How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education. More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes. Today’s students have more documented mental-health challenges. They take out more student loans. Expanded college-sports participation requires more athletic staff. Increased federal regulations require new departments, such as disability offices and quasi-legal investigation teams for sexual-assault complaints. As the modern college has become more complex and multifarious, there are simply more jobs to do. And the need to raise money to pay for those jobs requires larger advancement and alumni-relations offices—meaning even more administration.
But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”
In an email to me, Smith, the Pomona economist, said the biggest factor driving the growth of college admin was a phenomenon he called empire building. Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them. Before long, a human pyramid of bureaucrats has formed to take on jobs of dubious utility. And this can lead to an explosion of new mandates that push the broader institution toward confusion and incoherence.
The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs. After all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don’t just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty’s academic freedom.
“Take something like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Ginsberg said. “Many colleges who adopt DEI principles have left-liberal faculty who, of course, are in favor of the principles of DEI, in theory,” he said. But the logic of a bureaucracy is to take any mission and grow its power indefinitely, whether or not such growth serves the underlying institution. “Before long, many schools create provosts for diversity, and for equity, and for inclusion. These provosts hold lots of meetings. They create a set of principles. They tell faculty to update their syllabi to be consistent with new principles devised in those meetings. And so, before long, you’ve built an administrative body that is directly intruding on the core function of teaching.”
Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.
In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity—a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”
Goal ambiguity might be a natural by-product of modern institutions trying to be everything to everyone. But eventually, they’ll pay the price. Any institution that finds itself promoting a thousand priorities at once may find it difficult to promote any one of them effectively. In a crisis, goal ambiguity may look like fecklessness or hypocrisy.
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Sources: Shutterstock; Getty
