Also, isn't it fair to say that university administrators are less connected to the actual work of the institution than are many managers/executives in business? For example, marketing and engineering execs are often very involved, at a fairly detailed level, in the planning for new products. Sales executives often actually go out and help close big deals. Is there an academic analogy, in teaching and research, for this kind of involvement?

Seems to me that in the university environment, the faculty is actually performing some quasi-managerial roles, which in theory should *reduce* the requirement for pure administrators.

Administration and other segments of the discretionary budgets at colleges and universities are probably growing as a share of the pie, while Instruction is shrinking.

As I've said elsewhere, I believe that expenses are going to keep growing, over and above the so-called overall inflation rate, but this emphasis on non-academic matters is part of the picture.

I've both worked in and attended both private and public universities. On the whole, the public universities are much more efficient and much less subject to administrative bloat, in my experience. That is not to say that there isn't a wide range of variation among both groups. Some private places are very lean and others are ridiculously wasteful.

While faculty certainly have a quasi-managerial role (sometimes by institutional or legislative statute), the full-time administrators ceratinly have important decision-making roles, and sometimes are heavily involved in "closing the deal" (especially the president and the VPs for "advancement" and also for research.

I think the figures quoted probably fold in a lot of non-academic staff into administration, who actually are not actually administrators. Think professional staff in counseling, career placement, "diversity" ... the list goes on and on and keeps growing. A lot of extra administration is imposed by the federal or state governmnets, as well.

Remember, there's a constituency for almost all of these things. There's really nobody watching this stuff though, at most schools. Few faculty have the urge to delve into budgets and figure out what is going on, let alone the wherewithal to do something about it. And this assumes that they have access to the budget information in any digestible form. Somebody should be watching this more closely, but my take is it's not happening.

I'm certainly not an expert on higher ed personnel matters; however, don't many of the so-called "administrators" also enjoy the luxury of tenure?

Once positions are created and filled, it is virtually impossible for any school to make people or positions go away -- it becomes a legal, rather than management issue.

Out here in the "real world" bloatged bureaucracies get resolved through the free market system - the weak firms (i.e., those with the most "bloat") see profits decline or disappear. The firm is acquired, and all bets are off for all employees - the useless layers of managers are just stripped out of the org chart (along with the bodies occupying those positions), and the remaining employees start to feel relieved that they have a job at all. I know it's harsh; but there's no such thing as either (i) a free lunch; or (ii) a job for life.

drewski -- nice touch about the "so-called administrators". No, most of them don't have tenure in their administrative positions, maybe none of them. They can be and are replaced or eliminated. Some of them have tenure in the academic departments from which they came; usually these are "loaners" who do administration for only a few years.

As for the greater efficiency of the "so-called free market", I'm not convinced. Most of the adminstrators could make a lot more as executives in the commercial world. How do I know? Because I can compare what people make in comparable positions, and better yet, I've watched a number of them go and do it, people who are willing to tell me the deals they've gotten. Most of them are sacrificing a great deal by sticking with the academic world. The motivations vary, and surely they have their reasons, but sacrifice financially they do.

One thing I know, no academic administrator has ever gotten the prizes that top commercial CEO's have gotten recently for running their enterprises into the ground.

Re: Somebody should be watching this more closely.

I understand there was danger of this happening at Dartmouth, but they may have dodged that particular bullet... :-(

I am a faculty member at a public, 4-year institution and I've noticed a sharp uptick in the kind of silly "busywork" (filling out surveys, doing "assessment" stuff over and above what we had to do in the past, meetings) that seems aimed to justify the existence of more and more VPs.

The problem is - it wastes a lot of faculty time, time we could be spending on developing our teaching and research. And I suspect it's going to contribute to burnout in some faculty - I'm already dealing with far worse stress (in the sense of "I've been here since 7 am, it's now 6 pm, and I still don't know when I'll be done and able to go home"). And it's not an issue of needing to "work smarter, not harder" - it's an issue of being forced to do all kinds of paperwork caca that we didn't have to do before.

I am a grad student at a 4-year public university in a research-heavy department (Cog neuroscience). I can tell you that there are two people in our front office staff of 11 who do all the work. Their reward is, of course, even more work. There is no official tenure, but you would not get fired short of molesting a child at my school.

Also, the diversity office alone heavily skews the numbers towards administrators. However, it should also be kept in mind that universities are more and more heavily dependent on IT departments, which could also affect the numbers.

Mike"Remember, there's a constituency for almost all of these things. There's really nobody watching this stuff though, at most schools. Few faculty have the urge to delve into budgets and figure out what is going on"...One thing that might help is that if all universities were required to provide budget/expenditure information in a standard manner, analogous to the 10-K reports required of public companies (but with obvious differences to reflect the nature of the organizations.) If the standards were developed properly, this could also shed light on the perennial question of when big athletic programs are actually a profit center, as often claimed, vs when they are actually a *loss* center.

David Foster: Actually, I believe there is fairly standardized accounting. If you look at the report mentioned on this site re the Georgia system, it looks like the spending categories are similar or identical to those used where I work. Here they report this annually in fairly digestible form for anyone to peruse. The thing is, nobody really seems interested. (I'm an eccentric exception.) If there were profits and losses and dividends and stock prices, it would probably be different.

Re the athletic profits/loss: Few of the programs pay for themselves if you look just at sales/donations/endowment income. On the other hand, it's more complicated than that, alas. The administrators will tell you that the athletic donations also bring in donations to academic and other programs. They are probably correct. And most places, even if they're losing millions per year in direct costs of athletics, will be loathe to drop out of the big-time athletics business. Because they're afraid of losing much more in terms of donations, alumni support, legislative goodwill, student interest. It's a real dilemma I'm afraid. Unless you happen to be the Athletic Director or football coach.

Sure makes me want to encourage my high school senior to sign up for cheaper on-line course, enter an apprenticeship and enter the work work of his chosen teacher, learning from the best teacher their is-- OJT. Why would I want to pay $35K (yes, out of my pocket) a year to have my son taught my a non-professor who probably does not know as much as he does about his chosen field -- yep, I really have to think this thing called college through -- not sure it is worth it anymore -- answers?