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The admins are the enemy
George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki is a strong critic of the higher ed status quo, and has some skin in the game when it comes to rethinking governance models–several years ago he ran for the Dartmouth board of trustees as a dark horse alumni petition candidate, and he won. The election was much discussed in the higher ed press, and was an important part of a larger power struggle at Dartmouth about who should have a say in how the college is run, and whether entrenched inside interests should carry the day. So he’s a governance reformer, if you will, with an eye to returning our colleges and universities to a form that compels them to focus on their educational missions and their obligation to serve not themselves–but the public good.
A new study has just come out about the mammoth administrative bloat that we’ve seen in higher ed in recent years. It points out, among other things, that from 1993 to 2007, hiring and spending on university admins increased at twice the rate of hiring and spending on faculty. Zywicki notes that this fact has major implications for how we think about higher ed reform, and for how we assign responsibility for the problems we are seeing now:
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 [Jay] 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.
That’s a serious claim–the faculty have, as he notes, tended to be the focal point of much of the criticism that has been leveled against colleges and universities for their failure to fulfill their education missions as well as for their failure to maintain the system of peer review with integrity. I’m still thinking that latter is on the faculty–but the former is certainly more complicated.
Zywicki offers some thoughts on where all the money for the bloat came from, and speculates about how we might go about getting unbloated:
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.
“Might prove more difficult” is an understatement. It’s already demonstrably true that at many schools feeling a pinch, it’s not administrative salaries or positions that are being cut, but faculty ones. I’m reminded of Jonathan Rauch’s devastating book about how, once you create a special-interest bureaucracy, you can never get rid of it, Government’s End.
I’m curious about what kind of people choose to pursue careers as university administrators. I doubt that serious scholars and devoted teachers are typically drawn to this role, and I would think that people who enjoy executive management and are good at it would typically find the lack of control and measurement they would face in a university role to be quite frustrating.
David Foster wrote:
I’ve know some truly wonderful administrators, and I wish beyond measure I could say I was one of them (good administration and management are both art and science). Such folks are few and far between, and the best of them are in a class of their own. They’re a source of inspiration to me. Honestly.
But there are other folks as well: people who might want to be affiliated with an academic institution but not as faculty (status); people who might want a “low risk high profile” job (fear plus a desire for status); people who thrive in positions where they can convince themselves that they’re accomplishing something “Really Important” when they may not be (self esteem) and people who might like exercising influence over “heavyweights” (power). The categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive.
It’s not my cup of tea, nor, I’m guessing, is it yours, David.
[...] H/T: Critical Mass. [...]
Professor C.Northcote Parkinson addressed this phenomenon in his book “Parkinsons Law” Haughton Mifflin Company, Boston 1957, he Law is derived from his observation that the number of officials and the amount of work are simply unrelated. the increase in that number is determined by Parkinson’s Law which he explains.The slim volume is a must for anyone who would attempt to understand the apparently irrational expansion of an administration.
pleas correct the typo.”, he Law should be “. The Law
As always, things are complicated. Even when overall trends are clear, and clearly bad, the specifics can look fuzzier down in the weeds. I think a fair amount of administrative bloat is an unintended consequence of efforts to increase higher education’s efficiency. E.g., if the legislature decrees we must increase our retention rate, you can bet we’ll create two or three new retention-improvement programs, each with its own director and support staff. If the retention rate does indeed go up, that’s good. But that success doesn’t mean the administrative structure that produced it can now be dismantled and sent home. It’s there to stay, lest the retention rate creep back down. Ditto for reducing time-to-graduation or whatever other bandwagon the legislature or higher-ed commission has most recently jumped on. And it doesn’t matter if the reformers are liberal (access! equity!) or conservative (efficiency! accountability!)–more administration will be needed. There’s something like the Second Law of Thermodynamics at work here.
The one reform that might actually reduce administrative bloat would be a directive, not to reduce “inefficiency” or any other abstraction, but to reduce administration specifically. But you never see that; the directive is always to increase retention, streamline purchasing, coordinate transfer-credit policies, digitalize record-keeping, etc. A plain-English directive to Reduce Administration would doubtless be met with the creation of a new Office of Administration Reduction, followed by a lot of head-scratching about why administration is not being reduced. How could it be otherwise? After all, the existing administrators already all have full plates….
None of this has anything to do with the effectiveness of this or that individual administrator. At my grad school, the Arts and Letters dean was both a widely respected administrator and a well-regarded Henry James scholar who continued to edit the Henry James Review even after he was promoted to dean. Then there’s the new provost at my current school. While interviewing, he figured out that one of the things our poor, rather ugly little campus desperately needed was a big-time facelift, and the money to do it. After he was hired he brought the architects to campus, showed the students the plans for the beautiful new campus they could have for a mere $200 extra in annual student fees, persuaded the students to vote for the fee increase, and here we are three years later with a much more attractive, much more walkable and architecturally unified campus, and with two consecutive years of 10 percent increases in enrollment. The provost doesn’t deserve all the credit for that growth, but the excitement of the renovation and the attractiveness of the finished product have definitely helped our recruiting. And because the work was done during an economic recession, we got it all done about as cheaply as possible.
On the flip side, this same provost has created new programs, with new administrators….
An analogy that may or may not be helpful…When factories (in the early 1900s) began to move toward a much more highly-articulated division of labor, consistent with the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford (among others), it was found necessary to greatly increase the proportion of administrative overhead to obviously-productive direct labor. Why? To the degree that people are performing small and highly-specialized tasks, with no responsibility or knowledge for anything beyond those tasks, then clearly one needs people (industrial engineers, production-control managers, etc) to make all those pieces fit together into a coherent whole.
It seems that in academia we increasingly have the extreme specialization…and we have the administrative overhead…but is are the “overhead” people really contributing anything much toward making the pieces fit together? For instance, by ensuring a coherent core curriculum for undergraduates? Or is the administrative overhead more of a cargo-cult variety?
Arizona State University posted a defense of administrative bloat on their website:
http://asunews.asu.edu/20100817_goldwater
It’s interesting reading. ASU basically obfuscates and equivocates in order to claim that “the world is a different place than it was in 1993, and today’s employers have different expectations when hiring new graduates” and so we need lots of highly paid admins to make sure students have these “new” skills. I’m not buying it, but I doubt ASU’s defense was really meant to convince people. It’s written more like a piece of propaganda to help strengthen the resolve of the already faithful.
“today’s employers have different expectations when hiring new graduates. Many are looking for work experience that shows students can apply what they have learned in the classroom and work together in teams”….educationists love to use the everything-in-the-world-has-changed meme. In reality, people have always worked in teams: do they think the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building were designed by engineers who had no need to interact with one another? And how does having a proliferation of administrators help students learn team-working skills, anyhow?
“ASU is a free-market institution”…no, it isn’t. If a significant part of your income was extracted from the population under the threat of imprisonment or confiscation, you are not a free-market institution, regardless of how much you compete for students or subsidies. By ASU’s definition, most businesses in the old Soviet Union would have been free-market institutions.
[...] enemy: The blog Critical Mass quotes work by George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki, saying that administrative bloat is undermining the mission of many colleges and universities. From 1993 to 2007, hiring and spending on university [...]
@ conservativeEnglishPhD: The ASU defense strikes me as only about 50 percent BS. Since 1993 the world really has changed in ways that require additional administration, most notably in the areas of computer tech (networks and labs don’t manage themselves), marketing/recruiting/admissions (you can’t satisfy conservative legislatures’ demands to be more “entrepreneurial” without hiring addition staff), and distance education (which at my institution makes beaucoup $ but has also occasioned a whole new bureaucracy that did not exist at all in 1993).
The latter in particular gets me to thinking about Zywicki’s methodology. At our own institution, on-campus student enrollment is up maybe 15 percent since 1993, to about 2,300 students. But our distance-ed program, with its big new bureaucracy, serves thousands more students. If Zywicki were to evaluate my school by counting the distance-ed bureaucracy as part of administration, but not counting distance-ed students as part of enrollment, then the admin-to-enrollment ratio would be grossly inflated. I don’t know if Zywicki did anything like this, just saying it’s possible. Around here, whenever someone says “enrollment,” they almost always mean “on-campus enrollment.” It’s the default meaning. The distance-ed students are out of sight and out of mind, but the distance-ed administrators are right here on campus and just as visible as the rest of the administration.
@ david foster: Yes, higher ed is continues to be Taylorized, though not so much in the sense of getting workers to perform ever more specialized tasks. I think academic specialization is not the kind of specialization that occasions the need for more management in a Fordist system. One can be a specialist in Portuguese sonnets of the 17th century and still be a generalist in the sense of having a holistic vision of one’s institution.
What I see happening instead is an increasing rationalization of higher ed in other ways: articulation agreements for transfer credit require the reduction of course content into some lowest common denominator agreeable to many institutions. Efficient “delivery” of distance ed requires that all distance faculty use the same CMS (course management system, e.g., Blackboard), which means more faculty training. There was once a kind of wonderful anarchy within and between institutions that just doesn’t cut it anymore. The contemporary ethos is very corporate, increasingly standardized, etc. And that standardization doesn’t happen on its own.
I found myself shaking my head sadly when reading Harvey Silverglate’s take on all this at Minding the Campus (“Let’s Cut The Administrative Fat,” http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2008/12/after_years_of_fat_our.html). To blame any significant portion of contemporary administrative bloat on PC is just ludicrous. Our “PC bureaucracy” is dwarfed by our distance-ed and computer-tech bureaucracies. Silverglate is just going through the motions on this one.
@ Eveningsun -
well, I agree somewhat. There are administrative needs that have to be met, and there have been lots of changes. However, ASU’s defense has multiple problems. It basically claims that the need for some new staff justifies the need for all the new staff (and the inflated salaries for the admins, where the salaries for those doing the actual teaching are cut or held static).
I find it particularly interesting that Prof. Zywicki is from George Mason University. I worked at GMU for 3 years from 1999-2002 in the Provost office as a minor underling admin type (ie, not former faculty).
One of GMU’s secrets of its amazing growth and success in the 90s and early 00s is that it was very lean on overhead (the other secrets were location & timing). In 2000, there were exactly three people who had the words “Vice President” in their job title. In the Provost office there was a Provost and again, three people who had “Vice Provost” or “Assoc. Provost” in their job title.
If you look at GMU’s University leadership website (http://administration.gmu.edu/) you will count fifteen Vice Presidents and ten minor Provosts. Why? How has GMU changed in only eight years to require nineteen additional senior administrators, and their salaries?