You already know the answer to this, but why not hit it again?
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What Do College Administrators Do?
The College Fix has done a series of articles recently estimating the number of administrators at various colleges compared to the number of students. The numbers are pretty surprising.
The University of Virginia employs one full-time administrator for every three undergraduates at the school, according to an analysis conducted by The College Fix…
During the 2013-14 school year, there were 291 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads, and in 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 318 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads.
Meanwhile, the number of full-time educators per 1,000 undergraduates has stayed roughly the same over the last 10 years, hovering at an average of 103 instructors per 1,000 students, according to the data.
And in case you’re wondering the school has 55 DEI positions at an annual cost of $5.8 million. What in the world do these administrators do all day? My guess is count their money in their copious free time.
But things at UVA aren’t quite as bad as they are at Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students, a College Fix analysis found.
During the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent for which data are available, the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The school has fewer than 7,000 undergrads. How can it possibly required 3,516 administrators to keep the place going? Glenn Reynolds who teaches law at a nearby university offered an explanation.
“No school should have that many administrators,” he wrote. “Since universities are nonprofits, they don’t pay dividends to shareholders. Instead, they tend to plow ‘profits’ into staff and buildings.”
“The bloated staff has been a major cause of skyrocketing tuition and student debt,” he said.
Ironically, when the College Fix asked Vanderbilt for an explanation none of the 3,500 staff members could find time to respond.
Finally, last week the site did a similar analysis for the University of Michigan, this time focusing on DEI staffers.
The University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI and payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.
The payroll costs are $23.24 million for salaries and $7.44 million for benefits, or $30.68 million, an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.
To my complete astonishment, David Brooks has actually written an intelligent article on this subject.( I found it on HotAir; otherwise, I’d never have thought to read anything by the man).
Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.
