This is an essay by John Seery, a professor of politics at Pomona College. He calls it “Somewhere Between a Jeremiad and a Eulogy.” Seery has been at Pomona since 1990 and bemoans the explosive growth of the administration and what he sees as its adverse effects. He recognizes that the same thing is happening at large universities but thinks the effects are particularly pernicious at small liberal arts colleges and fundamentally undermine what makes those colleges special.
Seery makes the argument that even tenured faculty are relatively powerless in such a bloated administrative structure. One of his gripes is that increasingly the presidents of small liberal arts colleges are not themselves graduates of SLAC’s and therefore don’t sufficiently champion the traditional virtues of a small, intimate LAC. He gives a sad but funny description of the escalating cost of software and the ever growing gang of IT professionals that come with it. Even sadder is the description of what happens when he notices that one of students is troubled and in need of help. He can no longer just pick up the phone and call the Dean of Students but must fill out forms on the portal and wait for the portal to respond.
Seery also points the finger at administrators, not faculty, for the explosion of what he calls “the Residential Life Industrial Complex” of well funded administrators.
He basically ends with a call for “budgetary sobriety” and a return to focusing resources on the classroom.
It’s like the medical industry. Same number of physicians but 5X the number of administrators.
There’s bloat but it didn’t just happen because they decided to give people more jobs. There are more regulations to deal with and people needed to deal with them. Students have now become ‘Customers’ so they are treated more like Customers in all phases and that takes people. Technology has transformed expectations.
I think it will also require some regulatory sobriety. Each new regulation requires people to administer them. There seems to be far more “Office of…” signs now than when I went to school.
Some of this is a result of rankings. I went to Pomona’s site, and there are 14 admissions staff with territorial responsibilities. Salaries, travel, printed materials, events…all in the pursuit of applications to support the 12% increase in the student body since 1990, while decimating the acceptance rate to 8%.
^ So much of everything is due to rankings and upper-middle-class demand. You can actually receive a Harvard education by getting a degree from Harvard Extension School and taking only classes taught by Harvard profs, but it’s not the idealized experience that many on this site would expect nor would it come with many amenities (though still a lot). Nor can you brag about getting through the Harvard College admissions sieve.
Joe Asch at Dartblog has been preaching this sermon for years about the bloat at the college on the hill. Poor Cassandra. Oh, wait, we don’t have enough professors to teach the Iliad [much less Aeschylus] any more.
I’m sure each administrative subgroup would have some semi-plausible justification for its existence and need to expand its budget and turf. For example, I expect that admissions would say that they are seeking a geographically balanced class, including internationals, which requires travel and outreach. Pomona is among the schools that are recognized for doing significant outreach to low income students. But then you read about the expansion of the IT department and that’s not directly related to rankings. I think part of the point is that the administration inexorably expands as much as the budget permits, and that college presidents and boards of trustees don’t restrain the administration.
Mitch Daniels at Purdue identified administrative costs as one of the drivers of increased costs and made an effort to curtail them. Purdue has not increased it’s tuition or room and board since 2012. As a parent of a Purdue student I do not see where it has affected the education or experience they provide in the least.
This has been a known issue for the last 2-3 decades and a common complaint everyone I know who is in academia as faculty or in higher ed related magazines like Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed.
This very issue is one reason why the concept of the “corporatization” of the academy came about.
While I can sympathize somewhat with the OP on some points, it seems like he does have a serious chip on his shoulder regarding IT/computing staff despite protestations about “not being a luddite”.
One reason why universities have computing/IT staff is precisely because most academics/non-technical admins* are so lacking in knowledge in those areas or don’t feel the need to even be informed laypeople that they delegate too much decisionmaking power on admins they feel are qualified to doing so without realizing unforeseen consequences…whether they overspend or underspend(penny wise pound foolish).
He’s also failed to account for the rapid pace of technological change in computing technology within the last decade and to some extent, reminded me of an admin at my LAC during my undergrad years who had the notion that the major computing purchases they made in the mid-late '90s would be good for 25 years**.
A notion even some of my most technically ignorant college classmates back then found laughable. Especially considering the pace of improvements in computing technology was actually far greater back in the '90s than it has been in the last 10+ years.
I've observed similar attitudes among many biglaw attorneys and their non-technical staff as well...especially before the 2008 recession.
** Is anyone still using Windows 9x/NT 3.x/4.0 or computers like Pentium 166MMX-233MMXs or pre-G3 era Powermacs running MacOS System 7-9(PRE-OSX)…much less thinking they’d still be usable well into the mid-2020s?!!
That’s not the reality for most HES students as Harvard draws a clear line between HES and Harvard College students along with restrictions they place on HES students registering for Harvard College classes.
This is in total contrast to Columbia’s GS as GS students with very few exceptions are allowed to take courses from any of the constituent undergrad or even graduate level courses provided they meet prereqs.
@cobrat: “That’s not the reality for most HES students as Harvard draws a clear line between HES and Harvard College students along with restrictions they place on HES students registering for Harvard College classes.”
Many Harvard faculty teach the exact same class for HES as they do for Harvard College.
And yes, there is a massive difference between Harvard College and HES, but that is mostly due to the HES adjunct faculty and non-classroom differences between the two.
On the other hand, there is no material difference between Columbia GS and Columbia College, though Columbia GS (while not as selective as Columbia College) also isn’t terrible easy to enter (admit rate below 30% these days, last I heard).
Columbia GS versus Columbia College do indicate that the graduates of such entered as non-traditional and traditional students, respectively, right? Whether that matters to any employer or graduate/professional school is another thing altogether.
Then again, look at UC Irvine. They should have had skilled yield/enrollment managers, then they might not have had to rescind admission to 850 kids last week.
Some administrators are necessary and i don’t think it’s always obvious which ones. A good Title IX officer can save millions in lawsuits/bad publicity, theoretically. A skilled development/alumni office can raise millions for the school. Financial managers of any kind should be able to spot waste and target areas that need funding.
In 1990 just about every school had a mainframe with terminals around campus that were probably available from 8:00 Am to 8:00 PM then the mainframe did batch processing 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM. They probably had a small bank of modems for dial-in. The administrative systems were all made in house. Now the customers expect services like they find everywhere else and available 24/7 with 99.99% up-time. That’s expensive.
Columbia’s definition of a “non-traditional student” could be someone who took as little as one or 2 semesters away from college.
Other than being part of a separate college and some very minor differences in a few courses/core requirements, the vast majority of classes they take are identical to those of their counterparts in the under undergraduate divisions.
One other thing to keep in mind on the IT front is that just 2 decades ago, not everyone had a computer and the university at the most provided ethernet connections to dormrooms for students who had one. No wifi which started to become popularized a few years after I graduated at the end of the '90s and even wifi networking/internet technologies went through several very radical changes between the early-mid '00s till now ranging from improvements in speed/capabilities to serious improvements in basic wifi security protocols(i.e. From WEP which the FBI proved could be cracked within a few hours using cracking software on old Pentium 1 PCs from the early-mid '90s as early as 2005 to the much more secure current WPA2-PSK using AES).
That and unlike back then, students/people also carry around wifi tablets and many consumer/budget level PCs have much shorter warranties nowadays(sometimes as little as 90 days vs which further complicates the support picture.