The latest edition of Minding the Campus has an entry by Mark Bauerlein, “Why So Many Administrators?“ The entry discusses a new report from the Goldwater Institute by Jay Greene on the astonishing rise in administrative employment and expenses in higher education. From 1993-2007, expenditures and employment of university bureaucrats rose twice as fast as for teaching faculty. Any professor who has been in the business for more than a few years will recognize the trends.
One intriguing element of this issue is that perceptions have yet to notice it. Many observers believe that the problem with higher education is that universities are basically run by its employees–the faculty–and that the faculty’s interests are not aligned with those of the students who they serve. But what Greene’s report hints at is a larger trend at work–more and more universities are run by their bureaucrats, not the faculty, and the incentives of bureaucrats are even more poorly aligned with student interests than the faculty. University organization is so screwy these days, that even though faculty incentives are so poor, governance would probably be improved (at least in the short run) by empowering the faculty against administrators.
University administration has taken on a life of its own in higher education. I actually published a piece a little while back in a symposium organized by Jim Lindgren which models university administration using the models of bureaucratic behavior that have been used to study political bureaucracies. The article is “Institutional Review Boards as Academic Bureaucracies: An Economic and Experiential Analysis.”
Jay focuses on the role of government subsidies in feeding the bloat of academic bureaucracy. That seems plausible to me. The other factor that strikes me as perhaps relevant is that during most of that period university endowments grew at record rates. This essentially gave university presidents and their minions a huge slush fund to play with without actually having to raise new funds from alumni. This created a growth in agency costs for senior university administrators. Finally, this allowed universities to continue giving raises to faculty while expanding the bureaucracy even more. Thus, the growth in bureaucratic spending was not coming out of a zero-sum pot, so that faculty were not monitoring the growth in the bureaucracy as much.
Finally, I suspect this might also reflect the developing model of university president as CEO. As university presidents have come to be more like CEO’s of universities, their entourages have grown as well. Universities have come to take the look of a top-heavy bloated corporation like General Motors, with Vice-Presidents layered one atop the other. In a world of lax budget constraints owing to flush endowments, it is easier to fritter away resources on unproductive bureaucrats and internal empire-building.
The acid test, of course, will be whether the financial downturn will lead to the scaling back of these bureaucratic empires. Ironically, it appears that one of the Obama Administration’s priorities is to funnel more money into higher education–which will reinforce exactly the sorts of pressures that Greene highlights. Higher education almost perfectly converts subsidies (whether direct or aid to students) into higher prices. With no real reason to expect that those subsidies will be used to promote better substantive outputs instead of internal agency costs.
More generally, I think that for some time academic reformers have focused on issues like tenure and other elements of faculty governance in thinking about reforming higher ed. But this growth of administrative bloat is a whole new issue and one that might prove more difficult.
uh_clem says:
One reason for the increase in non-faculty support staff is that today’s students expect more from a University than they did in the past. When I was in college, “classroom support” was the custodian who sponged off the blackboard, now students expect multi-media presentations that are recorded on video and available for review within minutes of the class being over.
Career counseling, academic counseling, extra-curricular activities, conferences, IT support, etc all take time and effort to provide, are expected services, and are not usually done by the faculty. Somebody’s got to do it.
August 24, 2010, 2:59 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
But, but, for years we have been told that public institutions (like state universities) have to be more like the private sector. So of course, bureaucrats instead of intellectuals float to the top. Indeed, since the current job description of university leaders is more about fundraising—both whatever the state is still willing to supply, and then pursuing those “public-private partnerships”—that a CEO type is probably a better fit for the job. Now you need a guy (or gal) who can go golfing with zillionaires and beg. I agree there is a real problem here, but let’s look at the entire picture of university funding, not one symptom.
August 24, 2010, 3:10 pmMark N. says:
These are the “low end” of the academic staff though, and not usually all that highly paid (and as you point out, at least they’re doing something). A lot of the increase has been at the “high end” of Chancellor/President/Dean/VP-level stuff, though, who get much higher salaries and don’t directly provide any services (they’re management). For state institutions where salary data is publicly available, take a look at the increasingly long lists of staff who make over $150k: it’s generally not IT-support types.
August 24, 2010, 3:10 pmbilly q. says:
I graduated from college in the early 2000s. As students, we invented positions like the “associate vice assistant provost of transhemispheric student diversity” to mock to proliferation of administrators. I don’t think we were being particularly cutting edge in doing so.
August 24, 2010, 3:16 pmDan D says:
Look at some the the large state-affiliated universities, including the land grant institutions. They are regarded as engines of economic growth for their state and region, have numerous outreach programs to industry, consumers, technology sharing, agriculture, etc.
Administrative staff is added for each college within these universities to produce magazines promoting the college and its work to its various constituencies, conferences, grant writing, intercollegiate relations, alumni relations, and many other activities outside the core teaching and research areas.
These creatures further ride the wave of commercialized athletics programs with huge stadiums and sports arenas and enormous support staffs. They may also have extensive real estate holdings for campus use, research, hospitality, agriculture and environmental programs, and more.
Each such function has its own momentum to further its own bureaucratic and economic interest. A large, diverse university becomes an economic and political empire building project, not even taking teaching and research faculty into consideration. Any such empire building entity is eventually taken over by self-interested power centers who seek to extend their influence.
End result, huge administrative overheads, and a huge proportion of the institution’s energies directed at projects not clearly necessary for the educational goals of the university.
August 24, 2010, 3:17 pmZathras says:
To me the most surprising thing in this report is it suggests that private universities are much more bloated than public ones. Private universities have many more overall employees on a per student basis (including twice as many in administration) and have experienced much faster growth in this arena than public ones.
August 24, 2010, 3:23 pmJoeBlow says:
How so? Neither group has interests in line with students.
August 24, 2010, 3:27 pmDWAnderson says:
On the subject of Endowments, two thoughts:
First, I recommend Hansmann’s article from 1990 titled Why Do Universities Have Endowments? (http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Hansmann_why_do_universities_have_endowments.pdf) As I recall, he doesn’t come to any conclusion, but the piece raises many interesting questions.
Second, in an informal conversation with Saul Levmore within the past year, he indicated that current thinking on the question (including, he thought, by Hansmann) is that endowments are valued by donors as a check on the current administration spending all their donations.
The second point would run contra to your hypothesis about the effect of endowments, but perhaps the effects are different in different circumstances.
In any event, this is pretty interesting area in which to explore the effect of various types of incentives.
August 24, 2010, 3:31 pmMark N. says:
I think partly because private universities have been able to command a faster increase in funding: they benefit both from the increase in government education subsidies (as public institutions do), as well as an increase in expected out-of-pocket tuition paid by parents (which public institutions have more difficulty demanding).
That is still a curious result, though, because in that case, people are paying their own money, so you can’t blame it on the agency problem of people spending the government’s money unwisely: they’re spending their own money to fund increasingly large bureaucracies at private universities. Why don’t market pressures work in this case? Is there something fundamentally irrational about buying education that causes people not to make good decisions about where to spend their tuition money?
August 24, 2010, 3:32 pmJason says:
Overall, very interesting. I wonder how some of the shift in where the money comes from plays into it. For instance, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (certainly one of those large, public, land-grant schools) is hardly a state-funded institution anymore. As of this fiscal year, the University is only receiving ~16% of their budget from the state of Illinois ($743 million out of a budget of $4.7 billion, http://www.uillinois.edu/administration/budget.tuition.cfm). I’d be interested as to how the UofI and other “state” institutions that are in similar situations factor into this bloat.
August 24, 2010, 3:40 pmRKV says:
As a recovering former IT manager in higher education (I retired and now work in the private sector), I’d like to point out that the more laws that you enact the more administrators you hire. California’s education code is by itself many times larger than that of the next nearest state. I’d suggest we address the root cause of the bloat, rather than the symptoms. Repeal large fractions of the ed code, and focus on local control. Stop subsidizing higher ed from the state level and make students pay for what they get. Cost pressure from parents and students will do the job that commissions and politicians can’t/won’t. Oh, and decertify the unions. I had folks who worked for me who made $70K/year who had to be paid overtime to come in for the occasional weekend. Not at all like the private sector I can tell you.
August 24, 2010, 3:42 pmPatHMV says:
As others have suggested already, there are real reasons for these increases. Growing regulation, increased expectations by students, generally higher budgets and more expensive research facilities, all of these factors (and more) required somebody more skilled at administration than an English professor who comes late to the department meeting and gets voted assistant dean.
For example, consider just IT issues. Today’s university is of near-necessity a high-tech environment. Even if you outsource much of your work (like e-mail) to Google or Microsoft (as more universities are doing), there’s still a ton of on-campus infrastructure which must be maintained, many thousands of faculty and students who need help with passwords and connection issues, etc. And a lot of that data, grades and Social Security numbers especially, must be protected… and many states now have database breach notification laws which require a somewhat complex analysis to determine whether, if a security hole is found or unauthorized access to sensitive data is positively identified, affected students or faculty must be notified and provided with free credit reporting data in case of ID theft.
States are increasingly turning to their universities to be “engines” of economic development, pushing for more and more technology transfer, business incubators, etc. Any time you start mixing public dollars with private corporations, you need a LOT of oversight to protect those public taxpayer funds.
Research itself, in engineering and scientific fields, tends to be much more expensive these days. Mendel made great strides in genetics with a simple pea patch. Today’s genetic scientists need much more costly equipment. Again, more funding requires more administration to ensure the funding is spent appropriately and within the law (a lot of such machinery is financed through complicated lease-purchase arrangements).
Speaking of funding, more and more complicated financing schemes are being pitched as excellent mechanisms to secure funding for a new building or piece of equipment or whatever. It takes administrators with real knowledge and skill to understand the ins and outs of New Market Tax Credits and other schemes which are routinely pitched as THE answer to some particular financing project. Without skilled folks watching out for the public dollar, trying to weed out the risky deals which sound good now but won’t in 10 years after the fine print kicks in, then these multi-million dollar operations could nose-dive downward all too quickly.
And, laws and regulations governing universities have proliferated. There’s Title IX compliance to ensure gender equity in athletic programs. Routine EEOC compliance to prevent race and gender discrimination. Regulations governing student loans. Cleary Act compliance to report major crimes committed on or near campus. IT compliance to reduce the prevalence of illegal file-sharing on student computers. Credit reporting requirements because under a number of recently passed laws, the university is probably considered a credit-granting entity, just like a credit card company. And that’s all just at the federal level. Now stack NCAA regulations, accreditation requirements, and state laws and regulations on top of all that.
Sure, there’s a tendency in any bureaucracy to expand to perpetuate its turf. I regularly struggle with others in my job to try to prevent that. But there’s some real reasons for the growth in academic administration, and many of those reasons have nothing to do with a mere bureaucratic desire for turf-building.
Disclaimer: I am (obviously) one of those academic bureaucrats. The opinions stated herein are my own, and may or may not reflect the opinions of my employer.
August 24, 2010, 3:42 pmKamal says:
This is actually the problem at most places that I have worked at (excluding the government). Too many executives that are paid way too much, and rarely provide any benefit. Luckily our system of capitalism allows those with power and wealth to keep it, so they don’t really need to do anything.
August 24, 2010, 3:42 pmCurt F. says:
This is a good point. I would go further and say that the existence of all these educational support positions could be taken as evidence that faculty are increasingly abdicating their responsibility for educating students. I.e., why is it that these support staff answer to a Vice-Dean of Undegraduate Affairs (or whatever) instead of directly to professors or department heads in charge of teaching courses?
I don’t know the complete correct answer, but part of the answer is simply professors’ disinterest. They don’t want to administer an educational program. They want to lecture (and not very often, usually). So (i) the bulk of the labor required to run college classrooms doesn’t come from the faculty, (ii) faculty at large seem disinterested in managing this labor and are willing to outsource it to administrators. So I am not very sympathetic to complaints from faculty that “bureaucrats” are now running the show.
Here’s some ideas on how to get universities back under faculty control: (i) link faculty career advancement strongly to teaching performance rather than research, and (ii) start putting caps on administrative overhead that institutions can charge on grants that faculty receive. Note: both of these items require more work for faculty and less time spent on research.
August 24, 2010, 3:47 pmDon Miller says:
As any organization grows, it needs more support people. As the institution grows, there is room for advancement and promotion within the organization.
But what happens when growth slows down? People still want to feel important. They still want promotion and advancement in their field.
Bureaucracy creep start occurring. The easiest way to continue to grow your organization is expand your services. It is an easy sell to the people around you, because they want to feel important too. Your job is more useful now because you are helping more people. If the service is popular, now you have to add more staff to help you. You are a supervisor now. Pay raise comes with the new title. It is easy for the service to become popular, because there is no fee associated with it. Because it’s free, people use it more often. Once the service is entrenched to the point that it is expected, staff might be reduced, but the service is seldom eliminated.
It happens at every level of Government and any organization. I haven’t done any research about where the tipping point is, but I feel it has to do more with how fast the organization is growing. When a company or agency is rapidly expanding, administrators are hard pressed to keep up with the demands of growth. It is only when growth is stagnant that they start looking to add more services to keep themselves busy.
August 24, 2010, 4:01 pmgst says:
I agree with RKV. As we move towards regulating colleges and universities like utilities, we can expect more and more administration. Back in the days when the college org chart had a president, a provost, and deans, and not much else, courts and legislatures were highly deferential to college administrations. Not so much any more.
August 24, 2010, 4:02 pmPatHMV says:
Curt… so each college or maybe each department should have its own IT staff? Much of the work of actually preparing those multi-media presentations actually IS done by the faculty, at least at my university… that is, by the faculty and by the work-horse of the modern university, the graduate student.
Should each English teacher become an expert in the technical ins and outs of network technology? Of course not. The English teacher can (and usually does) know how to do a Power Point presentation. But maintaining the network (and physical) infrastructure takes specialized professionals. Most IT departments have some folks to guide the faculty through using Moodle or BlackBoard, but they work mostly with the new faculty to teach them (or their graduate students) how to do stuff; they don’t do the work for the instructors.
As for folks the various counselors, yes, some of that could perhaps be done by professors, but again that doesn’t always make a lot of sense. Their time can be better spent teaching and researching the subject matter rather than teaching a kid how to prepare a resume or write a better cover letter. And freshman require hordes of counselors experienced with dealing with young kids who just have no idea what they want to do with their live; again, faculty can be doing far more productive things with their time.
Now, if we got rid of ALL the counselors, we’d free up some funds, and could perhaps bring class sizes down to the point where faculty members would have more time to spend one-on-one with their students, but I really doubt it. One dedicated counselor can see and counsel 10 or 20 times the number of students a faculty member could see and counsel, even if class sizes were drastically reduced across the board.
August 24, 2010, 4:04 pmHouston Lawyer says:
Is there any evidence that all of these additional “services” are what students actually want or need. Were students 30 years ago just that much smarter and self-reliant than today’s students?
Bureaucracy exists to a large extent for its own benefit. If you offer students something for “free”, they will take advantage of it. However, that is hardly evidence of demand.
August 24, 2010, 4:13 pmPerseus says:
Even if the pay of support staff isn’t all that high, the sheer number of them is a significant cause of bloat. It really amazes me how much colleges coddle students (e.g., students now need “academic counselors” to help them figure out what courses are necessary to graduate). If colleges behaved more like business in this respect, these extra services would be offered a la carte and priced accordingly.
August 24, 2010, 4:18 pmuh_clem says:
Not that I am aware of, but take any of them away and your school’s place in the all-important national rankings will plummet. A big criteria in the ranking is how much money a school spends, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s spent on research, buildings, or a bonfire made from hundred dollar bills.
August 24, 2010, 4:19 pmuh_clem says:
Agree that this is a business decision, but is offering everything ala carte the right business decision? A big piece of the college business plan is donations from alumni, so customer satisfaction has to be kept high. Does nickel and diming your customers promote satisfaction? If the recent changes by the airline industry to charge for luggage is any guide the answer would seem to be a resounding NO.
But, who knows? Maybe the Sam’s Club University is the way of the future?
August 24, 2010, 4:25 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
One of my wife’s English professors started teaching in the 1960s. At the time, the college from which we graduated, he told us, had four deans, “and each of them still taught.” (They taught a class or two less than professors, but they were still teaching. “Now, everytime you turn over a rock–you find another dean.” And none of the deans were teaching classes anymore.
One of my professors told me that in some colleges of the university, there were four or five departments reporting to a dean; in other colleges, there was a single department reporting to a dean.
Wasteful beyond belief. I remember being dumbstruck by looking at how the university (a public university in California, the state with unlimited money to spend) had filled up dumpsters with perfectly serviceable office furniture: desks; chairs; filing cabinets. It wasn’t brand new, and some of it was worn–but there was no one that would have paid to buy this stuff cheap? Instead, we spent the money the have it hauled away and thrown into a landfill. (And this was a university very proud of its environmentalism, of course.)
August 24, 2010, 4:25 pmCrunchy Frog says:
When student loans are guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States, and more students are being pressured to get a 4-year degree just to get a foot in the door anywhere (since a HS diploma won’t even get you a job at McDonald’s), there is no ceiling to the amount of debt that students are forced to accumulate.
It’s only after the student graduates and discovers his Art History BA barely qualifies him to work at $12/hour that he realizes that maybe the $120,000 he took out in student loans might not have been such a wonderful idea.
August 24, 2010, 4:25 pmAlessandra says:
Yes, there is evidence for a great need for counseling services, career counseling, writing support, and extra-curricular activities, to name a few that come to mind first.
August 24, 2010, 4:28 pmDebrah says:
Mark Bauerlein is excellent.
Keeping Customers Happy is his latest at the Times’ “Room for Debate”.
Mark Bauerlein on YouTube: Young Americans Are the Dumbest Generation
August 24, 2010, 4:29 pmPerseus says:
The market for corporate control in higher education bears very little resemblance to that of the private, for-profit sector, so overpaid executives in higher education who build empires don’t have to worry about hostile takeovers.
August 24, 2010, 4:33 pmPatHMV says:
Houston Lawyer, undoubtedly yesterday’s college students were more self-reliant in many ways than today’s. In 1960, about 2% of the 180 million people in the United States was currently enrolled in college. By 2008, that figure had risen to 6% of 301 million. The educational and socio-economic status of the college population has broadened considerably. Back then, only the really smart or the well-privileged attended college. Today, those ranks have been joined by those who perhaps were not born into quite as many gifts (genetically or socially) as yesterday’s college kids. It’s not exactly shocking to think that those kids may need a few more services to adjust to college life; for example, more of their parents may not be college educated and may have no experience preparing resumes or cover letters, and may have fewer contacts to help their kid get a job.
August 24, 2010, 4:35 pmPerseus says:
While a la carte pricing may cause many airline customers to grumble, the fact that the practice has survived and expanded is an indication that customers prefer it to bundled service (and higher overall fares).
August 24, 2010, 4:41 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
While true, the bigger problem is that a lot of kids are showing to take college courses who are unprepared to do college work. I teach at a community college and at a technical college, so I am probably seeing the bottom of the range, but to be blunt, a fair number of these students in 1960 would have learned a useful trade in high school (auto repair, or machine shop), and been able to get a decent job right away.
Even at bottom tier state universities, such as when I taught Constitutional History at Boise State a few years back, many of the upper division students were not up to what used to be considered high school graduate levels of writing competence.
There are too many people going to college, instead of learning a useful skilled trade in high school. And many are coming from such destroyed family structures that even if they have the native intelligence, they aren’t ready for college.
August 24, 2010, 4:48 pmCurt F. says:
Of course I agree with you to an extent. If faculty are to remain in control of the ducational process, I would argue that (i) the English teacher should know enough about what to expect from IT staff and to demand appropriate levels of performance, and (ii) should be empowered to make these demands by having IT staff responsible for e-delivery of classroom content answerable in some way to them. If those criteria are not met, then I don’t see how faculty could effectively govern a modern university. That doesn’t mean that an English teacher needs to learn all of the ins and outs of network technology, but it probably means that most English teachers need to learn more than they do now about network technology.
My view is that either (a) some of those bureaucrats and that “bloat” is necessary after all, and the model whereby faculty exercise dominant control over university is to a degree outdated, or (b) individual faculty or at least department heads should learn enough IT/career counseling to run the show, if they want to go back to having dominant control.
August 24, 2010, 4:48 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Unfortunately, the skill set that makes for a good English teacher tends not to include either interest in, or ability, in IT. The bigger problem isn’t IT, at least in my experience. It is the proliferation of remedial support staff and organizations. How many colleges have a tutoring center with the monstrous name, “The Learning Center”? I thought that the whole college was supposed to be that. The problem is that a more honest description would be, “The Place For Students Who Should Not Have Received High School Diplomas, Much Less Attend College Classes, But No One Wants To Admit That.”
August 24, 2010, 4:56 pmPatHMV says:
Clayton… I certainly won’t argue with you on that point!
Curt, the technology used in our environment changes pretty rapidly. It would be utterly impracticable for individual faculty members to keep up with it on their own. Moreover, my own experience is that where certain departments (usually in scientific or technical areas) have opted to run their own IT infrastructure (their own mail server, for example), our independent audit staff has found those home-grown components to be less secure and less thoroughly backed up than that maintained by the professional IT staff.
People who like running businesses and doing paperwork don’t generally become academics. The “traditional” department chair or dean was somebody who had some academic prestige and also a greater willingness to be “political” (i.e., schmooze the other faculty and the higher-ups). He would dump most of the administrative work on the “secretary” of the department (really more like an office manager) and sign whatever she told him to sign to keep the trains running. He would spend the bulk of his time lobbying higher ups for more resources, and also trying to steer the academic direction of the faculty, trying to steer the faculty’s hiring and tenure decisions in the direction he wanted them to go. There wasn’t a lot more to the job than that.
Now there is. For better or for worse, the model of the university being totally governed by the faculty has long gone. They’re not coming back.
August 24, 2010, 5:05 pmPerseus says:
In some sense they were because K-12 preparation and expectations were better and because a greater proportion of the population is now attending college (which means lower average student quality). And having colleges do this sort of remedial work is very costly.
August 24, 2010, 5:06 pmmrmandias says:
These expectations might exist only because universities have started to offer them.
August 24, 2010, 5:18 pmdearieme says:
The old model of a co-operative of teachers survives to some extent at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford recently managed to get rid of a CEO bent on suppressing it. They were perhaps lucky that features of his private life worked to the advantage of those who wanted to see the back of him. But, I guess, they only have to lose once and then there will be no turning back. Fragile, innit?
August 24, 2010, 5:40 pmlgm says:
I teach at a large private university where administrative bloat is as extreme as anywhere, NYU. I have observed that much of this is driven by the trustees. They are the ones who see the university like a business, which is natural since they are all business leaders. They specifically set the off scale salaries of the high university officers. They approve ritzy dorms rather than beefed up academics to recruit students. The faculty are not involved in such decisions.
August 24, 2010, 5:41 pmElliot says:
Perhaps the notion that everybody has to go to college is just plain silly? I often hear that kids have to go to college to get a good job. Unfortunately, as the number of graduates increases, the average quality decreases.
Employers are interested in skills, and only a subset of graduates have acquired any marketable skills. I don’t discount the value of self-actualization, but nobody wants to pay for that.
I’d suggest the college model doesn’t make much sense anymore. It looks like the market is screaming for an alternative that will focus on skills rather than pretending to create well rounded individuals. I’m not sure how it will happen, but when the internet really gears up to educate it will steamroll the education industry just as it did several others. No mercy.
August 24, 2010, 5:47 pmElliot says:
Perhaps the notion that everybody has to go to college is just plain silly? I often hear that kids have to go to college to get a good job. Unfortunately, as the number of graduates increases, the average quality decreases.
Employers are interested in skills, and only a subset of graduates have acquired any marketable skills. I don’t discount the value of self-actualization, but nobody wants to pay for that.
I’d suggest the college model doesn’t make much sense anymore. It looks like the market is screaming for an alternative that will focus on skills rather than pretending to create well rounded individuals. I’m not sure how it will happen, but when the internet really gears up to educate it will steamroll the education industry just as it did several others. No mercy.
August 24, 2010, 5:47 pmDavid Welker says:
What is really lame is that Zywicki makes this argument without reference to what these administrators do. The question he should be answering is what positions he thinks should be cut; otherwise the argument is rather useless.
August 24, 2010, 5:49 pmDavid Welker says:
*gasp*
Maybe one actually has to know what these employees are doing before forming an opinion on the value of their functions?
Also, that universities didn’t used to do X isn’t really an argument that they shouldn’t do X. Times change.
August 24, 2010, 5:56 pmRKV says:
“students now need “academic counselors” to help them figure out what courses are necessary to graduate” As a former systems administrator of DARS (a very common degree audit requirements system) and the parent of a current Berkeley engineering student, I can tell you that the inmates are now running the asylum. Properly setup, there is no need for such counseling. That said, the UC requirements my son is having to meet are not all in DARS. There is human decision making involved and therefore the need for counselors (a kind of rent seeking if I ever saw one). If the bureaucrats actually encoded all the rules in the application (which is precisely what DARS is designed for btw), students wouldn’t need them to hold their hands. No one in the management is going to break the union member’s “rice bowl.” Professional courtesy as it were, at taxpayer expense. Putting my MBA hat on, we have a “goal congruency” problem folks. This can (and should) be solved by ending state subsidies to higher education.
August 24, 2010, 6:15 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
The market doesn’t guarantee efficiency, it guarantees grim consequences for inefficiency. Or at least, it used to.
August 24, 2010, 6:17 pmRKV says:
“instead of learning a useful skilled trade in high school” Clayton, vocational education programs cost more than traditional sit on your behind classrooms. And many of these teachers would be men, and likely Republicans. Couldn’t have that could we?
In my bad old days, a pre-college student (like me) had time to learn how to weld, tear down an automobile engine (and put it back together), survey, prepare mechanical drawings and drive heavy equipment. Summer jobs in the oil fields based on those skills paid a chunk of my tuition at UC. Legal liability is one issue we’ll have to get past if we want to return to vocational education in the high schools, btw.
August 24, 2010, 6:24 pmDavid Welker says:
You are a dinosaur with a dinosaur’s conception of what would be good policy.
If you haven’t been noticed, most of the decently paying jobs that one used to be able to get right out of high school have been outsourced. Back in the day, sure, people could get a decent job with good pay with just a high school education. (There probably would be a union involved which would increase that pay above purely cut-throat market rates.) For better or worse, that era is behind us. Unskilled or semi-skilled labor is not able to compete with workers in China or elsewhere.
August 24, 2010, 6:33 pmLN says:
No, the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs is a liberal plot designed to take away jobs from men and Republicans.
August 24, 2010, 6:39 pmRKV says:
LN, A for the day. Ditto the executive orders shutting off large sections of the mountain west from logging and mining. Send some illegal aliens home so we can employ the least skilled of our fellow citizens and we’ll get somewhere. And don’t tell me Americans won’t do “those” jobs. My first job was hoeing weeds in a vineyard 55 hours a week in the 100 degree sun at age 14. Sure as hell got me motivated to go to college.
August 24, 2010, 6:55 pmPerseus says:
It is your point that is rather lame and useless since various papers (including one of those linked to) question the value of these new administrative positions.
Before computer systems and modern administrative bloat, students were expected to be more self-reliant (a student especially didn’t want to pester his faculty adviser, but the services of academic counselors are there to be used). As you rightly point out, computer systems should increase efficiency in matters like these, but administrative bloat prevents that from happening, which is precisely the sort of the phenomenon that Prof. Zywicki and others are highlighting.
August 24, 2010, 6:58 pmN.D.V. Dual says:
Only read the first half of the thread above, so this may have already been said:
Homeschool at the university level, go to a community college, skip “higher/hire education” altogether and go into a field or into your own business, or any other alternative. The university is a racket these days; it’s a jobs program for soft, often partisan administrative types, as well as a fake gateway to classical enlightenment (it’s mostly enforced PC and not free thinking now) and lucrative employment. College degrees have become so ubiquitous and watered down that they mean less than they ever did, while costing more than ever.
The internet has enabled non-institutional learning and entrepeneurship as never before. There are certain fields which are school credentials dependent, but too many students or their families are borrowing and spending obscene monies for underwriting today’s rite of passage from a parent’s home to an intermediary womb before “adulthood.”
One day soon, I predict, individual and informal groups of profs will get smart and freelance, get paid for their lectures online and in some rented brick-and-mortar to all comers. As it is, student-consumers increasingly are getting to pick and choose who “learns” them without the financial hardship of supporting the listing Titanic of academia. This is the arrow of higher learning.
Currently, tuition “guarantees” and other federal grants support moribund institutions that can’t make it on the open market. The soft crash is happening all around, and the smart kids are less willing to mortgage their lives for cloistered ivy walls and animal house fraternities, when there are sound alternatives, and when “alternative” is so in vogue.
August 24, 2010, 7:08 pmN.D.V. Dual says:
Only read the first half of the thread above, so this may have already been said:
Homeschool at the university level, go to a community college, skip “higher/hire education” altogether and go into a field or into your own business, or any other alternative. The university is a racket these days; it’s a jobs program for soft, often partisan administrative types, as well as a fake gateway to classical enlightenment and lucrative employment. College degrees have become so ubiquitous and watered down that they mean less than they ever did, while costing more than ever.
The internet has enabled non-institutional learning and entrepeneurship as never before. There are certain fields which are school credentials dependent, but too many students or their families are borrowing and spending obscene monies for underwriting today’s rite of passage from a parent’s home to an intermediary womb before “adulthood.”
One day soon, I predict, individual and informal groups of profs will get smart and freelance, get paid for their lectures online and in some rented brick-and-mortar to all comers. As it is, student-consumers increasingly are getting to pick and choose who “learns” them without the financial hardship of supporting the listing Titanic of academia. This is the arrow of higher learning.
Currently, tuition “guarantees” and other federal grants support moribund institutions that can’t make it on the open market. The soft crash is happening all around, and the smart kids are less willing to mortgage their lives for cloistered ivy walls and animal house fraternities, when there are sound alternatives, and when “alternative” is so in vogue.
August 24, 2010, 7:08 pmCurt F. says:
In that case, aren’t the faculty just another special interest that the university governance has to contend with? It would certainly be in the interests of the faculty to claim that “the incentives of bureaucrats are even more poorly aligned with student interests than the faculty,” for example, as Prof. Zywicki did in his post. What’s the evidence that this is true, and that what the report chronicles is just the result of a feud between one group of special interests (professors) vs. another (bureaucrats) for resources?
August 24, 2010, 7:15 pmPerseus says:
A high school education isn’t what is once was, which means that colleges are doing remedial work at a much higher cost. And even to the extent that additional education is necessary for higher-skilled jobs, a BA is usually not required. Those skills can be learned on the job or through focused vocational training.
August 24, 2010, 7:21 pmDavid Welker says:
This blog post tends towards being lame and useless. I don’t have the time or the inclination to read long advocacy papers. At least not most of them. A blogger who is making an argument probably should at least take the time to explain exactly what it is that they are advocating in the actual blog post.
If Zywicki wants to argue against growth in university services, he should at least tell us specifically what he wants to cut.
But I understand. For conservatives like Zywicki, it is usually enough to rail against “spending” without explaining specifically what spending they are against. The problem is cutting specific spending tends to be unpopular, so it is much safer to stick to generalities. This is a very typical intellectual laziness that especially afflicts conservatives. Another example would be Somin’s argument the other day that Jack London’s racism supported the view that racism is not primarily a right wing phenomenon. The basic holes in the argument were quite lame; it was just sloppy thinking.
If Zywicki wants to link to others, that is fine for a blog post. Linking serves a useful function. But such linking should serve to support one’s argument, not substitute for it. He shouldn’t pretend like he is actually adding anything with his generalities that follow those links. His generalities presume that you generally agree with whatever he has linked to and does not address specifics. I do not consider vague unsubstantiated references to “empire building” to be persuasive or useful unless you actually demonstrate the empire building is primarily what is occurring, something that Zywicki utterly fails to do.
Also, when someone links to something, they cannot be pinned down regarding what they are arguing. After all, linking does not always imply agreement. So, Zywicki protects himself from criticism, because it is impossible to know exactly what he is arguing. Does he agree with the links? Partially agree and partially disagree? Who knows.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this blog post a 3, which is a failing grade.
August 24, 2010, 7:27 pmDavid Welker says:
That is a bunch of bullshit. Maybe you don’t regularly use the critical thinking skills that you developed in college on the job, but I do.
If you want to add higher value, you have to be able to offer something that someone off the street cannot. If you are so easily replaceable, you are nothing more than an interchangeable commodity in the job market. Good luck competing with cheap overseas labor if your job can be outsourced.
Guess what, we don’t have enough retail and fast food jobs that cannot be convenient outsourced for such a huge percentage of our population to remain relatively uneducated. Also, our entire economy cannot sustainably be based on nothing more than consumption. We actually have to produce more complex goods and services that are internationally competitive if we want to thrive.
The argument that increasing levels of education is not a necessity is so ridiculous as to not really be worth arguing at length. It is bad policy to have free trade and expose all of our low-skilled and semi-skilled manual laborers to intense competition from abroad and simultaneously maintain the status quo in education. That would be a good formula for destroying the economic base of our country, though.
It is like arguing that the transition from little league baseball to the major leagues doesn’t require more preparation and training. The transition from an economy with abundant manufacturing positions to very few is a very big move. It is really an absurd argument that we can continue doing exactly what we were doing before when you make that move. The only people who argue like that are probably people without real world experience outside of the low skilled sector or are academics in the ivory tower who are relatively sheltered from competition and the economic consequences that their advocacy would, if implemented, impose on others. Education is absolutely the most important investment we can make in the future.
August 24, 2010, 7:43 pmDale Sheldon-Hess says:
Came to say the same thing; with citation.
August 24, 2010, 7:49 pmRKV says:
“If Zywicki wants to argue against growth in university services, he should at least tell us specifically what he wants to cut.”
Zywiki answers your question in the second sentence.
You must be an administrator in higher education or some other government employee.
August 24, 2010, 7:55 pmDavid Welker says:
As I mentioned before, no he doesn’t. Linking to something does not necessarily imply full agreement. There is no accountability there.
Another example of extremely intellectually lazy thinking. The only reason someone could possibly disagree with you is if they were an administrator or some other government employee? Great logic. You have clearly eliminated all other plausible explanations.
I see that you are one of those people who Clayton Cramer thinks aren’t ready for college. Nice logic fail.
August 24, 2010, 8:02 pmMike S. says:
Look at all the things that colleges have to do besides teach. They build buildings, hire people, have health plans, perform research at federal expense and raise money. All these activities are more heavily regulated than they used to be. Buildings must comply with ADA, the health plan with HIPAA, donors attending the $1000/plate fund raising dinner must get receipts with the cost of the food estimated. All the people dealing with the extra paperwork have to be supervised. And it isn’t only the government that demands more paperwork. My wife’s small department (4.5 faculty + 2 adjuncts) is up for re-accreditation this Fall. The required self-study is over 800 pages. Plus they require copies of everyone’s senior project and transcripts.
August 24, 2010, 8:10 pmElliot says:
There is no reason to presume non-college training resuts unskilled or semi-skilled. If I need an entry level programmer, I will hire someone with a one year computer programming certificate from a for-profit school before I will hire someone with a four year degree in political science.
August 24, 2010, 8:14 pmElliot says:
Couple that with a testing system similar to what we now have for lawyers, CPAs, and professional engineers. (I am not calling for widespread licensing.) It’s already happening in computers, with Cisco, Microsoft, etc offering courses and certification tests.
I don’t care how people learn what they need to pass the tests. But, think of the internet course a really good professor and top of the line computer people could develop.
August 24, 2010, 8:38 pmRKV says:
The overall solution to higher educations high costs runs something like the following…
1) 80% of all costs in higher ed are driven by employee wages and benefits, therefore the biggest cuts will have to come from there
2) I propose the elimination of government employee unions as a start followed by
3) the end of tenure and a
4) complete changeover from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement going forward plus
5) wage cuts to private sector levels (perhaps 20% reduction) and a
6) reduction of holidays and vacations to private sector levels going forward (perhaps a 25% reduction)
7) repeal of large numbers of government education directives which drive costs but not quality (ADA, FERPA, TITLE IX to name a few)
8) an end to affirmative action as proven discriminatory against poor Americans of European origins and therefore racist (sorry, that’s not a fix for high costs, but I felt like throwing it in because its the right thing to do morally)
9) no athletic scholarships funded with public monies nor reduced entrance requirements for athletes at any publicly funded institution of higher education
10) and an end to government sponsored loans and grants to students, with the exception of those based on military service to get demand down to a market level
11) an end to large “cattle call” lectures for lower division survey classes and their replacement with video, we’d need maybe 2-3 professors of American history for the whole country (and Howard Zinn would never have made the cut), and so on, yeah you’d still have to have grad students to grade papers and answer questions
Of course, I am one of those neanderthal conservatives who is old enough to remember what things were like before the bloat set in. And as a former employee of the UC (and the CA CC system) for a least part of my career, I’ve actually seen both the public AND private sector.
August 24, 2010, 8:48 pmJasmindad says:
I’m a senior professor at a major state university and I know quite a bit about the increase in bureaucracy. Little of what I see in the growth of bureaucracy has to do with bureaucratic featherbedding or growth for growth’s sake. I categorize the growth as coming from the following sources.
Federal, State and Other Regulations. There are many regulations that have to be satisfied. Privacy rules alone have created a substantial need for officers, forms and certifications. The increased litigiousness of society in general has created the need for more lawyers, rules, and forms and certifications. Someone in the state government makes a statement that professors don’t work hard, and a small bureaucracy is created to keep track of faculty time and how they spend it so such charges can be refuted. Civil rights laws require keeping track of diversity, and making absolutely sure that people are trained in sensitivity in these and related matters. Affirmative action programs similarly require both documentation and control. One way to avoid being hauled into court and punished is to have dedicated bureaucracies that train and control everyone in this matter, and to show everyone that we have such bureaucracies as proof of good intentions. Increased insistence on student rights in general and with respect to academic misconduct in particular has created a new set of regulations, and a corresponding bureaucracy. For example, when I was a young professor, I caught a student turning in what I thought was not his work, I called him in, and gave him my reasons for suspicion, he admitted, and we agreed on a penalty that resulted in his course grade being lower. I thought I was fair, and I assume he thought so too, but of course, given my relatively powerful position with respect to him, I might have been wrong. Today, I would not be allowed to do anything like that. I’d report, there would be a hearing, someone would be appointed to be his spokesperson/attorney, etc., he might even be allowed to bring his own attorney, and my teaching techniques would be examined, etc. The bureaucracy that handles this is an order of magnitude larger than was the case 30 years ago.
Federal auditors complain about this and that not being documented – mind you, not that there is misuse of money, which I’m sure happens, – but that they think that more documentation is necessary. For example, in the last three years alone, I am certifying more things – which I have no more certainty about than I did three years ago – about how my TAs and RAs are spending their time. This is not because the university administrators want more bureaucracy, but because of Federal audit requirements. The whole thing is stupid, since in a university, the research students don’t always do their work in assigned cubicles and punch a time clock, and I’m still supposed to certify that they spent so many hours per week on a grant.
Then there is a whole new bureaucracy for intellectual property. Every semester I’m supposed to fill a form whether there is any disclosable IP, and if there is, I’m supposed to describe it, and work with university administrators in filing for patents and licensing. The university has a large number of IP attorneys to help it make money. Previously, grant money from industry was subject to less bureaucracy, but now an enormous amount of time is spent in negotiating about who will get the IP as a result of the grant. All of this pays off of course, but there is a new bureaucracy in any case. At least in our university, a major impetus for this IP bureaucracy was a newspaper article on how private industry was making money on university IP, and the university wasn’t smart enough to get a piece of the action.
There is also academic misconduct by faculty and staff. Investigating it is required by Federal and state laws, and it in turn requires legal staff and oversight by administrators. (Think of the recent investigation of Marc Hauser by Harvard.) A few decades ago, a small group at the Dean’s level will do a quick investigation and their decisions would stick. Now, the investigation has to avoid so many legal, political and PR pitfalls that legal, academic and PR administrators will have to be involved.
Then there is fund-raising. Previously, the university went after a few big-name donors, and the alumni association went after the alumni. Now, it has been decided that a department-level fund-raising specialist would be useful. We now have a half-time person, who works with the faculty, identifies their students who have been moderately successful, and create scholarships in the professor’s name to which his students are then invited to contribute. All of this takes a lot of time, and more scholarship money indeed becomes available because of this, but again, this is not without bureaucratic cost. But it would be silly to say that this is all bureaucrats simply increasing their numbers. In my department alone, several undergraduate and graduate fellowships have been created as a result of this aggressive find-raising.
Then there is new technology. IT is changing the face of everything including teaching and research. Privacy and security issues, both because they are intrinsically important and are also a concern of state and Federal oversight, require state-of-the art solutions that require a large, system-wide bureaucracy. Students can register and pay bills without standing in line, communicate with professors and discuss course-related issues with other students in the course, but the infrastructure for it requires a fairly large and well-paid bureaucracy. When it works well, it’s great for everyone. Of course, it doesn’t always work well, so what else is new.
Focusing on teaching alone, not everyone is a natural teacher. In an earlier time, the not so great ones might just be fired (in places where in-class teaching was emphasized) or ignored (in places where they were not), but today, with student evaluation of teaching becoming an increasingly important thing, no university can ignore not so-great teaching. So, a new bureaucracy has arisen in major universities that help TAs and young professors with their teaching skills. Best-practices are collected, seminars and training sessions are held, etc. Beginning faculty find them useful, but this requires resources and administrative leadership.
Then there are student scholarships. University rankings are partly determined by the prestigious scholarships won by its graduates. So a whole new bureaucracy has arisen to identify good candidates for Rhodes, Marshall, etc., scholarships. Also, in a large university, there are complaints when students at the margins who could have been helped fail because there is no such help. So there are centers that do indeed help. My daughter (at a different university) was identified (correctly) as being weak in writing (based on an essay she wrote when she enrolled). The writing center worked with her for a quarter, and boy, I don’t know what they did, but her writing surely improved quite a few notches. But such centers require a new bureaucracy. By the same token, there are complaints at the other margin, about and from students who could be doing much more challenging work getting by with easy stuff. So there is a Honors Program, with an administrator, who cajoles various faculty to work with bright students, to develop honors courses, etc. For large university, on a per capita basis, this is small investment, but sure enough it increases the administrator count.
Increasing the size of the administration is not without cost to the university. People who complain about university administration don’t realize the following simple fact. University overheads go up when the size of the administration goes up. I write research proposals, and a key number is the overhead percentage. Guess what: university overheads are in the range of 50% whereas industry overheads can easily exceed 200%. Nevertheless, there is a lot of pressure to keep the overhead low, since the university with a high overhead becomes less competitive.
Above I have made a case for an increase in the size of administration that can be more or less justified, at least with respect to intentions. Then there is silly stuff. One of my friends in a less august institution told me of the increase in her college’s top-level administration and how they stand in the way of everything useful and focus their administrative energies in stupid stuff, like developing empty and inane “vision statements,” and the like. She would dearly like help from the administrators along the lines I outlined above, but she’s not getting that. Instead, she’s getting memos on empty abstractions like “teaching with integrity,” as if anyone was trying to do the opposite. In any case, there is nothing concretely useful about teaching with integrity in these memos.
August 24, 2010, 8:51 pmPerseus says:
And how many people do we need to fill positions in the major leagues? Not many. Similarly, we don’t need even more workers with BA degrees if their jobs do not actually require them and serve mainly as an expensive employment screening device. In fact, jobs that only require an associate’s degree or vocational training are projected to grow at a faster rate than jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree. But then your “critical thinking skills” amount to little more than ipse-dixitism.
August 24, 2010, 9:11 pmRKV says:
One more cost saving measure…
12) If you’re an illegal alien enrolled in a state institution and we find out about you, we deport you. No in state tuition for non-citizens.
August 24, 2010, 9:16 pmElliot says:
Jasmindad,
Presuming you have tenure, package that up and send it to newspaper OpEd sections around the country. Then the web sites and blogs will pick it up. Maybe testify before the next Congress?
August 24, 2010, 9:27 pmChris W says:
I think that in our debates on this subject, we often conflate “having an education” with “having a BA/BS/MA/MS/PhD/EdD/JD/etc.” We also conflate “being educated” with “knowing how to learn,” and I would argue that the latter is much more important in future economy.
A guy I went to high school with commands a six-figure salary as a computer programmer. He dropped out of college after three semesters, and taught himself programming. Luckily he got into a start-up company that was more interested in what he could do vs. what piece of parchment he had. How many other places wouldn’t even look at his resume because it doesn’t say “BS in such-and-such”
Additionally, I don’t think we will be outsourcing plumbing, paramedics, or a plethora of other skilled yet “un-bachelored” jobs anytime in the near future.
August 24, 2010, 9:28 pmPerseus says:
The paper from the Goldwater Institute specifically mentions that more strings (and thus red tape) have been attached to increasing government subsidies, which is why they argue that the government should reduce those subsidies and try to restructure the incentives (which will be particularly difficult).
August 24, 2010, 9:36 pmuh_clem says:
You neglected to mention how important it is for all those kids to get off your lawn.
August 24, 2010, 9:49 pmPatHMV says:
As I said, I’m on the administrative staff of a large university system, and I can tell you that Jasmindad is right on target. My own university is frankly understaffed, given the demands placed on us. With a few more key people, we could do much better developing routine policies and procedures which would make it easier and cheaper to handle routine issues. But because we’re really short-staffed, we spend most of our time putting out fires rather than streamlining the processes for handling routine stuff.
Perseus… the grave danger with the Goldwater Institute report (and all the recent carping about allegedly overpaid government “bureaucrats” by libertarians and conservatives) is that the funding and salaries will be cut WITHOUT cutting the regulations and other red tape which necessitated all of these bureaucrats to begin with. The Inspectors General offices will still be funded, no matter what, and we’ll be left holding poor faculty members responsible for complying with byzantine federal red tape without any administrative assistance available to create routine forms and procedures to help him out…. and inevitably the faculty member will screw something up, and then BAM! there’s a finding and sanctions and maybe even a scandal about misusing government funds… and all of the folks demanding that the administrators be cut (if not strung up by our thumbs) will join right in, condemning the poor bastard who screwed up, and all of the waste and fraud that will go on when all the folks whose job is to prevent that waste and fraud, and to prevent simple paperwork screw-ups, are sent packing.
August 24, 2010, 9:56 pmPatHMV says:
Perseus… to be more concise, my point is that we should be complaining about the unnecessary regulations and red tape, not the administrators who are made necessary by all that red tape. Attacking the administrators (and that’s what this post and the Goldwater report are doing) as a class is attacking the wrong problem, which always distracts from attacking the REAL problem.
August 24, 2010, 9:58 pmDavid Welker says:
RKV,
I agree that you are a neanderthal. At least we can agree on something! =)
August 24, 2010, 10:14 pmDavid Welker says:
You are right. The latter is more important. However, that is a skill that one develops over time and the purpose of education should be geared towards ultimately to teaching people how to think for themselves as well as particular subject matters.
Well, this guy is an exception. Bill Gates also dropped out of college. That doesn’t mean this is a wise path for the majority. As someone who was a computer science major myself, believe me, I know that some students after their first or second year are more capable than some graduates. But, we aren’t going to design our educational system around just the exceptions. Besides, the mission of a university is more than job training, and your friend missed out on that. He probably should have taken some economics courses or philosophy courses or other courses and used them as a catalyst to become a deeper and better thinker. He is missing out on something if all he knows how to do is program computers really well.
Last time I checked, when we had a lot of manufacturing jobs, we had plumbers, paramedics, and these other jobs of which you speak. The question is, what replaces the jobs that are lost, not what replaces the jobs that aren’t. It is quite clear that not everything can be outsourced; that doesn’t mean that the jobs that are outsourced do not need to be replaced with reasonable alternatives.
August 24, 2010, 10:39 pmDavid Welker says:
Jasmindad,
Thanks for the very informative post.
August 24, 2010, 10:50 pmRKV says:
I’m the neanderthal with the MBA, who figures that the market has been distorted by government intervention and wants to reduce the fraction of GDP devoted to what is a a clear waste of resources (and I mean that in the economic, not the cultural sense). I don’t want to be known as the nice guy who played along with the other hogs at the trough even if that makes me a “bad person.” I have a high regard for education, having studied abroad in France as well as at two universities here in the States. That said, it’s basic economics that when you subsidize a thing you get more of it than you would if you didn’t. That’s what I mean by mis-allocation of resources. I consider it a moral wrong to tap the taxpayers for entertainment (intercollegiate athletics), and to use race to allocate scholarships (or for taxpayers to subsidize non-citizens for that matter). You can laugh all you want, but I at least have worked in academia, and know the games that will be played when push comes to shove – which is why I’ve focused on actually reducing the cost drivers which require administrators, rather than giving them a mere curmudgeons sideward glance. I lived through what FERPA (and ADA, and others) did to my colleges IT infrastructure and administrative staffing requirements. I have personal knowledge of the overly generous wages, benefits and holidays in higher ed and have the audacity to compare them to the less costly private sector. Further, I proposed that we use technology to cut costs by allowing basic courses to be taught on the web (hell, MIT does that already http://ocw.mit.edu/). And I’m the neanderthal. /S
August 24, 2010, 10:53 pmRKV says:
Jasmindad, It gives me no pleasure to say this…
August 24, 2010, 11:02 pm“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
W.E Deming
Perseus says:
But many demands are imposed by the administrators themselves. If administrators faced real cuts, those demands would more likely be the first to go or at least they would have to think seriously about setting priorities. For example, the president of my alma mater lavished huge amounts of money on IT before the crash (she hired 2 webmasters for the website of a small liberal arts college, adopted a policy of replacing everyone’s personal computer every 3 years, etc.), but since has had to cut way back (though she managed to finish the expensive renovation of the president’s residence).
Because if we increase the supply of college graduates, then–presto!–there will be an increase in these “reasonable alternatives.”
August 24, 2010, 11:32 pmDavid Welker says:
Yes. It is called people being able to perform more complex and higher value-added work.
Also, to the extent that people major in computer science and engineering, they create jobs when they innovate. It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley is located in close proximity to Stanford and Berkeley.
August 24, 2010, 11:49 pmCanopus says:
When I worked at USDA as a research scientist, there was a person on the organizational chart whose title was Administrative Assistant to the Assistant Administrator in Charge of Administration. I am now in higher ed and things are no better.
August 25, 2010, 12:02 amDavid Welker says:
So, an assistant administrator has a secretary.
When a vice president of a major corporation has a secretary, do you automatically assume that it is wasteful?
I will say, the title is a little ridiculous. The Assistant Administrator in Charge of Administration? That is really a title? Sounds like a dumb title to me. I really can’t say whether I think this position justifies a secretary or not unless I know what work it involves though.
I think your post is a good example of how superficial thinking rather than analysis of actual job duties comes into play. That said, I do believe there is waste in all organizations (corporations included) and that we should take actions to control that waste. But, an actual analysis involves more than making fun of stupid titles but instead analyzing job responsibilities. (Although a title like the Assistant Administrator in Charge of Administration is so dumb that it deserves to be made fun of. Are you sure your not making this title up?)
August 25, 2010, 12:09 amCanopus says:
A title of this sort still exists at EPA. See the following:
August 25, 2010, 12:24 amhttp://yosemite1.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/b1ab9f485b098972852562e7004dc686/ef276ef316df8baa8525664400709340?OpenDocument
Elliot says:
Available labor may be necessary, but it’s hardly sufficient to create those jobs.
August 25, 2010, 12:33 amPerseus says:
So you believe (as it were) that “supply creates its own demand” when it comes college graduates. But if that were true, then why have we seen a glut of college-educated workers in economies ranging from China to Britain? Economists such as Pryor and Schaffer have argued that the supply of U.S. college-educated workers with average cognitive abilities exceeded demand (from the 1970s-1990s), which led to credential inflation. Sure, very talented people benefit handsomely from receiving a college education at top universities like Stanford and Berkeley (though how much is debatable), but it is not obvious that encouraging ever more people with average (or below average) abilities to get bachelor’s degrees in fields like computer science from California State University is going to markedly improve their employment and income prospects. And since there are large opportunity and monetary costs associated with college, people shouldn’t blindly accept the “everyone needs go to college” mantra.
August 25, 2010, 1:11 amDavid Welker says:
Perseus,
Generally speaking, I never said supply creates it’s own demand (except when it does; i.e. the creation of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. People did not really know they wanted these products before they were invented and marketed. I didn’t realize I wanted a iPhone or an iPad before they were invented by people with the education and skill to invent such things). In general, I think BOTH supply and demand matters.
Second, having a higher percentage of people going to college is appropriate and desirable to adapt to economic change and remain competitive. We cannot outsource millions of decently paying jobs and not replace them unless we want to turn into a second-rate country.
August 25, 2010, 1:32 amUCProfessor says:
Tiny nitpick: Well, actually, yes you would be allowed to do that. I’m a professor at one of the UC campuses, and I assign penalties to cheating students several times a year. It’s the professor’s choice whether to assign a penalty themselves, or whether to pass it on to the campus office that handles student misconduct. (If the professor assigns a penalty, the student has the right to appeal it to the campus office, but few students do, because they know that the campus office tends to be very strict.)
Your broader points are well taken and most of them closely match my own experience. I think you have an excellent point.
August 25, 2010, 4:29 amUCProfessor says:
Some, perhaps, but in my experience many of the demands on administration come from federal or state regulations, or from funding agencies, and thus wouldn’t go away even if many administrators got fired. (Don’t get me started about how we seem to place more scrutiny on a $20 reimbursement for a grant-related expense than on a $20,000 salary for a grant-related employee. The requirements can be totally illogical — but it’s driven by federal/state regulations, and there’s not much a campus can do about them. I suspect every person who has served as a faculty and principal investigator for a while has stories about ridiculous requirements from funding sponsors or government regulations, but what can you do? They’re a fact of life.)
August 25, 2010, 4:33 amPersonFromPorlock says:
So if this is so obvious across-the-board in the academic world, what’s to prevent an industry-wide refusal to implement such regulations? Telling government “not only no but hell no” might be messy at first, but strikes do work.
August 25, 2010, 7:41 ampetard says:
It’s my impression that a vast majority of university faculty and administration types vote for a particular ticket at election time, in order to support social issues they believe in, which, in turn, lead to increased Federal and State subsidies, quotas, scholarships, mandates, onerous oversight and, as a result, an outsized, entitled and defensive mandarin class at the Federal, State and School level.
Some academe stalwarts seem to be saying, It’s not our fault, this time-consuming red tape and these out of control expenses, and then turn around and teach their PC syllabi that include: Social Justice 101, Centrally-Managed Opportunity 201, Fair Share Redistribution 301, and Shrinking Government is a Christianist, Racist Plot 304.
August 25, 2010, 9:45 amCollegeLaw says:
As other commentators have noted, the impact of federal regulation on the growth of college administration cannot be underestimated. In 2008 Congress reauthorized the Higher Education Act. The bill was 1,150 pages in length, nearly 20 times longer than the original Higher Education Act of 1965. It was followed a year later by three sets of implementing regulations from the Department of regulation, totaling another 136 pages (with explanatory text). The Department has now released another two sets of regulations devoted to program integrity issues. In September 2009 the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report devoted just to summarizing the institutional reporting and disclosure requirements contained in the higher education act–it ran 119 pages with 21 tables. The Education Department was required by the latest reauthorization to provide a compliance calendar for all HEA required reports and disclosures including required completion date, required recipients, required content, and supporting statutory and regulatory references. It has yet to do so and one suspects that’s because even the Department doesn’t know or understand the number and extent of these requirements.
That’s just the Department of Education. If an institution accepts sponsored research grants from federal government agencies (and many do), or is a federal contractor (and many are), significant new regulatory and compliance obligations kick in.
If you take federal money, and few institutions have any realistic choice, at least with respect to federal student financial aid funds, you get an ever-increasing number of compliance obligations, many wholly unrelated to financial aid.
For a recent analysis, see Dunham, Government Regulation of Higher Education: The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, 36 Journal of College and University Law 749 (2010).
August 25, 2010, 10:01 amCollegeLaw says:
p.s. I did not mean to refer to the Department of Education as the “Department of Regulation” in my last post, but there’s some justice to that phrasing.
August 25, 2010, 10:04 amLugo says:
The students “expect” this stuff because it’s available. If these services were not available, the students would not expect them. We didn’t expect them back in my day!
Universities are not engines of economic development; they are a dead weight that holds back the real engines of growth in the private sector. This is especially true insofar as administrative bloat creates costs that do not contribute to the university’s fundamental mission of research and teaching.
They don’t have to do any of those things. They choose to do they – because they can – because they are massively subsidized.
Yes. I work in a major corporation, and secretaries are, in the main, wasteful. Only the most senior executives have their own admin. Most executives share them, and an “assistant administrator” equivalent would never have one.
August 25, 2010, 10:06 amClayton E. Cramer says:
Actually, there are still a lot of decent jobs out there that haven’t been outsourced. Or do you mail your car to China to be repaired? Outsourcing plumbing repairs seems impractical to me–but perhaps you know better. At least here in Boise, there are Cisco certification programs aimed at high school students.
The whole point of shop classes was to produce skilled workers: not “unskilled or semi-skilled” workers. But perhaps being a lawyer, you have no idea how much skill a machinist brings to his job.
I had a fascinating chat with a guy who had been a shop teacher in Oklahoma. He told me that Oklahoma had abolished shop classes because they were racist. Far better for minorities to graduate high school without any job skills, and then drop out of college in the first year, rather than be able to get a job. Of course, abolishing shop classes didn’t solve the cultural problems that were the reason that so many blacks and Hispanics weren’t doing well on the college prep track.
August 25, 2010, 10:26 amMe! says:
Step 1: Remove the tenure program. Use student evaluations as performance reviews.
August 25, 2010, 10:29 amStep 2: Remove inane publishing requirements. You are here to teach, not churn out mindless dribble. Use publication for bonus determinations.
Step 3: Law professors are required to perform x hundred of pro-bono legal work a year. Doing real lawyer work for real clients.
Step 4: Fire the lazy people who consistently fail to achieve minimal competence.
Step 5: Get rid of the bureaucrat administrators and fluffy student services.
Step 6: Stop tuition inflation by eliminating free-market-killing easy federal loan money.
Bill says:
This discussion is incomplete without some acknowledgment of the avalanche of federal and state regulations that have fallen on colleges and universities in the last thirty years. Here is just a tiny smattering from only the first six letters of the alphabet:
Age Discrimination Act of 1975
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 and 1990 Amendments
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (Patent Rights in Inventions Made with Federal Assistance)
Campus Security Act of 1990
Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act
Campus Sexual Assault Victim Bill of Rights (amends the Campus Security Act of 1990)
Charitable Gift Annuity Antitrust Relief Act of 1995
Charitable Solicitations, State Laws Regulating
Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI (Students)
Civil Rights Act of 1991 (amends Title VII)
COBRA, Health Care Continuation Coverage Requirements (amended by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA))
Conflict of Interest Policy as required by IRS
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
Direct Loan Program, Wm. D. Ford Federal
Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act Amendments of 1989
Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX
Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994
Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Arms Export Control Act (AECA)
Federal Pell Grant Program
Federal Perkins Loan Program
Federal PLUS Loan Program
Federal Policy on Recombinant DNA
Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Related to Discovery and Electronically Stored Information
Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations; Revised
Federal Stafford Loan
Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant
FERPA — see Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (also known as the Buckley Amendment)
Financial Aid Programs
Who’s going to administer institutional compliance with that mess? The poets in the English Department?
August 25, 2010, 11:06 amClayton E. Cramer says:
It isn’t clear that this is actually happening. I was majoring in computer science at a CSU campus in the early 1980s, when large numbers of incoming freshmen had figured out that a CS degree was the path to wealth and glory. Within a semester or two, huge numbers had changed majors, because they discovered that even the introductory CS classes far exceeded their native intelligence.
A CS degree from almost any reputable school will still get you a job–even a very good job. The problem is vast numbers of bachelor’s degrees in fields like psychology, English, history, environmental studies, women’s studies, and other fields that do not demand enormous intelligence–and consequently, aren’t worth much in the marketplace.
August 25, 2010, 11:15 amDavid Welker says:
Cramer,
See the discussion above. That not all jobs are outsorced does not mean that the millions of jobs that have been don’t need to be replaced. I think that is obvious enough. We only need so many auto mechanics or whatever.
The story about Oklahoma sounds apocryphal. Oklahoma is nearly as knee-jerk unthinkingly right wing as Idaho. It is hard for me to imagine that state adopting reasonable left-leaning policies, much less over-the-top crazy extreme leftist policies. Without evidence backing it up, I don’t believe this story about shop classes in Oklahoma of all places being abolished because they were supposedly racist.
The bottom-line is that I think you are a dinosaur. People used to be able to earn a decent living without a college education. They still can, sometimes. But in general, a college education is increasingly necessary to have a decent standard of living. That you are unaware of this fact suggests to me that you living in the past.
August 25, 2010, 11:17 amClayton E. Cramer says:
I don’t think so. Professors who give out easy As will get better reviews than professors who are doing their jobs. In going through my reviews from this last semester, one student whined that there was all sorts of stuff on the quizzes that wasn’t covered in class. On both the syllabus, and in the first few lectures, I emphasized that the lectures hit the most important points–but that there was simply no way that the lectures could cover all the material in the assigned reading, and while most of the quiz material would have been covered in class, by no means all. Yet at least one student failed to get this point.
I had students who, on multiple choice quizzes, were frequently getting scores that were statistically indistinguishable from guessing. They weren’t doing any reading, and nothing that I was saying was sticking in their brains.
In some cases, you have to wonder where some of these students have been the last few years. In the chapter on the rise of Christianity, one of the questions asked what Jesus’s followers claimed happened after his death on the Cross. The correct answer was, “They claimed that Jesus rose from the dead.” Even if you didn’t read the textbook, or listen to the lectures–how could someone raised in America not know this answer?
During one of the lectures, a student saw a completely unknown word on the screen. He raised his hand and asked, “What is…’Islam’?” It was an entirely new word to him.
Yes, there are people going to college who don’t belong there.
August 25, 2010, 11:23 amElliot says:
Facebook and Microsoft introduced new products we had not seen before. We have seen college graduates. They are nothing new. What is new each year is the declining quality of the average graduate.
I’d also suggest any discussion of the value of a college degree is meaningless unless unless it subdivides into the value of various majors. The iPhone and iPad you mention were invented by physical scientists, engineers, and software engineers. The non-degreed people who started Apple and Microsoft were self-taught in computer science. The value of degrees in those fields is much different than the value of a degree in ethnic studies, political science, or sociology.
College used to be a good filtering system. If someone had a degree, one could assume they had a certain set of skills and discipline. I don’t find that to be true anymore. Now I look to military veterans for the same filter.
August 25, 2010, 11:37 amClayton E. Cramer says:
“The bottom-line is that I think you are a dinosaur. People used to be able to earn a decent living without a college education. They still can, sometimes. But in general, a college education is increasingly necessary to have a decent standard of living. That you are unaware of this fact suggests to me that you living in the past.”
What do you do with people that lack the skills required to graduate from college? What we have done: degrade a college degree.
“The story about Oklahoma sounds apocryphal. Oklahoma is nearly as knee-jerk unthinkingly right wing as Idaho.”
Which is to say, not particularly right-wing.
August 25, 2010, 11:48 amTW says:
The university at which I work has three different top-level administrators for whose whole job centers on “diversity.” They have slightly different titles, all containing the word “diversity.” Administrator pay is very high here.
August 25, 2010, 11:49 amPatHMV says:
Lugo said:
I agree and disagree. Universities ARE engines of economic development in the sense that they provide a steady supply of educated students ready to go into the private sector and do productive work. They also supply a good bunch of basic research which can and should be licensed by private companies for production by the private sector.
But I agree that as many states currently use them, as agencies through which to flow “economic development” financial (or infrastructure) assistance to private companies, they are dead weights. But even Republican governors like headlines about the opening of a new plant, or a new high-tech start-up, so we see more and more “economic development” funding of this sort.
At any rate, my point regarding the use of universities was not to say that it was a GOOD thing, but that it has happened. Sometimes the universities are willing participants, other times the universities may be resisting the efforts to be used in this fashion (this is rarer than it should be, because it involves taking politically unpopular stands by refusing to accept additional funding from the state). Either way, the fact that it is being done is one of the reasons WHY these extra administrators get hired. If you want to get rid of the extra administrators, get the states to stop doing that. If the state keeps doing it, than those administrators are needed.
August 25, 2010, 11:58 amfwb says:
Back in 1980 Colo State faced this same administrative bloat. The answer. Fire a third then reorganize. Reduce the bloat.
The same issue is rising at campuses across the country because, well hey, We’re different!!! Professors at best at like a one-eyed horse with blinders on. Been in the midst of them for 40+ years. Done my best to be the radical. Stir the crap. Throw it at the fan.
Why do colleges and universities end up with too many chiefs and not enough indians? Because of EGO and because crap floats to the top. In general, those who cannot teach and those who cannot do research (or those who can do neither) float to the top because other admins are afraid of doing their job and eliminating dead wood.
August 25, 2010, 12:03 pmGeorge Burns says:
What a pity that the people who really know how to run a university are busy posting comments on blogs.
BTW “Me!”, the word I believe you’re searching for is “drivel,” not “dribble.” Spellcheck can’t do everything for you.
August 25, 2010, 12:07 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I would argue that the problem isn’t how to run a university–but larger social problems, such as a degraded secondary educational system, and the insistence that everyone should go to college, even those who lack the skills, capabilities, or temperment for an academic education.
As others have pointed out, federal regulatory excess doubtless plays a part as well.
August 25, 2010, 12:12 pmBinah says:
Yes.
http://kavanna.blogspot.com/2008/05/coming-fall-of-pcu.html
August 25, 2010, 12:14 pmhttp://kavanna.blogspot.com/2008/05/more-on-end-of-pcu.html
http://kavanna.blogspot.com/2008/05/now-it-gets-interesting.html
http://kavanna.blogspot.com/2008/07/academic-standards-and-academic-freedom.html
Pashley says:
I actually read the entire thread.
Let’s just note in passing that regulation is now truely the sorceror’s apprentice. Constraints, injunctions, and directives have turned everything this side of breathing into a jungle, and give the EPA time, they will get to that as well. I hate beating up on the salaries and perks of professors, who are simply “line workers”, worker ants, and usually well below the pay-grade of some patently unconstitutional “diversity” officer.
So the thread says universities are too expensive. I say everything is now bureaurcratic, cumbersom, and too expensive, and the high cost of everything is making us poorer each day.
August 25, 2010, 12:19 pmRoberto says:
Houston Lawyer: Is there any evidence that all of these additional “services” are what students actually want or need. Were students 30 years ago just that much smarter and self-reliant than today’s students?
I think the answer must be yes – and necessarily so. As higher ed transitions to a natural right for any and all, and nearly half of humans have below average intelligence, the average brain power in HiEd institutions must go down, no?
August 25, 2010, 12:24 pmRKV says:
Thank you Bill. Until you remove the rules, you don’t remove the reason for the administrative overhead. If you attempt to just cut the administrative headcount without removing the body of work then you get corruption or terminal slowness of response. I’d add that some tort law limits would be appropriate as well.
August 25, 2010, 12:32 pmDavid Gillies says:
Many years ago, at the university in the north of England where I was working, it was rumoured (among faculty, who uniformly hated and were in in constant conflict with admin), that the administrative portion of the university generated more mail within itself than escaped its confines. Any student of nuclear physics will recognise the analogy with neutron capture in critical masses.
And at Imperial College in the late 80′s, it was noted by all and sundry that one of the largest and best-staffed buildings on campus was the administrative HQ. This is not a new problem.
August 25, 2010, 12:33 pmElliot says:
For some university person:
What happens if a university simply declines to comply with all the federal regulations?
August 25, 2010, 12:36 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
But you didn’t manage to get the runaway chain reaction that would solve your administrative problem, did you? That’s the difference: administrative chain reactions don’t produce anything even as useful as heat or electromagnetic radiation.
August 25, 2010, 12:37 pmorthodoc says:
Universities are the best illustration of Parkinson’s Law extant today, including the desire of officials to multiply subordinates as well as the fact that officials make work for each other. This is true for any sort of medical research, which is my area of interest; we have multiple committees with overview, and whose mandates often contradict each other. In addition, as others have pointed out, the number of unfunded mandates coming from the Federal and state governments means that more administrators are needed to fulfill those mandates.
The problem isn’t that the administrators are lazy, or corrupt, or stupid: it’s that they are industrious, honest, and bright!
http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
Parkinson himself, from a Forbes interview:
“I think Parkinson’s Law came to me, or is based upon, experiencing the armed forces,” Parkinson says. “I was serving in a joint headquarters, that is to say army and Royal Air Force [military intelligence, he reluctantly admits], and the headquarters was headed by an air vice marshal, who was assisted, or possibly impeded, by a colonel in the army, who was impeded, or possibly assisted, by a wing commander in the air force, and then all three of them were assisted (but definitely assisted!) by me. I was then a major in the army, and we were all very busy winning the war.
“But the day came when the air vice marshal went on leave. Shortly afterwards, as it happened, the colonel fell sick. The wing commander was attending a course, and I found I was the group. And I also found that, while the work had lessened as each of my superiors had disappeared, by the time it came to me, there was nothing to do at all. There never had been anything to do. We’d been making work for each other.”
August 25, 2010, 12:40 pmPatHMV says:
Elliot, it depends on which regulations you’re talking about. For your garden-variety typical federal b.s. regulation, the first consequence is findings by an auditor or inspector general, a slap on the wrist and warning not to continue. If it involves reimbursement pursuant to some federal grant program, if you don’t comply with the regulations governing what costs are allowed and how the expenses must be submitted, the consequence (in addition to the findings from the auditor or IG) is probably having to eat that expense out of your general budget, because the feds won’t reimburse you until you show compliance.
If infractions continue, the university could find itself debarred from receiving future government grants or contracts… this would be a death sentence in the research world. Other types of infractions could lead to your school losing the ability to accept federally-guaranteed student loans or Pell Grants.
If you’re talking in the medical realm (many university systems have medical schools with attached hospitals), you risk denial of Medicare and Medicaid claims (leaving the school unpaid for the treatment rendered) or even worse, seeing your faculty charged and the university sued for fraud in one of those programs.
Ignoring the regulations is not an option.
August 25, 2010, 12:51 pmPatHMV says:
orthodoc… the fundamental problem which leads to all the internal communications among administrators is the unwillingness of most admins to actually make a decision, and be the one willing to accept responsibility for making the decision. Properly designed processes avoid this by clearly spelling out who is responsible for making the decision and the normal and routine channels by which that decision is to be made. It’s when you have something that falls outside of the normal and routine that you get lots of “I don’t know, let me try to pass the buck to somebody else, to cover my own ass” internal communications.
August 25, 2010, 12:54 pmMark Field says:
I just want to say that Jasmindad’s comment was the best I’ve seen here in a very long time.
August 25, 2010, 1:05 pmToby says:
As someone who has spent years hiring in the post-grad pool surrounding a major state university, I can name any number of majors which appearm to reduce the employabiltiy of those who major in them. They become unviversity clerks, or work in student life until they tire of it, and eventually graduate to being waitresses around town.
Eventually they leave and take up some trade that has nothing to do with their undergrad work.
August 25, 2010, 1:23 pmDavid Welker says:
That someone doesn’t know what Islam is does not imply they are not ready for college. Knowing or not knowing what Islam is tells us precisely nothing about the intellectual ability of the student. This is actually a great question. What are the core beliefs that are defining to Islam? I would bet a majority of college graduates could not answer that question.
And why should they be able to? I don’t think this is exactly what most people would consider essential knowledge. Maybe nice to know as a citizen deciding who to vote for when evaluating the foreign policy decisions of the President. But hardly essential.
Overall, I am of the opinion that your not the brightest tool in the shed yourself. That someone takes a few remedial courses while in college does not imply that standards are being lowered for them to graduate. I think that is pretty obvious. If someone has already graduated from high school and there are some gaps in their abilities (especially if some time passes between when they attend college and graduate from high school), that does not mean that they cannot succeed in college. Gaps like that can easily arise when people move around a bit and switch high schools a couple of times; so they have to take some remedial classes to fill in skill gaps. So what? Those credits don’t count towards graduation. Why not offer them at the college, which has appropriate facilities to teach such courses?
Your solution seems to say that anyone who has some sort of skill gap should work at McDonald’s or become an auto mechanic. But it is quite possible that someone with such a skill gap actually would make a better Ph.D. than they would an auto mechanic. Maybe they would make a better auto mechanic; but maybe that isn’t really a good fit for them. You are making too many assumptions.
Anyway, I think you have some serious deficiencies in the way you think. You come to sudden judgments that do not follow (not knowing what Islam means – which is nice to know = not qualified to be in college) or if you have any gaps in knowledge requiring remedial courses, you shouldn’t be in college at all. I wonder if you are even cognizant of the huge leaps in logic you are making.
I am not impressed.
August 25, 2010, 1:36 pmgraham mer says:
Overall, I am of the opinion that your not the brightest tool in the shed yourself. (David Welker)
Heh.
August 25, 2010, 1:44 pmLN says:
I completely agree. (It’s kind of funny/sad how a really good comment will generate a few “good comment” comments, while a really good troll can generate a 300-comment thread.)
August 25, 2010, 2:07 pmLN says:
Yeah, it seems really smart to rely on the rantings of a delusional lunatic. Do you have any evidence that this actually happened?
August 25, 2010, 2:15 pmSteve H says:
To David Welker,
August 25, 2010, 3:02 pmSee if your claim is true next time you need a plumber, electrician, a/c technician, or auto mechanic. Those jobs haven’t been outsourced, and many of the plumbers I know make more than I do as a college professor. There’s still a market for people who are willing to learn how to work with their hands.
David Welker says:
Of course there is still a market for people who do manual labor. It isn’t as big as it used to be.
Or do you think all of the people who lost manufacturing jobs can just go and become plumbers, electricians, a/c technicians, and auto mechanics? What happens to these jobs that are indirectly dependent on the health of the real estate market (plumbers, electricians, a/c technicians) when the real estate bubble bursts (as it has)?
What happens to the auto mechanic positions as car manufacturers make cars that require less maintenance?
The bottom-line is we need a higher percentage of the population to obtain a higher education so they can perform higher level intellectual tasks and compete internationally. Real estate cannot replace all of the lost manufacturing jobs, especially post-bubble. Imagining that the solution to our economic problems is a shift towards vocational education focused on manual labor skills is seriously misguided and would be a disaster if implemented.
August 25, 2010, 3:28 pmSnorri Godhi says:
All what I can say is that I am astonished that there is only a single comment mentioning Parkinson’s Law.
August 25, 2010, 3:51 pmPerseus says:
I, of course, was only referring to college graduates, not the products of those firms. But, as I said, there are good empirical reasons to cast doubt on your belief that having relatively more college graduates will automatically create new, higher paying jobs that actually require such education. Indeed, there is reason to doubt whether we need any large increase in the number of engineers or scientists. If so, devoting more resources to college education will be a drag on individual incomes and economic growth.
August 25, 2010, 4:21 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
One-employee strikes don’t work too well, either. But what happens if a group of schools tells the government “Sorry – not interested?” Admittedly, this course of action is unthinkable to a group whose most treasured principle is carpe pecuniam, but hardly impossible otherwise.
August 25, 2010, 4:27 pmPerseus says:
Because it is a waste of scarce resources. While some students need remedial education only because of a few gaps, the bulk of students at your average university doing remedial work need it because of serious deficiencies. And courses that are largely remedial in nature do in fact count toward graduation because standards have been watered down.
August 25, 2010, 5:02 pmDavid Welker says:
Well, if courses that grant credit are “remedial in nature,” that is a separate problem. That sort of problem could exist whether or not remedial courses are offered. But courses that are actually labeled as remedial typically do not count towards graduation.
If you think universities have lowered their standards for graduation, that is a separate issue. Blaming that on remedial education where remedial courses properly do not count towards graduation is seriously off.
Further, I for one do not think that teaching people basic skills that they may have missed is a waste of resources. Even low-skilled workers need basic math to manage their finances, basic reading skills to understand the world they live in, including the contracts they sign, and basic writing skills to be able to advocate for themselves when necessary. So, even if people do not successfully graduate, they still should benefit from the remedial courses they take.
August 25, 2010, 5:41 pmPerseus says:
My point is that the pervasiveness of remedial education and the lowering of standards tend to go together, not that it’s impossible to have one without the other. How much students benefit from remedial education is an open question, but unless students pay the full costs, I consider it to be wasteful.
August 25, 2010, 6:22 pmUCProfessor says:
They get fined by the federal (or state) government when they are next audited. The fines can be enormous (significantly higher than the amount of the grant). This is not a winning strategy.
Keep in mind, many — not all, but many — of the regulations that I’ve seen come along with federally/state-funded grants, where university researchers seek out the grant from the federal/state government. The deal-with-the-devil when seeking such a grant is that the university and the researchers get the money to support their research, in exchange for the administrative headache of dealing with all of these regulations and restrictions. That’s one reason that, in my field, many leading industry research labs avoid seeking federal/state grants for their research (although, with the economic downturn, this may be changing).
Obviously, I’m coming from the perspective of a research university. The situation may be different at a teaching-oriented school or a community college; I have no experience of what that environment is like.
August 25, 2010, 7:45 pmUCProfessor says:
Then they all get audited and fined (and potentially even barred from future contracts). If you think this is a solution, I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking.
August 25, 2010, 7:51 pmPerseus says:
If so, then there should be noticeably less administrative bloat at more teaching-oriented colleges and universities (as someone who teaches at one, I still see lots of bloat).
August 25, 2010, 8:32 pmJoe OSullivan says:
A perfect storm may be brewing for colleges and universities. During the past 15 years there have been all but unlimitted government funding through an expanding tax base and hundreds of millions of dollars of equity growth in homes. Most all the middle class folks I know funded their children’s education by borrowing against the equity in their homes. Each drop in the interest rate made tens of thousands of dollars available with no increase in payment. Our family home in the Boston area rose from $150,000 to $450,000 during that time and my brother put 3 students through expensive private colleges by borrowing against that growth with little increase in payment. This funding source no longer exists for the middle class qnd they will not have it to spend on college. Additonally it has become apparent to the average person that at this time a college education is not what it costs to attend. Until the job market shifts to reward the average watered down degree (not likely) or free money again becomes available, we are likely to see serious financial pressures on colleges in the years ahead. The government is tapped out so it has no money to give to make up for what will be a drop in spending by the private sector.
August 26, 2010, 8:00 amCareless says:
*giggle*
Did I miss all the times David Welker posted passionate defenses of fourth tier law schools after posts saying law school may not be a good idea for a lot of students? He must think the three extra years of school will help their critical thinking and employment prospects, correct? (sorry fro possible typos, on painkillers atm)
August 26, 2010, 1:30 pmDuracomm says:
David Welker said,
If you knew anything about mechanics you would know that outside basic oil change maintenance modern cars can’t be worked on by folks without specialized equipment and training. This likely swamps the impact of increased dependability.
Wishful thinking in at least two parts.
1.)There is no indication that all higher education degrees are any more economically valuable than a vocational degree. In fact some degrees are likely to be less valuable than a quality two year vocational degree.
2.) Many higher education provides absolutely no protection from outsourcing and are in fact easier to outsource than a good vocational job.
Take a good hard look at the despair in the comment thread in the article below. Many PhD chemists are facing an extraordinarily difficult hiring environment because their highly educated positions have been outsourced to china and india. They would have had better prospects with a good vocational degree.
If You’re Not A Chemist – What Next?
August 26, 2010, 8:33 pmKev says:
I think this may be the root of the problem. Education on all levels (it’s likely worse than this in the K-12 sector) lost its way when administrators stopped teaching. This caused all kinds of problems, the worst one being that the people charged with making educational decisions became removed from the very thing they were charged with overseeing–the classroom–and became bureaucrats and politicians, more concerned with their own comfort, power and control than the actual educational process. (Never mind that it’s not easy for a person who hasn’t spent daily time in a classroom in 40 years to make decisions that benefit those teaching in today’s environment.)
My solution for this is simple: Require every administrator to teach one class in addition to their other duties. This would do a great deal to dismantle the proverbial ivory tower, keep those in charge well-engaged with education as it exists today, and drive those admins who have lost their hearts for teaching out of the profession, as it should be.
Actually, I’d like to slash the regulations, the red tape and the administrative bloat (as you say, they wouldn’t be “necessary” anymore if the red tape went away). And as I said above, I’d like every remaining administrator to also be a teacher.
August 27, 2010, 6:22 pm