My take on this is that it’s a result of stupid luxury.
There’s a lot of admin positions. I’m not sure what the right amount of admin is, but seems stanford has too many doing too little and too much. I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to way lower rated schools but it seemed to me that my interactions with admin were all unpleasant and funny in a Brazil-style way. And whole I would like them to be better, I never thought that more people would solve the problems.
Stanford admin staff has doubled in the past 40 years [0] and they have more admin staff than teachers. Students did not double during this period.
I think admin staff are more insidious than just driving up costs (although that’s important). I think it’s an issue of giving smart people good pay and bullshit work. Perhaps with good intention they want to be constructive but choose bikeshedding topics and really drill down to do something to stay busy. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the decision to cut sports teams and which ones, dozens of committees and papers and consultants over something completely stupid that shouldn’t even be worth a single agenda item.
I remember an analysis after 9/11 that partially blamed the attacks on Middle East countries shift of cutting all the busy work for graduates so smart people got masters degrees and had nothing to do. [1] So the boredom ended up leading to more terrorism.
Obviously, high tuition and kangaroo court pogroms on privileged kids is better than blowing stuff up. But perhaps the solution is to not have make work positions and release people to create real things.
I think a possible solution is for alumni to stop donating and state reasons. But that might result in just hiring more admin staff to promote more donations. (I know a contact who works as one of 5 admin staff in a 4th tier subregional university that works on alumni promotions and is justified by a 1.2x return on salary based on the increased donations. So, for example, their cost is $500k per year and they produce a newsletters and a ton of spam and bring in $600k so it’s good right?)
I think a Stanford degree is still very valuable and I would spend more time reading a job application with a Stanford degree, but what’s the tipping point?
[0] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris...
“ Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. The graduates they studied came of age at a time when a degree from a competitive technical program was supposed to provide a guarantee of high-status employment. But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
I like this and have unconsciously used this when designing governance processes. I try to design so that people who like governing and code review are avoided and people who hate it, are competent, and view it as a duty are favored. So always to avoid “professional governancers,” especially when people try to hire contractors to perform review as their incentive is to just burn time. I haven’t encountered a good simple metric.
If I were designing a university (and I never would), I’d make admin a chore that professors are forced to do in addition to the real work. I’d make it some sort of only senior people can do it so there’s some prestige but is not fun. That way competent people are doing it, but they do it as busywork on top of their “real” work. There are some downsides to that and I think such a system is not stable as, naturally, smart people would get out of it [0] and eventually they would hire professional admins and everyone would avoid.
[0] I read a story a few years ago how Feynman hated administration, https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-think-of-acad..., so I got the idea to take on a very high profile admin task and ruin it so thoroughly and famously that my “brand” would be tagged with “never let prepend do administration and manage projects as ve will mess them up.”
30 more years until I know if it works. Fingers crossed.
When my kids started Elementary school we had a Principal, a superintendent, and teachers, The superintendent both retired and we now have a Principal, a superintendent, a vice-principal, and a few specialized directors. This happened over 10 years right before my eyes. The new Principal claimed the job was just too big. We are small town with fewer than 600 students. I feel like such a grumpy old man doubting these peoples work effort. I think people that do poor jobs hire more people to create more confusion. I'm not proud of my cynicism.
I have a simile experience. I live in an affluent suburb and I moved here for the school. There’s 5 vice principals and all sorts of others. Of course there are 30 students per classroom.
Also, sadly, the vice principals make more than teachers so there’s a perverse incentive for people who need more money to move from teaching to administration.
I had a surreal meeting that the school scheduled for me when my child’s kindergarten teacher wanted to tell me my child had autism. It was the principal, the kindergarten vice principal, a backup vp, the special needs assessor (not the special needs teacher there was someone whose permanent job for the school was to identify kids with special needs), the teacher, and a county observer. So six school staff and me and my spouse.
It seemed like a big deal when we got there. They said that my child had autism and should be moved into special classes. I asked what made them think that and the kindergarten teacher presented her “evidence” that my child got upset once because the room was too noisy and poor performance in class.
I asked what else made them think that and they didn’t have anything else. There was no medical training out of the six people. It was so surreal. My kid had been screened many times and no one said anything so I said I would talk with the pediatrician.
Pediatrician laughed and said they were crazy and wrote a letter saying bo autism.
The school ignored the letter and tried to move them into the class despite my disagreement.
Comically, they had forgotten to file some form weeks earlier and when I showed the county procedure the county observer forced them to “follow the documented procedure” and so the process stopped, my kid stayed in regular class. And, weirdly, they never filed the forms for stage 1 of the multi stage process and I never heard about it. (10 years later, still no autism).
I never got closer as to what was going on and I fear their attention to pivoted to some other, less fortunate child.
All that labor, my cynical self says the more administrators the more things need to be found to administrate.
So glad to be out of the public school system. I always supported public schools. If I was starting out today I would break my back to keep my kids out of the system.
I hear you and I have experienced the same thing at the local schools. But I will say that my wife is a teacher and there are many more kids with serious needs today than I believe there were when she and I went to school. Not a statistic I can back up, but as a grumpy old man I think about that too.
No doubt that is why I'm embarrassed by my cynicism. I was a kid that would have had also sort of interventions that would have helped me academically. Our school tries to keep class size below 15 and there is a classroom helper. All those interventions take paperwork and that could be the problem with workload. I would like to think a good school administrator could develop a good strategy so that eventually the daily paperwork creates the end reports.
Governments at multiple levels have also imposed additional compliance mandates on schools. It now takes extra work to gather the necessary data and submit official reports. But there is a lot of waste in most school districts and much of that work could be automated.
heh elementary school principals get high in the parking lot before school (at least they do in Dallas public schools). You're not dealing with the best people in public education.
The Principal that needed the vice principal was found years early having sex in a school closet with another teacher.We can only imagine why they couldn't keep up with the paperwork.
The job of administration should always be to _reduce_ the bureaucratic burden of an organization.
Think of a small firm that doesn't have a dedicated admin and/or accountant. Leadership and productive workers might constantly be dealing with admin tasks themselves, it becomes a mess quickly and no one really knows how to do these things efficiently, because it is a skill in itself. The boss often becomes a bottleneck, workers have to deal with inconsistencies and so on.
This is why an admin is hired: They are the lubricant of an organization. Make everything smoother. Say "no" at the appropriate times. Organize internal knowledge and time tables. Set up meetings etc. They are there to make everything _easier_ and smoother for the rest.
If administration becomes its own, self-perpetuating thing that invents arbitrary rules, instantiates committees and process rigidity, it becomes a complete burden. A polished turd that makes the appearance of neat organization and professionalism, but is rotten on the inside as it's spreading and encumbering everyone else.
Tangent: school “ratings” are part of the grift. Yes, there are bad schools, but you hit diminishing returns far sooner than expensive schools want you to believe.
I agree on the ratings. I struggled with a way to convey that this is not a school where you would even imagine alumni caring about. It’s the school to go to when you don’t get into the state university and don’t get into the secondary state university. Not that it’s bad, it’s just not a place that should have 5 people working on this task.
So at I thought that the ranking shows that they haven’t even gotten to the point of joining the grift of rankings. It’s rated between 400-500.
It’s hard to truly rank universities in general or even in specific subject areas and, for me, it falls into the unquantifiable reputation realm.
I grew up with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and other successful college dropouts so I always felt I wanted to look at output and production rather than credentials. But of course, I have to settle for medical boards and whatnot and the drawbacks of that as there’s no way I can or am willing to evaluate cardiologists based solely on their work. Artists and coders, sure.
I feel like your cited article [0] loses most, or all, of its heft when the author admits that 47 percent of the growth in "admin positions"---more precisely, of non-teaching employees---comes from hiring at Stanford's hospital. Doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees shouldn't be counted as part of the university's administrative bloat.
There’s a lot of admin positions. I’m not sure what the right amount of admin is, but seems stanford has too many doing too little and too much. I didn’t go to Stanford, I went to way lower rated schools but it seemed to me that my interactions with admin were all unpleasant and funny in a Brazil-style way. And whole I would like them to be better, I never thought that more people would solve the problems.
Stanford admin staff has doubled in the past 40 years [0] and they have more admin staff than teachers. Students did not double during this period.
I think admin staff are more insidious than just driving up costs (although that’s important). I think it’s an issue of giving smart people good pay and bullshit work. Perhaps with good intention they want to be constructive but choose bikeshedding topics and really drill down to do something to stay busy. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into the decision to cut sports teams and which ones, dozens of committees and papers and consultants over something completely stupid that shouldn’t even be worth a single agenda item.
I remember an analysis after 9/11 that partially blamed the attacks on Middle East countries shift of cutting all the busy work for graduates so smart people got masters degrees and had nothing to do. [1] So the boredom ended up leading to more terrorism.
Obviously, high tuition and kangaroo court pogroms on privileged kids is better than blowing stuff up. But perhaps the solution is to not have make work positions and release people to create real things.
I think a possible solution is for alumni to stop donating and state reasons. But that might result in just hiring more admin staff to promote more donations. (I know a contact who works as one of 5 admin staff in a 4th tier subregional university that works on alumni promotions and is justified by a 1.2x return on salary based on the increased donations. So, for example, their cost is $500k per year and they produce a newsletters and a ton of spam and bring in $600k so it’s good right?)
I think a Stanford degree is still very valuable and I would spend more time reading a job application with a Stanford degree, but what’s the tipping point?
[0] https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is... [1] https://slate.com/technology/2009/12/why-do-so-many-terroris... “ Gambetta and Hertog propose that a lack of appropriate jobs in their home countries may have radicalized some engineers in Arab countries. The graduates they studied came of age at a time when a degree from a competitive technical program was supposed to provide a guarantee of high-status employment. But the promises of modernization and development were often stymied by repression and corruption, and many young engineers in the 1980s were left jobless and frustrated. One exception was Saudi Arabia, where engineers had little trouble finding work in an ever-expanding economy. As it happens, Saudi Arabia is also the only Arab state where the study found that engineers are not disproportionately represented in the radical movement.”