Not admin. Or lazy rivers
https://robertkelchen.com/2018/05/10/is-administrative-bloat-a-problem/
Okay, I’ll bite. A responsibility which has been “taken” away from my faculty spouse and an administrative system build to replace that role? Academic dishonesty discipline. In the “old days,” if a faculty member identified a paper which was plagiarized, the process was between faculty and student – an F for the paper, and whatever other recourse had been identified on the syllabus. For my faculty spouse now, if he identifies plagiarism, he is just the first step in the disciplinary process, as it gets referred automatically to a process within the College and he may not even have final say in the outcome.
It’s probably a good thing to remove the potential for bias and error when it was simply a single professor and student, but a pseudo-legal process with multi-levels of review has taken over.
That may be true, but I do not see it as a problem. For an offense that can ruin a life, scrutinized due process should be an expectation.
I think there is an issue here in the definition of terms. To some faculty, any “office worker” in higher ed who is not directly engaged with students in the classroom might be considered “administrative,” not just deans and associate deans, etc…, but also the academic advisors, student support service providers, and all of their “administrative assistants.” So, I think for many people, administrative bloat doesn’t only refer to upper level management, but to all of the “other professional staff” as well.
Supply and demand?
Between 1940 and 2017, the US population has more than doubled.
In 1940, 3.8% of women and 5.5% of men in the USA completed 4 years of college.
In 2017, the corresponding numbers were 34.6% and 33.7%.
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)
Meanwhile, how many new 4y colleges have been founded in the past 80 years (or even since ~1900)?
@yikesyikesyikes I wasn’t suggesting that it was a bad thing, just offering an example of what used to be part of a prof’s job and now is done, at least in part, by others.
Many four year schools did get bigger, and many were founded in the post-WW2 (GI Bill) era. For example, the state of California founded 14 (out of the current 23) CSUs and 5 (out of the current 9) UCs with undergraduate programs after WW2.
However, the increase in capacity may not have kept up with the increase in enrollment demand since the 1970s or 1980s, as indicated by increasingly difficult admission thresholds for what were once easy to get into four year schools.
I agree that there has been administrative bloat…but only as one of several factors.