Comments on: Who’s the Boss?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:24:37 +0000

Freddie:

I’ve really been admiring your blogging lately, so let me take a page from your book and say: this is not mockery. Both because I think you (and even Ginsberg!) are right: administration, especially at big universities, especially at poorly-led big universities, especially at overly centralized big universities, needs to shrink a lot, and because I think you understand what many faculty do not: that we actually have to talk about which administration jobs, which functions. But the thing is, getting there politically, as you’ve been noting on the adjunct crisis and much else besides, takes more than just howling at the moon. It takes understanding how faculty were involved in the growth of administration, it takes understanding what forces are driving this growth that do not originate endogamously within administration, it takes seeing students as agents of and not just consumers of growth, and so on.

By: Freddie deBoer

Freddie deBoer — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:51:21 +0000

I really don’t think someone teaching at a school as tiny as Swarthmore has any right to mock someone for suggesting that there’s room to shrink administration. Here at Purdue, where we have more than 20 times your student population, you simply cannot believe the size of the administration, or how many programs and departments and officers there are that have seemingly no connection to the educational enterprise whatsoever. It is incredible how many administrators work at this school. It’s not a question of only pilots and no flight attendants, it’s a question of hiring no new pilots because you’re hiring assistants for airplane bathroom attendants.

And yes: I will gladly tell the undergraduates they have to make do without a vice dean of strategic planning for the operating fund.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 01:19:50 +0000

Those are sticker prices. D’Youville, for example, gives discounts to over 90% of their incoming freshman. Same thing at Utica. Schools are unwilling to compete directly on price; they pursue the Ursinus strategy. When Ursinus tried to go national from regional, they had trouble pulling folks from outside their traditional area. Market research revealed that people outside the Northeast who hadn’t heard of it couldn’t believe the school was any good if it was so much cheaper than others. Ursinus doubled tution, gave everybody a scholarship and watched themselves ascend the ranks of national liberal arts colleges.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 15:31:09 +0000

In the interests of precision, Eastern Michigan is not a state university, but a state college with a ‘university’ appellation because it gives vocational master’s degrees. (We don’t do this in New York).

—

Let’s see what the sticker price (tuition, room, board) is for some common-and-garden private colleges in my zone:

Utica College: $45,000
St. Bonaventure: $39,000
Siena College: $43,000
LeMoyne College: $42,000
D’Youville College: $33,000
St. John Fisher College: $39,000

etc.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 19:54:03 +0000

I wasn’t comparing Hillsdale to Swat, I’m comparing it to Eastern Michigan University, where tuition is about 8K a year even if you through in another 10k for room and board it’s still way cheaper than Hillsdale. The debate isn’t about Swarthmore and Harvard, both of which offer generous financial aid packages and make no debt promises to their students. The debate is about how much state unis and lower endowed private schools cost.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:26:19 +0000

And on the first, when I start asking most faculty I know (at Swarthmore or elsewhere) which exact administrative positions they think aren’t needed,

The dean of student’s office likely provides the richest vein.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:23:32 +0000

And while they’re at it why not try real coursework and rigor instead of psych and soc and illiteracy.

I am not sure what you have against psychology or sociology as disciplines. The study of social relations and history does suffer from poisonous groupthink and a truncated range of questions considered worth of consideration. They did that to themselves. That does not mean that sociological study per se is nonsense, merely that it doesn’t cover the waterfront properly.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:17:55 +0000

Duncan Frissel:

1. The institution I know best makes ample use of student labor in its IT service. However, interested work-study students cannot fully replace trained technicians. (And while we are at it, I would be fascinated to know how you got the idea in your head that college campuses are free of youths working campus jobs).

2. Western Dave: Hillsdale accepts no federal aid. The $31,000 price tag is the full freight (and Grove City is cheaper).

3. One thing not brought up is that campuses are overbuilt. (Thomas Sowell has discussed this and how faculty are drivers of this; I’ve seen the same phenomenon). One thing that might assist is a general practice of pairing donated construction with dedicated maintenance endowments.

By: Nord

Nord — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 17:18:58 +0000

Swarthmore is $58,000 a year including room and board. Hillsdale is 47% cheaper. Worth it? May be, but in terms of the collusion-oriented pricing umbrellas that colleges have set up nationwide (Amherst is $26 a year cheaper than Williams, what are the chances?), Hillsdale is a bargin.

By: Nick Burbules

Nick Burbules — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 23:48:52 +0000

Thanks Tim

We featured some excerpts from this posting on our blog:

http://nofacultyunion.blogspot.com/2014/02/administrative-bloat-or-just-lot-of-hot.html