Coyote Blog

I think you'd have a lot of unhappy students if that rule got passed, since you'd have to take away a lot of things students want in order to achieve it. Things like dormitory maintenance and internet access and landscaping and so forth.

Free markets would take care of that. German universities are not much better (about 60% goes to professors and tas, rest is overhead), but there is no campus or university funded internet access. Students generally find their own living quarters and provider. Works just fine.

I'm curious what the ratio of administrative to customer facing personnel is in various other service industries. Back in the late 90s I worked at an IT consulting firm where sales and engineering were significantly outnumbered by admin staff. And I don't know but seriously doubt my current employer is at parity or in favor of customer facing staff.

This is sort of a vacuum, we can compare admin to teacher ratios from the past, but even that trend might be economy wide, (think the explosion of IT,) not just a function of higher ed. How do universities compare to consulting firms or engineering firms? I'm pretty let down by the economists who have blogged about the topic for not asking that question as well.

I think the most interesting information would be how much that has changed decade by decade. My guess is that ratio for 1990 would be cut in half at least.

perlhaqr:

Landscaping requires minimal amount of people which are paid very little. Dorm maintenance also. One of the worst issues is the one raised by Mark2 which is COMPLIANCE with everything. Financial reports every few months, diversity/sensitivity trainings/state mandated other trainings, people who are supposed to help faculty get/administer grants, legions of secretaries (sorry, administrative staff) for every senior bureaucrat, HR which interferes with hiring while not understanding any of scientific details which is basis of hiring, etc. A nice picture that shows management vs faculty growth at UC system: http://www.oftwominds.com/photos10/faculty-mgt2.png. Increased tuition money is spent on management growth since these people are typically paid much more than faculty and they are picked either from career bureaucrats or scientifically failed faculty.

"I think you’d have a lot of unhappy students if that rule got passed, since you’d have to take away a lot of things students want in order to achieve it. Things like dormitory maintenance and internet access and landscaping and so forth."

As if these could not be obtained anywhere but from the university staff. At significantly less cost.

Mark Perry, for unknown reasons, did not include on his chart the number of part-time faculty. Colleges and universities across the USA have been increasing administrative positions, decreasing full-time faculty positions, and hiring scads of part-time faculty (at low salaries) to lecture at (they rarely teach) the massive influx of students. College now is about empowering administrators, sucking in federal student loan dollars, and proving a place for young adults to fart around for five or six years before going back to live with their parents when they cannot get a job.

My hope is that tomorrow's young adults rebel against the wasted years and wasted money and demand cost-effective education. We have the technology and know-how to educate at low cost: modern home schooling exemplifies this. So do some workplace training programs. Our current crop of 'educators' needs to be ousted.

Everybody talks about athletics and universities but gloss over other big time stuff. How about parking? The University of Minnesota has dozens of ramps, many lots, it's as much of a parking company as it is a school. But try and find out, through the university budget, anything about the financial impact of parking on the U of M. None of that stuff is available to the public that's paying the bills. The ordinary taxpayer doesn't know how much they spend on parking facilities, employee numbers or compensation, and what the revenues are. Nobody but the financial mavens at the U even know if parking is a money-making enterprise. I would suspect that it generates huge revenue but can't prove it and don't know anyone that can.

BTW - Perlhaqr - most of the sysadmin at the universities I know are grad students paid at below current wage, in addition to teaching (but Dr Staff HATES me!!!!eleventy!!11)

Buildings and Grounds folks at universities tend to be paid a bit less than market, due in part to perks (discount tuition, but only for the employee, no more discount for the A/C guy's kids, hah)

Parking lots have become profit centers. Many universities now require a credit card just to enter the divine grounds, to prove ability to pay for parking. I call bullshit on this one, particularly as most of the parking management is contracted.

The worst problem though is mission creep. Universities now suffer under the apprehension that they must expand at all costs. There are a few exceptions, mostly in the "classical studies" genre, but university administrators feel that they must offer everything - a school of medicine, a school of law, a business school - otherwise they will be passed over for another school with a bigger menu. This of course leads to the ever-growing campus, and the need for full time fund raisers, which brings me back to the start of this rant.

(Sits back and admire his Platonic elegance)

I retired from OSU in 2007 after working for 35 years as an engineering faculty member.

THE CONTEXT

OSU is a stunningly huge world with 57,000 students enrolled on its main campus, numerous hospitals, classroom buildings, research labs and complexes, administrative buildings, farms (even in Columbus) and sports complexes. Only any given day, well more than 100,000 people are roaming the campus. On football Saturdays, it might reach 200,000. The Notre Dame game might have had more than that. And they were deliriously happy, even joyful.

The annual budget is summarized here: http://www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo.php. It amounts to $ 5B per year. $ 900 M comes from state and federal subsidies. Much of that goes towards instruction costs. $ 2B goes to salaries and benefits.

It costs a full-time undergraduate student living on campus $24,000 per year for everything: tuition fees of $9,000 per years, board and room, books and misc. expenses.

The actual employee head counts (not FTEs) listed at the url are: tenure track faculty (the real faculty), 2,930; clinical and research faculty (generally non-teaching, 90% at the hospital), 891; auxiliary (adjunct, mostly part-time teaching), 2,433; administrative and professional staff (NOT janitors and gardeners--real professionals), 16,710; classified civil service (the janitors, maintenance, gardeners, etc) 5,277; student workers (part-time helpers, probably includes funded grad students, don't know), 13,680.

If there is any bloat it is likely to be in the administrative and professional staff. And much of the bloat is imposed by federal mandates. However, a department chair once told me that he didn't manage people, eg N, but their relationships, eg N^2. And that square law probably accounts for much of the administrative and professional staff. I don't think the amount of bloat is anywhere near what outsiders and faculty believe.

There is also hidden bloat in the regular tenure track faculty, because many courses actually have very low enrollments, on the order of 10 (yes!!, 10) students or less. Many, but not all, of these courses are populated by the faculty's graduate advisees and generally support the faculty's research interests. These courses are are tolerated as the cost of doing business, especially if the faculty member has research funding that supports the students. However, quite a few are undergraduate courses that are part of degree programs the University wishes to keep. In most cases, the University wants to keep them simply because they exist--inertia rules all.

OSU's main campus covers 1,765 acres within 3 miles of downtown Columbus. It is an easy walk to the State House, but only in broad daylight. There is another 14,000 acres or so scattered around Ohio in four regional campuses and research centers.

Several years ago, the main campus' physical plant was valued at about $2 B. There is a very large amount of ongoing, never-ending construction going on, so the current value might be $5 B. Even more if the current market value of the land is counted.

The hugh and spectacular and stupefying hospital complex accounts for 40% university's total budget. It is generally operated as a separate profit-making entity. Some of the tenure track faculty are MDs working as such at the hospitals.

The Athletic Department budget is not broken out at the url cited but it is rumored to be about $ 100 M per year. It is historically self-funded by the men's football and basketball programs, but recently the University had to take over the costs of the new basketball/hockey arena, which loses money as was predicted. So, historically it has been a profit center. Except for maybe a dozen universities and colleges in the US, athletic departments are money losers. The money losers include several Big Ten, Pac whatever and Big Twelve schools and everyone else. Don't ask.

THE MAIN POINTS

1. Graduate Research Associates and Graduate Teaching Associates are technically University employees, with W2s, retirement accounts, contracts, etc. But really they are apprentices learning how to be professionals with specialized skills. Many of the PhDs will eventually be faculty members (if only in China) whose jobs will be research, teaching and administration. We teach them how to do these tasks the old-fashioned way by making them do it. They get a lot of one-on-one training, which is expensive. They are not being exploited by teaching a bunch of undergraduates.

By the way, at OSU all the foreign TAs go through a screening/training process that includes actual English language instruction and teaching instruction and monitoring. They speak accented English, but they speak intelligible English. If your OSU son/daughter tells you otherwise, he/she is lying.

2. All of the research, every damn penny, comes from external, mostly federal, sources. OSU does not fund one penny of research out of its own monies or state subsidies. It charges overhead against the research contracts.

3. In the engineering college, the adjunct faculty are practicing engineers who do some teaching to satisfy themselves. All of them are PhDs/PEs. Many were once faculty members who found a professors life (which includes a lot of administrative work) unpleasant, but who loved the student contact.

In the humanities, and in some other areas, most or even all of the adjuncts are people with PhDs who can't find (and mostly won't ever find) regular faculty jobs and ABDs (all but dissertation) who need a job to support themselves while they try to finish their dissertations. They have miserable lives, and their numbers are increasing as universities strive to contain costs and control the faculty.

Almost all the horror stories about exploited adjuncts; politicized faculty, programs and courses; illiterate unteachable, unemployable and indebted students; etc etc, come from the humanities and social sciences.

Life was pretty good, although often hectic in engineering. The students were focused and hard-working, too.

4. If OSU is any guide, the amount of waste and bloat is much less than is normally believed. We are not a lean, mean machine, but none but small enterprises with only few levels of hierarchy are.

I believe that number includes staff at one of the largest hospital centers in the midwest.

Not to mention feeding and housing tens of thousands of students. And security. And etc.

Quick, snarky analysis is easy but not terribly valuable.