No One Knows What Universities Are For

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/bureaucratic-bloat-eating-american-universities-inside/678324/

by nsoonhui • 2 years ago

51 77 2 years ago

It's a big feedback loop. You go to college, you get a degree, you become a middle manager or administrator of some type, you go work at a university since you didn't learn the skills to actually do anything.

On a serious note, I worked in research and education for nearly a decade. The real question isn't whether all the staff actually work (I was staff myself!), they do. It's whether or not that work actually aligns with the mission of a university. IMO, this is research and _education_, but that's an unpopular opinion. Hence the poor return on investment so many graduates are seeing.

IG_Semmelweiss3• 2 years ago

Such is the problem of not exposing the industry to market forces.

The same perverse incentives have permeated into healthcare, which is no longer about owning the patient's health journey, vs administrators handling contracts, billing , benefits, claims, and shifting responsibility elsewhere

podiki2• 2 years ago

But isn't that exactly it, that these (and healthcare) are very much part of the "market?" The goal to make money and to provide healthcare are at fundamental odds if you ask me. (Or they don't have to be, but the natural "experiment" of for profit healthcare in places like the US tells us much.)

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

It's not a normal market because the customers (the patients) are generally not the people paying for the services.

IG_Semmelweiss3• 2 years ago

I think no one is against paying doctors to make a good living. Perhaps even extravangant living. If the product is great, why not? Apple, Tesla, Etc made owners very rich.

The problem is your share of health dollars going to administrators, which is bundled with the barriers to entry into healthcare and into insurance.

Its very hard to be a doctor that doesnt take insurance, so administrators come to rule the roost. If there was truly a free market, yiud see a material share of doctors working outside the insurance system. Yet no such niche really exists.

kube-system• 2 years ago

I think it's the exact opposite -- this is a problem created by administrators who are treating these institutions like a business and 'selling' these schools to be everything to everyone in order to continually grow enrollment, and grow their administrative empires. Academics works better when relatively isolated from market forces -- the worst thing you can do for academics is to ask it to turn a profit.

IG_Semmelweiss3• 2 years ago

Chicken va egg

What was first - barriers to entry, or administrative inertia?

Im not sure whos right, but im sure between thw two of them, they are making entire industries extremely inefficient.

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

And by subsidizing them we are. If actual market forces emerged then they’d stop it with the bullshit degrees that people that can’t afford and go into debt on. Subsidizing as we do today incentivizes them to be everything to everyone because the money keeps rolling in.

titanomachy• 2 years ago

University administrative bloat is a popular topic here, and certainly one that I’m concerned about. But I’m not sure that this article adds much to the discussion.

mrbluecoat• 2 years ago

Agreed. Some nice stats, but a clickbait title (everyone knows what universities are for). I guess "Less Collegiate Overhead Is Better For Students" isn't a splashy enough title.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

"everyone knows what universities are for"

Non profit reits? Sports teams? Partying? A degree

kstenerud3• 2 years ago

Kind of reminds me of the Yes, Minister episode "The Compassionate Society"

Bernard: In fact, there are only 342 administrative staff at the hospital. The other 170 are porters, cleaners, laundry workers, cooks, etc.

Hacker: And medical staff?

Bernard: Oh, none of them.

Hacker: None?

Bernard: No!

Hacker: We are talking about St Edward's Hospital?

Bernard: Yes. It's brand-new and fully-staffed. Unfortunately, there were cutbacks, so there was no money for medical services.

Hacker: A hospital with over 500 non-medical staff and no patients?

hedora• 2 years ago

In the US, it’s similar, except there are still patients.

You might think I am kidding:

I remember going in once for something minor. The receptionist, admissions nurse, doctor, and blood draw nurse all had “volunteer” badges on, and the company running the building proudly claimed it was a non-profit. The only person without a volunteer badge processed my credit card payment.

They billed my insurance 500% the national average for some routine bloodwork.

ta9883• 2 years ago

And the volunteers were probably trying to get some hours to be finally accepted in a program...

FredPret4• 2 years ago

That show - and Yes, Prime Minister - is a triumph

labster3• 2 years ago

Yes, Minister is amazingly relevant and fresh for a TV show from the last century. Human nature rarely changes, and bureacracy changes even more rarely.

MattPalmer1086• 2 years ago

They are brilliant. Been rewatching all of them with my son over the last few months.

Funny, great characters, and nice observations on the nature of power and people. Still amazingly relevant.

podiki2• 2 years ago

I think there is a big piece that is left unsaid here: capitalism. If we had to boil down a university to one imperative, it sadly seems to make money (ideally, for some, as a means towards the true ends). Lots of good points raised, as I can say from direct experience, but too often capitalism is just assumed or ignored as the underlying principle at work.

brightball• 2 years ago

It’s capitalism in that it’s economics and competition.

1. Competition for federal research dollars

2. Unlimited student loans removed price controls as a restraint on demand, which just applied upward pressure on the price since the supply didn’t increase as rapidly.

3. Because of 2, there’s a need for constant building and construction to add more space.

4. College rankings have the institutions competing with each other on all sorts of criteria. At Clemson 25 years ago there was a big push to get into the top 20 public universities. On of the rankings was student to teacher ratios…so they just had classrooms that weren’t full to help with the metric, just as other schools were doing.

5. The metrics that are used for competition sometimes involve spending money.

6. In order to keep up with all of these things, a lot of administrators are hired.

7. College football has really created an entire culture around universities that keep alumni together for their whole lives well after graduation. It drives alumni events, esprit de corps, and most importantly…advertising. Applications to Clemson are higher in years where the football team does better. The 2010s were crazy.

cranky908canuck• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/J3yIM

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

I don’t know. Is there not massive administrative bloat everywhere? It can’t be all misallocated.

And anyway, if I take a $300k salary you might see in industry, and split it between 1 associate professor at $150k and 2 admins at $75k, the admins get to WFH and all three get to have enriching time with their families where a single partner isn’t the sole caregiver, is that not the kind of community that educated people are agitating for anyway?

Universities are the future of work, not some sort of flawed or regressive past. I don’t know for certain if it’s a bullshit job. I know those people are happy though. You can argue all day for paying adjuncts more, or whatever, and I agree, but in principle, the admins are the community. They are the spouses and recent grads, they are the moms and dads.

The place where it is harmful is not the bloat. Like everyone’s income is someone else’s expense. It’s such a reductionist view, to complain about anyone who is getting paid to do something that isn’t exactly the same thing as you are doing. It’s harmful because those admins are shutting down communities, be they fraternities or co-ops, as a sort of vengeance plot against the people who wronged them when they were in college, which students never asked for. These college aged vengeances are the same thing motivating angry commenters against education in HN threads. No matter what the party, the sense of exacting vengeance is the nasty and bad part. Not the money.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

Universities are the future of work

Historical universities were originally an acculturing opportunity for the upper classes who were often not obliged to work, and modern universities broadly provide the same services to a more egalitarian cohort.

Work preparation was never really something they were optimized for, although there's now about three or four generations of them erroneously being treated that way in political and social discourse. In that view, it's no surprise that universities don't quite know what do with themselves or that many of their graduates find themselves drowning in profound debt while struggling to find work related to their studies (since their studies were about becoming cultured, not preparing for work).

Most people work in trades of some kind, and there have always been much more effective and efficient ways to learn trades than through universities.

392• 2 years ago

We should be ashamed of every dollar wasted on this lazy-middle-class-New-Deal that wasn't spent helping children in poor schools in the same nation. Luckily, the research for how best to help those schools is being done in Universities.

FredPret4• 2 years ago

But they don't do anything useful?

What is there to "administer" to this extreme extent?

In the past, there were very few of these administrators, and more professors. And we made lots of really great advances then, as now.

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/J3yIM

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are too many ideas about what a university is for.

It's a shame we've lost a lot of the alternative educational "systems" that existed alongside higher-ed. Things like journalism was learned in journalism schools, not universities. Trade schools used to be common place and target far more industries. No one used to get a degree in "business".

The university/high-ed, unfortunately, has a monopoly on cultural cachet. Certain schools now function as the main gatekeepers into whole industries. Corporations have handed over the entire idea of employee training to universities, while demanding frequently arbitrary degree requirements when hiring, allowing particular universities to exert enormous power over someone's life and future prospects.

They also have to be finishing schools and boarding schools for young adults hoping to get the "college experience".

sirspacey• 2 years ago

The history of universities, especially the American system, are a fascinating study in a century plus of institutional evolution.

Even the universities with particular mutations (New School, Olin) have evolved in fascinating ways.

Broadly, university evolution is:

1. Real estate development 2. Sports 3. Research grants 4. Brand 5. Source of vetted early talent 6. International tuition dollars

Almost none of what a university is economically designed to do is ensure students are trained for success in their career and life.

If there’s any directly relevant student benefit, it is certification - a fairly benign benefit.

What’s critical to grok is that universities are quite literally accredited based on how similar they look & behave to their peers.

harryp_peng• 2 years ago

Idk about university, but high school is indisputably important because it's training data for the brain.

nwiswell• 2 years ago

it's training data for the brain.

Has the word "education" fallen out of favor recently?

eru7• 2 years ago

If there’s any directly relevant student benefit, it is certification - a fairly benign benefit.

That might be a benign benefit for the direct recipient. But it's a poisonous arms race for everyone else.

intended2• 2 years ago

The arms race itself is a recent evolution that required a few conditions to kick off.

The debate on this will be never ending, and however much I personally value the benefits of international trade, the movement of well paying blue collar roles is the initiating factor.

This arms race didn’t exist here back in the 60s and 80s for example. However it was alive and well in Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

That runaway competition for certification is just… enshrined in the socio-economic fabric there. That structure is why there are so many doctors / engineers and graduates from the region.

If anything, it’s remarkable how long it took to get started here. The upside is that if there ever a chance to slow it down, it’s now.

ta9883• 2 years ago

The only indirect way student success and benefit plays a role is in 3, 4 and 6. Having personel on grants that comes from "prestigious" universities was seen as a plus by some of the grant reviewers I was sitting with in committees. It also plays with the brand to attract students and donation money (which play a big role still in some places).

There is an interesting movement now where universities are getting out of the rankings they have been avidly optimizing their metrics for in the last decades. I have sat in another kind of committee where one of the administrator rejected a project because it would divert funds from something that would improve the ranking (something about facilities that needed updates can't remember exactly what it was).

Animats• 2 years ago

I've commented before about Stanford's Redwood City "campus"[1] It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. Just administrators.

Recent events (March-April 2024)

* BeWell fair - visit with therapy dogs.

* Fire drill.

* National Pet Month.

* Automated External Defibrillator training.

I wonder how much of what happens there could be done by LLMs.

[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

FredPret4• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of what happens there could be done by LLMs.

With process optimization you first cut out things you don't have to do, then you simplify, then you automate. (vaguely calls to mind the spirit behind Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)

Academia got along fine in the 90s with 1/6th of the administrators.

resource_waste• 2 years ago

A deontologist cannot figure out what a University is for.

A consequentialist and virtue ethicist can figure it out.

I suppose the issue is that you need rules for funding. Deontology only solves that.

jaggederest• 2 years ago

In other words: The purpose of a system is what it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

PlunderBunny• 2 years ago

It's easy to say, if I'm spending someone else's money, that asking what a university is for is the wrong question.

(I feel like this is something that Terry Pratchett would have said better)

throwaway22032• 2 years ago

UK perspective here: we had a huge push to get "everyone" into higher education with the idea being that university attendance is correlated with higher income, so more degree holders = better economy.

In reality it's just created a large not-quite-elite that consider themselves "underemployed", when in reality there never were any jobs for 80%+ of them.

I feel that instead we should have promoted self employment / small businesses and created the environment for that.

That is to say - housing and building policy that ensures reasonable rents for living and shops, taxation policy that rewards taking risks, etc. Trade schools teaching people useful skills that they can apply without relying on some sort of ever-expanding bureaucracy to slot in to.

The focus on credentialism is backwards in my view. Most employers don't use it other than as, basically, a glorified signifier of IQ.

eru7• 2 years ago

[...] with the idea being that university attendance is correlated with higher income, so more degree holders = better economy.

That sounds a bit like buying a Lamborghini in order to get rich? Lamborghini ownership is highly correlated with net worth.

I feel that instead we should have promoted self employment / small businesses and created the environment for that.

Or just not done anything. At least that wouldn't actively waste resources.

The focus on credentialism is backwards in my view. Most employers don't use it other than as, basically, a glorified signifier of IQ.

Alas, employers do use it, to a degree. And for good reason.

See Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education for some background.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

"signifier of IQ" I believe I read that in the USA, the average IQ of college students is 100.

But with the student loans they have to take, I'm not quite so sure it can be that high

labster3• 2 years ago

This, more than anything, is why we need student loan forgiveness. The elected officials that were supposed to be supervising universities were asleep at the wheel, and the last two generations have had no option to get affordable education at the same quality of pre-1990 university. It’s great that some states are cutting university DEI programs, but why only deal with a tiny part of the problem? We need more professors and academic staff, not what we’ve frittered away loan money on to bump our US News rankings.

eru7• 2 years ago

This, more than anything, is why we need student loan forgiveness.

What? That's crazy!

By all means, give money to poor people, please. They'll need it.

Don't instead select the recipients of government largesse by 'who was middle-class (or better) enough to go to university, _and_ hasn't paid of their loans, yet?'

---

If you want to fiddle with student loans, I would suggest making any future loans dischargeable in bankruptcy (and removing all government guarantees for these loans).

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

The problem is that universities can't really be "disrupted" by newer, leaner startups, because what they sell is intangible prestige, not something more concrete and objective.

If the purpose of university was only to prepare you for professional exams, or something similar with projects, it would be straightforward to start a new one that managed better results for its students on less money. But how do you rapidly develop prestige as a new business, on a budget? It's practically impossible.

The system as it is massively favors incumbents. States can still start new universities because they can easily subsidize them, and people usually have some trust in their states to provide an okay education. But a new private entrant? Good luck!

ta9883• 2 years ago

The fun thing is that prestige rots. Unless someone can buy it and brandish it as their own exclusive possession. Maybe billionaires will invest in universities and treat them like the sports teams and journals they own these days.

jjmarr• 2 years ago

This disruption is already happening with the rise of co-operative education. Schools like the University of Waterloo have amazing job-market outcomes with 5-year degrees that alternate between education and work terms. You graduate with 2 years of work experience and connections with employers to land a job after you graduate. Now they're the best school in Canada for CS and on par with MIT/CMU.

Students value "prestige" because they think it'll improve their life. People see people that go to a good university and get good jobs and think "wow this university will make me successful!" because some of the prestige rubs off on them.

I don't believe that's a good mechanism for improving outcomes. I think there are better ways, and many schools are implementing those ways right now.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

That prestige is fading rapidly:

https://www.natesilver.net/i/143904654/perceptions-of-higher...

In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup polling. By summer 2023, that number had declined to just 36 percent. The decline has been especially bad among Republicans — although only 32 percent of independents have confidence in higher education, and the numbers have also declined among Democrats.

That is from mid 2023 so predates the campus protests.

Universities have chosen to consume their political capital to deliver short term wins to the left, e.g. by appointing diversity hires to top positions who have engaged in easily spotted plagiarism or academic fraud. People are noticing and trust is falling, even amongst those the universities are directly pandering to. There's not much sign they're going to change strategies though, so probably there will soon be a gap in the market for education startups.

beej71• 2 years ago

Diversity focus is a fairly recent thing, and a very recent thing politically, but Gallup has been looking at this downward trend since the 70s.

brigadier132• 2 years ago

Someone explain to me why these not for profit institutes charge so much money?

eru7• 2 years ago

Because profit isn't actually as 'evil' as it's made out to be?

Profit isn't a major component of costs (in most industries), despite all the bad press.

friend_and_foe2• 2 years ago

But they're non profits...

ipnon• 2 years ago

The first university, the University of Bologna, always seems like the ideal to me. It was a guild, or what we might today call a trade union, of local tutors, who colluded together to regulate prices and amount of time spent teaching for their own benefit. Out of this emerged the modern concept of the research university, because having colluded on acceptable prices and labor limits, the professors then had amply ability to work on whatever problems they wanted to. And being smart people they started to work on unsolved problems, began traveling across Europe and helping similar institutions, and collaborating across the continent in Latin.

Fundamentally this seems the best approach, the professor-centered one. The professors who are extremely knowledgable in a single field exchange some of their time to undergraduates who provide them with enough money so that they can continue learning about their specific field. This professor-undergraduate relationship is mutually beneficial, and also aids society by increasing the number of experts in the world. Things begin to deteriorate when other influences such as administrators, real estate agents, financiers, donors, politicians, and so on get in the mix, because their goals are oftentimes only tangentially related to increasing the total amount of knowledge in the world.

spiderxxxx• 2 years ago

Nalanda university was the first, not Bologna, having predated it by more than 600 years.

OutOfHere• 2 years ago

I get the feeling that a PhD is the only degree that a university should offer. All else is a money-grubbing scam that enslabes people in debt. Moreover, the PhD should be publicly funded or by donations. Regarding specialist degrees like MD and nursing, I think they too can be rolled into a PhD. It should take 5 to 8 years to complete after high school, and no more. Everything else can be learned on one's own.

Perceval• 2 years ago

Johns Hopkins started out that way. Only grad students, no undergrads, pure research university. When they first admitted undergrads they had no separate courses, they just had to backbench the grad courses and listen.

incomingpain• 2 years ago

Universities should be forced to publish their unemployment, underemployment, and successes of their recent grads.

In high school the local university was doing a presentation and they said their grads were 92% employed. I immediately asked the obvious question, 'since unemployment is 4%, university makes you less employable?'

They had no answer and so I got to follow up. If I got a physics degree, how likely is it that I would get a job using the degree. They were a biologist, but knew how to answer. "If you get a physics degree, you'll need to get your phd otherwise there's no jobs for you.'

Boy did I ever get in trouble.

Balgair• 2 years ago

Unless I am mistaken, Derek Thompson, the author of the short article, does not once mention Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University[0]. Really, that's a shame as it's one of the foundations of how we view universities and, honestly, I don't think much has changed since then 1852 in those respects.

The good cardinal lays out his vision about a university, quite secularly for the time period, and spells out 'what a university is for' very explicitly: Intellectual development, formation of character, unity of knowledge, freedom of inquiry, and life preparation. I don't think even some 170 years later that things have changed all that much for us in respect to those overarching goals.

Though it is The Atlantic, a rage bait magazine for nearly a century, it doe make the point that the admin of many universities is just too much. That higher education has become a make work program of sorts, fueled by the government's goal of more college grads and a lot of debt.

I'd say returning to the ideas outlined by Newman would be a great start to burning off the admin bloat.

[0]https://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/

tim333• 2 years ago

No One Knows What Universities Are For

People do know what they are for - education and research. The problems listed in the article seem mostly an American thing where the administrators are allowed to say should we give the money to teachers or ourselves? I know let give it all to the administrators.

I'm from the UK and went to Cambridge and you wouldn't get away with that stuff over here - there'd be a huge outcry. I'm not sure how it got quite so out of hand in the US. I mean there is quite a lot of government control but places like Cambridge ran ok on private money for centuries without the hundreds of administrators disease.

No One Knows What Universities Are For

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