduce some parts of it, and then link to another article, and then make some comments at the end.

The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures. 

The disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent years… 

…Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show… 

…Part-time faculty and teaching assistants now account for half of instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show. 

During the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That’s a rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of students. 

It’s not possible to tell exactly how much the rise in administrators and professional employees has contributed to the increase in the cost of tuition and fees… 

…But critics say the unrelenting addition of administrators and professional staffs can’t help but to have driven this steep increase. 

At the very least, they say, the continued hiring of nonacademic employees belies university presidents’ insistence that they are doing everything they can to improve efficiency and hold down costs. 

“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. 

“I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”… 

...The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty. 

Centralization has been promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition… 

…“It’s almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you started with.” 

In higher education, “Everyone now is a chief,” he said. “And there are a lot fewer Indians.” 

And if that is not enough, how about this: 

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, 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. 

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. 

As a faculty member, I can attest to this. Faculty are downsized concurrently with a relentless expansion of administration and staff. Faculty are held accountable to how they spend every microsecond of their workday, and at the same time incompetent administrators have lower and lower responsibility and accountability as they rise in the academic hierarchy. 

The more administrators talk about “tight budgets” and “cost cutting measures”, the more administration and staff they hire, the more expensive out-of-state meetings they attend, the more of their buddies are invited to come and “train the faculty,” and the more fluff and nonsense they waste money on. Much of what administrators do is self-serving: they use the authority of their positions to the advantage of administration (of which they are part) at the expense of faculty and, above all, students (who have to pay, via tuition, for this bloated administrative infrastructure). 

What about the excuse that all these administrators are required because of the expansion of regulations? Guess what – more self-serving behavior. Who do you think are making up all these regulations? Academic administrators working for government and for accreditation agencies. Where do these people come from? Look at the situation in which people switch back and forth between government positions and corporate lobbyists – it is the same principle in academia. It’s the same general pool of parasitic, self-serving administrators that fill the academic administrative posts and also fill the positions in government and accreditation agencies dreaming up more regulations to justify even more administrative hiring. 

What about the “demands of students and their families?” If only those students and families understood how little the students actually benefit from a school having more Deans, Vice Deans, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, Presidents, Vice Presidents and all of their respective staffs! That’s just another excuse…have you noticed that American academic performance continues to decline despite our expansion of ever-more administration to “help” “students and their families?” In the end, the administrators are not really helping the “students and their families” – they are helping themselves. And why are students ill-prepared for college in the first place (one excuse often cited for hiring more administration)? One reason is that these scenarios play out at the public school level as well; anyone who has a child in American public schools understand how much time is wasted with non-academic fluff at the expense of a rock-solid education.

If all of this administration could be justified by the fact that American education was a well-oiled machine that would be one thing. But that’s not the case. The administrators ultimately cause problems requiring hiring even more administration to fix. Work creating even more work, a feedback loop that will continue until colleges end up having more administration and staff than they do students (faculty have already been out-numbered long ago). It’s like a metastatic cancer and it can only end up by killing off the host. 

Solution? Faculty and students need to form an alliance to promote the best interests of their institutions and the students who attend those institutions against the self-serving behavior of runaway administration. A stand needs to be made or the student-faculty foundation is going to crumble under the weight of the gigantic administrative superstructure, whose sheer mass is much-too-much to handle.