Just to further you basic point: a lot of the growth in use of non-teaching professional staff in higher ed is coming from the realization that student learning is driven by their total college experience, and not individual hot-shot professors.
At the community college level, it seems to me that there is real overlap between the services we provide for struggling students and social work. This issue is tricky, because students say overwhelmingly that they don't want us to be their social worker. Still, I think this role for the college needs to be expanded, no matter what you call it, because no one else is providing these services.
So, yeah, I'd like to see our school hire more advisors and student support people (and streamline the process. At least from my perspective, it seems weirdly complicated.) This will probably do more good for students than more full time faculty.
From the link in the OP, I couldn't figure out how I'd count in that chart. I'm part of total university compensation, but I don't have anything to do with students (except as they also work for the university) or receive any money from tuition.
I think a lot of the adjuncts lamenting their fate, bemoaning their fate, decrying their fate, et al. would be happy with, say, three-year contracts, instead of being hired on an ad hoc basis. The lack of a middle ground between "six-month commitment" and "indefinite, possibly lifetime commitment" seems odd.
Also seems odd that the general response to the numbers cited in the LGM post is "Oh, of course there are now all these 'deanlets' making $120,000 a year. Fire all the deanlets." Really? If you do the numbers, that leads you to conclude a massive increase in deanlet density, measured in terms of deanlets per square foot, even accounting for reduced state funding and increased building construction. Is "deanlet" really the hot new career? Are colleges hiring 50 times as many deanlets as professors every year?
There is a small trend of offering five year contracts to math lecturers, at UTexas, at least.
In terms of total employee compensation, what I've often heard is the healthcare costs are strangling higher ed like they're strangling everything else.
There's just a basic arithmetic problem here, isn't there? Revenue rose 40% and the only expense listed that rose by that much is the university president's salary. But that's obviously a tiny fraction of the budget. So a significant fraction of the money is going to something that isn't listed in the chart.
No, wait, 6 must be wrong. Tuition revenue rose 40% but that's consistent with total revenue rising by a much smaller amount.
All the money is going to libraries. That's why we all sit around drinking rare and expensive wines and lighting our Cuban cigars with leaves torn from incunabula.
The whole thing is impossible to tease apart, since we don't know what percent of the total budget any of these categories are.
For most state schools, educational cost per student has remained approximately constant, and the increase in tuition is just making up for the decrease in state funding. Administrations have been unequivocally growing, but at big state schools at least, much of this seems to be paid for by endowments and overhead on grants.
I think part of the problem is even as deanlet staff grows geometrically, HR staff grows exponentially. Everyone you hire means hiring .X more FTE of HR staff. Including HR staff. Pretty soon, big land-grant universities will just be gigantic HR plantations.
11: The administration is expanding in order to meet the needs of the expanding administration.
For the record, our HR department of two people has not grown in my time at Heebie U.
13: Maybe you should be asking THEM for tips on keeping the weight off, then.
At places like the U of California, the educational enterprise (which has been fairly well frozen in size) is tiny compared to the spending on everything else (five hospital systems, three large national laboratories, federally funded research, etc.). It is hardly surprising that the number of non-faculty is going up faster than the number of faculty, and not particularly a problem if you believe (as UC does) that the mission of a university is knowledge creation and public service in addition to undergraduate education.
UC still owns its hospital systems?
Ours got spun-off a long time ago, because it was just too much bigger than the university.
I've never really seen any article written that actually lays out what's going on in university finances. It's frustrating. It shouldn't be that hard to say: revenue from tuition/grants/endowment/state have gone from x_i to y_i, while spending on faculty/labs/graduate students/adjuncts/administration/studentliving have gone from z_i to w_i.
13: That sounds like fuzzy math.
There are no fuzzy people, only fuzzy parts.
I'd argue that if enough parts are fuzzy, the person is fuzzy. I'm not sure what the percentage is, but I've known guys who have to pick an arbitrary point at which to stop when shaving their face.
16: Yes, and hospitals are a $4.5B piece of the UC budget (compared to a third of that for student tuition/fees).
That might explain the difference. Our former system has $9 billion in revenue. I'm not sure exactly what student tuition and fees are, but certainly far less than 1/3rd of that.
15 -- I don't particularly think it is a duty of a university to run hospitals. It's also pretty legit to feel that the primary groups of people that ought be fulfilling the university mission are faculty + students, given the way universities are structured, and to be concerned when that changes.
24: The university medical systems mostly grew out of teaching hospitals needed to train medical professionals. Then it kind of exploded in size along with the rest of the health care system, but even more so because of things like non-profit status and having access to piles of money and federal reimbursement rules allowed them to prosper. Then the Chancellor of the Republic is revealed as a Sith and so on.
Really, wouldn't it be best for everyone if we just removed the "undergraduate education" part of universities? I hear MOOCs are good for that.
21: I had a boss once who favored open-necked polo shirts, and had a heavy beard that grew uninterrupted down the front of his neck until it became luxuriant chest hair. He had a sharp line that showed through his open collars where he stopped shaving.
Who would walk around wearing yoga pants and cheering me up on my way to lunch?
But maybe even more important would be to remove all professors over the age of 50.
Who would write grants that keep me paid?
Remove them to where? The insane asylum? The English department?
+1 for yoga pants.
Remove them to where?
A nice farm somewhere?
You just need to include the appropriate line items for nutrition of PI.
I know one who always order big bottles of champagne. Magnum PI.
33/35, they could share a sanctuary with the retired research chimps.
In North Carolina, I think a lemur sanctuary is easier to find.
The 50% increase in president salaries seems to reflect a trend in which the culture as a whole (though I don't recall being consulted) has decided that chief executives were massively undervalued in the past. I don't think that is the case. reversing this trend seems to me a key step in dealing with income inequality.
18: That would require a reporter who was not innumerate. I know quite a few reporters and to a person they are great at crafting a story but shitty with numbers. It needs someone or a group of someones to do the math, explain it in basic terms, and only then will the story get written.
If there was grant funding for it, I could dust off my undergraduate newspaper reporter badge.
Speaking of undergraduates, I just left a bar because it made me feel old. I was the only person over thirty.
You should have stood up on the bar and shouted drunkenly "You're all too young! Can you even legally drink in this state? I'm calling your parents!"
I just got on a bus to go to the usual bar.
Why were you at the youngsters' bar in the first place?
31 et seq.: to the soylent vats
I believe somebody here at unfogged has already proposed the only real solution to the funding problem, which is to fire 50% of all university administrators and replace them with robots, temp workers, and Massive Open Online Administrators.
46: Sign outside saying $2 pints and I figured the undergrads don't come back until next week.
Well I hope you at least got a cheap pint or two.