The Staggering Administrative Bloat of Universities

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/04/the-staggering-administrative-bloat-of-universities.html

by peterkshultz • 9 years ago

45 11 9 years ago

jbooth• 9 years ago

This could have been an interesting article about a real problem, but it's just 3 paragraphs of ranting about political straw men.

refractal• 9 years ago

If you look at what the UC Office of the president does, there's a huge scope there that the other examples probably do not have http://www.ucop.edu/about/

magila• 9 years ago

It's easy to make an impressive looking list of responsibilities for administrative offices. The thing is many of those bullet points include words like "help", "support", "promote", and "oversee". It's very hard to judge just how much work is going into those things and how important it is. You can have endless rows of "support" staff doing important sounding things that are actually totally superfluous to getting actual productive work done.

mljoe• 9 years ago

Anecdotally, when I was IT student sysadmin at a major university, I don't recall ever seeing admin staff doing actual work. Often times, you'd walk through the hallways and see rows and rows of offices of people screwing around on the Internet, or even playing video games. A good part of our job in IT itself was super slow as well except for the first two weeks of every semester, so we weren't much better. My boss would play WoW on the clock.

cortesoft• 9 years ago

This is why I hate these sorts of criticisms; they just talk about how much money is spent but never talk about what you are getting for the money. It still might be a waste of money, but we can't know that until we really look at what we are getting for the money, what would happen if we didn't spend it, and then decide if it is worth it.

noahjcz• 9 years ago

The annual budget of $29B certainly puts the half billion in perspective.

WillyOnWheels2• 9 years ago

I decided to explore what else this blogger blogs about, who I believe blogs from Arizona:

"Take the Pledge: Let's Take A Year Off From Giving To Our Universities" http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2017/04/take-the-pledg...

"How The Left Is Changing the Meaning of Words to Reduce Freedom -- The Phrase "Incite Violence"

Wealth Creation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy

Statism Comes Back to Bite Technocrats

He actually has a few views I can agree with, and links to plenty of things I read every week, but I don't think his analysis is particularly technical or hard hitting.

callalex• 9 years ago

Where's the rest of the article? This is a great opening statement followed up by...nothing.

verylongname• 9 years ago

I'm sure there is a lot of waste in the UC Office of the President. But Universities have become huge, complicated behemoths with many functions besides education.

I recently saw a breakdown of where the money for one of the UC campuses comes from. About 50% was from the associated Medical center, about 25% was from federal research grants (many of which had PIs in the medical school and medical center), about 15% from tuition, and 10% from other sources (not broken down further). This wasn't UCSF, either, where I would expect the medical center's budget to dwarf everything else.

I don't think it would be too far fetched to call it a medical center that happens to have school with 30K undergraduates attached. I wonder how the cost of running the chancellor's office there compares with the costs of administration of a medical services company?

Of course, at this point aren't Yale and Harvard basically hedge funds?

The Staggering Administrative Bloat of Universities

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