Administrative bloat at Yale

[TreadingLife]

This seemed interesting enough to share.

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike.
Source: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/

[Wahoo Redux]

Growing government requirements imposed on universities may have contributed to the administrative expansion. According to a report from the American Council on Education, in 2013 and 2014 alone, the United States Department of Education added new rules and regulations on 10 new issue sets, including grants, loans and campus crimes. The report further details that, according to data from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, "the number of federal requirements placed on colleges and universities grew by 56 percent between 1997 and 2012."

Where's Polly when you need her?

[marshwiggle]

A bizarre quotation from the article:

Professor of political science James Scott agreed with Campos, adding that while all Ivy League schools are subject to similar levels of government regulation, Yale still leads the group in manager to student ratio.

"One [cause] is the tremendous increase in revenue generated by these universities that more or less has to be spent," Campos said. "This means that as revenues go up, there has to be found ways to spend them. And one of the most natural ways to increase spending is to increase administration, the size of it and the compensation of the top administrators in particular."

I know some of these places have huge endowments, but I can't imagine their students are all attending for free. The idea that there are these buckets of money with nowhere to go doesn't fit any sort of reality. If students paid no tuition or living expenses, and endowment interest above inflation covered all of the expenses with money left over, then that would be the case.
I can't imagine that's it.

[mahagonny]

Bloated government bureaucracy and bloated college administration are self-regenerating buddies. They both pretend to be watching important things very closely, including each other. And then laugh all the way to the bank.

[apl68]

It's frustrating to read about so many SLACs and HBCUs going to the wall for lack of a few million dollars, while other schools have so much money they don't know how to spend it all, and are basically just blowing much of it off.  It reminds me of looking the other day through a coffee-table book of photos of wonderfully-designed and crafted houses done in traditionally-influenced styles.  On the one hand I admire their beauty (and that fact that there are evidently still some good craftsmen left out there).  On the other, I can't help thinking about how some of us here in our rural county who are charitably inclined could transform the lives of multiple struggle families in our community if we just had what one or two of those places cost at our disposal.  And some of those houses were mere vacation homes that probably stand vacant for months at a time.  It's just not right.

[TreadingLife]

It's frustrating to read about so many SLACs and HBCUs going to the wall for lack of a few million dollars, while other schools have so much money they don't know how to spend it all, and are basically just blowing much of it off.

I thought the same thing. Oh how I would gladly take their financial "problems" for the financial woes of my current SLAC.

Then again, it seems like many people can't help but complain, regardless of how well they might be doing. For some, it is too ingrained to find gripe instead of gratitude around every corner, so even where there isn't an issue, folks see one. Sigh.

[Caracal]

This seemed interesting enough to share.

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike.
Source: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/

Does it really make sense to use undergrads as the metric of comparison? . Elite research universities also do all kinds of stuff that are only vaguely related to students. Yale has four different museums. They also have five libraries housing all kinds of important collections, a whole host of centers and think tanks of various sorts. You need a lot of people to run all this stuff.

[quasihumanist]

I don't donate money to my alma mater.  They already have so much money they don't know what to do with it.

[dismalist]

A bizarre quotation from the article:

Professor of political science James Scott agreed with Campos, adding that while all Ivy League schools are subject to similar levels of government regulation, Yale still leads the group in manager to student ratio.

"One [cause] is the tremendous increase in revenue generated by these universities that more or less has to be spent," Campos said. "This means that as revenues go up, there has to be found ways to spend them. And one of the most natural ways to increase spending is to increase administration, the size of it and the compensation of the top administrators in particular."

I know some of these places have huge endowments, but I can't imagine their students are all attending for free. The idea that there are these buckets of money with nowhere to go doesn't fit any sort of reality. If students paid no tuition or living expenses, and endowment interest above inflation covered all of the expenses with money left over, then that would be the case.
I can't imagine that's it.

Yeah, reading around a bit, the expansion in revenue and staff came from the Medical School, which of course is run from a hospital. That's all irrelevant for undergraduate education. Surely Yale has financial reports with Medicine and the rest separate. Surely these facts are not made available to most of its own administration and all of its faculty!

[Hibush]

YDN probably got Unversity of Colorado professor Campos speaking off hte cuff about admin trends without looking into Yale specifically. Faculty in general have no idea about university finances, so you do eget lots of uninformed comments in student papers.

Med-school expansion is an excellent example of a revenue positive increase in staff that is unrelated to the instructional budget.

My school has seen a substantial increase in staff specifically in mental health support. That is not an expression of the "desire of administrators to accumulate power and influence" that Campos criticizes. I also suspect that failing to make that staffing incrase would have put us in worse financial shape.

[Parasaurolophus]

I dunno, IIRC this is one of Campos's crusades over at LGM.

[Caracal]

YDN probably got Unversity of Colorado professor Campos speaking off hte cuff about admin trends without looking into Yale specifically. Faculty in general have no idea about university finances, so you do eget lots of uninformed comments in student papers.

Med-school expansion is an excellent example of a revenue positive increase in staff that is unrelated to the instructional budget.

My school has seen a substantial increase in staff specifically in mental health support. That is not an expression of the "desire of administrators to accumulate power and influence" that Campos criticizes. I also suspect that failing to make that staffing incrase would have put us in worse financial shape.

Yeah, increases in staff instead of faculty can be bad but the details matter. For example, I've been at or around a number of schools that wouldn't hire or replace departmental admins at the same time they were funding new faculty lines. That tends to be a bad plan if you just spread the work around to the remaining admins.

I suspect that many of the problems I have whenever I deal with some sort of administrative issue at my school are caused by staff shortages. When say, the room you teach in is 100 degrees and the system is pumping out heat, I just get a bunch of emails for four days from someone about how they are working to get the problem fixed. You would imagine this is in the registrar's purview, but when I wrote them it was pretty clear that nobody thought this was their job. So...my job is just to teach the class at that time in that room. If that isn't feasible, it seems like figuring out the new plan should be someone else's job...It wouldn't shock me if this used to be someone's job, they retired three years ago, and nobody has ever replaced them.

[Ruralguy]

The temp in room thing might just be more of a misunderstanding of who controls what and who you can get to just come over and do it.  Direct work  order to facilities management would probably be most effective.  Then again, some places require requests through chain of command to lift a screwdriver. In any case, even if you had contacted the wrong person, they should have been polite enough to transfer you to correct person or even just to make the quick call for you.

[Caracal]

The temp in room thing might just be more of a misunderstanding of who controls what and who you can get to just come over and do it.  Direct work  order to facilities management would probably be most effective.  Then again, some places require requests through chain of command to lift a screwdriver. In any case, even if you had contacted the wrong person, they should have been polite enough to transfer you to correct person or even just to make the quick call for you.

Yes, I think it was the chain of command thing. The building manager was on it, but for whatever reason, he didn't seem able to get somebody from facilities management to just come over and deal with it. He was writing everyone who taught in that classroom regular updates that nothing had changed and we were still waiting for them to come try to fix it. I eventually saw the guys come fix it before my class and it took 20 minutes from start to finish. All I got from the registrar was them telling me to call facilities management.

I imagine the absence of the registrar was why it took so long to fix. I'm sure the building manager was trying, and I'm sure the facilities management people are busy and everyone thinks their requests are urgent. What you need is someone in the registrar's office to call facilities management and say "Hey, we are going to have to find somewhere else for eight classes to meet tomorrow and that's going to be a mess. Can you guys please send someone down there now to see if there's a quick fix?"