> At public research institutions specifically, there has been a particularly marked rise in the number administrators. In 1990, there were approximately twice as many full-time faculty at public research institutions as administrators. In 2012, the two groups were nearly equal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
“Three decades later... administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures”
Even if admin costs where zero in the 1980’s they went up far more than 24% over the next 30 years. What happened is fewer classes are taught by full time professors which was a minor cost savings.
One of these costs was a massive influx of new students required a huge increase in facilities. Another was the need for websites, computers, and networking infrastructure to keep up with the competition. Collages did not benefit from the computer revolution because few things could be automated and they suddenly needed websites, and networking in the student dorms etc.
Many schools lack donors and actually needed to pay for new facilities. 12.1m students in 1980 vs 21.2m in 2010 means quite a few new buildings across the full range of collages.
These are things that would have required more physical space and more personnel in the past. Schools have transitioned a lot to a more self-service model but it has not translated into savings for students or their families as far as I can tell.
Teachers actually calculate grades, but that’s again vastly less effort than grading assignments. to the point where many just use pen and paper to record results. Many attempts at automation have increased teacher workload and require support staff.
Schools are seeing benefits from these computer systems, but they rarely reduce costs.
PS: Another consideration is collages are seasonal. Reducing the effort for some task may aid the workers. However, 100 administrators twiddling their thumbs costs just as much and schools need to staff for various crunch times not average workloads.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
> an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
> According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Reusing numbers from another post. 12.1 million US students in 1980 vs 21.2 million in 2010 and their instructors increased “11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008” sure that’s the full story.
PS: I can’t find C.S.U numbers but I expect your going to find similar or larger growth in student populations due to California’s higher than average population growth.
Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.
With a faculty member, I found that they were more focused on their actual faculty/teaching duties, and had trouble with the more administrative side of things.
This is also probably dependent on the quality of the school
That said, our faculty used to advise incoming students as well. From what I understand, our undergraduate director (tenured faculty) would do all the advisement personally, during the summer, himself. One summer he was out of town a lot and asked me to fill in for him for a day.
I was not very happy to be asked to show up during the summer. For one thing, typically faculty are paid only during the academic year, unless it's from grants (although I happened to be getting summer salary that year).
But also, the advisees were mostly freshman who weren't ready to take math-major courses yet. They wanted general advice on how to navigate the system, which gen-ed requirements to get out of the way, whether to take "University 101", and the like. Although I did my best, I felt quite out of my element.
Can't tell if you think this is a good thing or not?
You could equally say who gives better career advice - a 26 year old academic who knows nothing but their PhD, or someone who has been guiding people into careers successfully for 3 decades.
Might be best to control for the age I think.
Thirty years ago, most senior professors had secretaries, but now secretaries are almost unheard of. Individual professors wind up spending most of their time on ridiculous administrivia required to keep their grants.
If an administrator sticks his or her head into a profrssor’s life, it’s to make it harder, not easier.
For the most part, it's not part of their job descriptions.
Some things which have grown: student services; "Student Success" centers and the like; advising; IT; compliance with various grant agency and accreditation requirements (which seem to be growing); institutional efforts to further diversity and inclusion.
As an example, my understanding is that universities are doing much more to identify, and try to help, at-risk students than they were before. The new administrators hired into these roles will cheerfully work with faculty as appropriate, but it's a much more student-facing than faculty-facing role.
[1] The people justifying these requirements, of course, spend much time hand-wringing about how important it is for students to live in their expensive dorms.
Other possibilities:
Direct funding from states to public universities has decreased. Some portion of tuition increase has gone to replace the revenue lost from reduction in subsidies.
Capital costs from new campus buildings have gone up, as universities add expensive features that are not strictly required for education, such as apartment-style dormitories, or luxurious fitness centers for faculty and students. The university's money is usually fungible, so housing and recreation fees may be higher for students using those buildings than for the palmetto-bug dorms and century-old fieldhouse, yet still subsidized out of tuition revenue.
The aforementioned swarms of useless educrats may be corrupt, diverting university revenues to their own pockets via schemes that require their academic credentials or administrative authority.
Universities may be underwriting student loan debt, trading cash now for future income streams from future repayment. In that case, the money isn't even there yet, and the students first have to graduate and start earning before there is any of that money to spend.
I know that Indiana University dumped a lot of money into its "18/20" retirement plan, to attract better quality professors. It sounds very expensive. At some point, they realized it would bankrupt the university, and stopped offering it, but current students will still be paying for it until all those old professors that got it die off. So, maybe tuition increases are going to retired employees.
Last, we have accounting fictions. Universities charge $X on paper, to receive or maximize some third-party benefit, then rebate $Y to the student in the form of grants or scholarships. The money was never there, except on paper.
I'd suggest talking to your professors in undergrad school :)
Even better, if a professor actually gets a grant, the university will “tax” the grant at around 50% to pay for the overhead of providing office space for your post docs.
68% staff + faculty salaries and benefits 15% financial aid 17% equipment
From page 7, https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...
If someone knows a more detailed breakdown of the budget, I’d be curious! :)
I think UC is first and foremost a research institution. A lot of these professors are barely involved in undergraduate teaching, and the massive staff employee count I think is a lot of people related to research and assisting these researchers. That's why the undergraduate student experience is going down at UCs, with worse class sizes, and less engagement.
So I'd expect the tuition increase to be associated with teaching staff or teaching administrators (either dedicated to this full time or else as a percentage of their time), not with research (which is basically self-sustaining anyway). In fact, probably one of the motivations for increasing research activities is that it naturally brings in money and that you don't need to increase tuition to do it.
I do agree that research professors don't necessarily make the best teaching professors, but that's an entirely separate issue from the financial one.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...
Let me add that there were some very large class sizes during the peak of the baby boom. I don't think that I ever had fewer the fifty kids in my classes until I transferred out of parochial school in sixth grade.
[edit: teach -> teaching]
It's interesting to consider how college costs have increased compared to other indexes:
US inflation : ~300% https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980
US college costs: ~300% https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-college-tui....
US GDP per capita: ~500% https://mgmresearch.com/us-gdp-data-and-charts-1980-2020/
Keep in mind that those college and gdp graphs have inflation removed.