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Comment by basket_horse | Hacker News Reader

It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.

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> The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software

I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?

It’s engineering, not research

PhD in engineering is a thing

That is still a research position.

I went to an Arizona university in the 90s and our class registration system was far more customizable and feature-ful than what my son lives with now. His university has half the students mine did and they, across two decades, shared a university president.

I think it might also be something else.

That reminds me of the Pharoh’s sorcerers in Prince of Egypt. Maybe we aren’t underestimating anything and these organizations are just dysfunctional because the federal government gives them a blank check with student loans?

WUSTL has 20,000 students and faculty. This is not a big organization. To manage that, they have over 17,000 administrators. Meanwhile, the Pentagon in 1941, at the start of US involvement in WWII, had only 24,000 civilian employees to manage over a million soldiers.

Universities will respond that regulatory compliance is more complex and costly every year, and that student services costs are also increasing continuously (and cannot be cut if a university wishes to remain competitive). They may also say that with faculty not wishing to take on administrative roles (which take time away from research and teaching and do not help with tenure cases) the university needs to hire more full-time administrators.

Some universities will also claim that the average financial contribution for students and families has not increased, in spite of tuition and fees outpacing inflation for half a century or more and student loan debt reaching $1.6T.

But any large bureaucratic organization tends to seek expansion of its staff, budget, and influence, and that is likely a core reason for the dramatic increase in non-teaching university staff.

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