Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

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Obviously I’m 20 years past university and nearer being the paying parent, but why oh why should university “capture the value of data”. They should offer affordable education (if you believe in the value of tertiary education) and affordable signaling of abilities (if you don’t). A recent post by John Cochrane [1] somewhat pointed out the absurdity in US education, Stanford specifically. Stanford itself mentions 15750 non teaching staff members on 2288 professors. My kids K12 (EU) runs on about 6 administrators (excluding cleaning, but including all other staff) for 22 teaching staff, including upstream shared services in the city. In a high school the ratio is probably even better.

15750 administrators wanting to capture the value of data is just plain silly. (I’m going overboard here, but it’s about an order of magnitude of difference! I know of 50% differences in FTE/value in the market I work in, but x10…)

[1] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/?m=1

A big chunk of that 15,000 are professionals engaged in research activities (mostly funded by grants and other external funds) e.g. the 1600 folks involved in running the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and activities like fundraising and finances. They mostly are NOT folks 'administering' the faculty in any way. So the comparison with your kid's school is not meaningful. Not to say there are perhaps more administrators than might be ideal. But these numbers aren't helpful in understanding whether that's true.

Also, it's worth noting that Stanford is in fact free for folks under the median household income in the U.S. (roughly speaking) which seems pretty 'affordable'. Of course the economics of one of these large-endowment, research intensive institutions is pretty much unrelated to their teaching function. But that just highlights the weakness of using gross, whole-institution numbers of people/dollars for any sort of comparison. Big universities serve lots of ends (not just teaching undergrads) and so the teasing apart the economic picture (and whether it's efficient at meeting it's many goals) is complicated.

Public schools depend on a lot of administrative support outside the physical school its self. Buss drivers for example aren’t managed at the individual school level because they transport students to multiple different schools.

This extends through a huge range of administrative functions for everything from calling snow days to collecting taxes to pay for the school etc.

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