Comments on Staffing Up, Productivity Down

• Posted by Louis Proyect on April 20, 2009 at 9:15am EDT

• An interesting report that touches me personally, having been working in information technology at Columbia University for over 18 years. I came in as part of an initial levy of new hires that were implementing a new student information system. The department has increased steadily ever since to keep up with an ever growing demand for quicker, more accurate and user friendly systems. This has to be seen the context of the kinds of investments made by financial institutions, industry et al in an earlier period. The university was simply catching up in many ways. For example, Columbia's financial system is about 40 years old and badly in need of replacement. The expenditure to replace it is absolutely necessary. The report also highlights the addition of budget experts, exactly the kinds of people I develop software for now. My take on this is that such staff is crucial to the needs of a university that is becoming much more openly capitalist in its structure and functioning, a question no doubt ignored by the report.

• news flash: higher ed is more than instruction
• Posted by back office dead weight on April 20, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

• It will come as a great shock to the writers of this article to know that many higher ed institutions do more than instruct students and churn out degrees. Many institutions have a large public service/outreach component. For example a university affiliated hospital, laboratory or "extension" component may be staffed by university employees and not producing degree holders. Many institutions are deeply involved in research. Many of the research support staff are also "adjuncts" or using more mainstream terminology, "at will" employees. The minute money runs short, they are subject to having their percentage employment cut partly or totally.

  I find it extremely disturbing that the authors did not find out about the existence of research and public service missions in their investigation.

• News Flash
• Posted by Jonathan Brown , President at AICCU on April 20, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• The first two comments explain some of it but there is also the factor of governmental reporting. Since the Higher Education Act of 1972 all levels of government have asked for more and more reports and have added regulation upon regulation. Thus, in the last 20 years colleges have added people to handle those new responsibilities. One could argue that while the elaboration of academic computing and many student service functions have added to the overall productivity of higher education - it is hard to make a case that the addition of these regulatory compliance people have.

• CCAP
• Posted on April 20, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• This from the brainiacs who brought you the RateMyProfessors.com/Who's Who Rankings.

  http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/08/13/college-university-rankings-oped-college08-cx_rv_mn_0813intro.html

• the dependent variable
• Posted on April 20, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• The authors measure productivity in terms of enrollment. I wonder if their results would have differed had they considered any other variable as the output of higher education (I say output because they're attempting to measure productivity). An article in Research in Higher Education a while back by two economists used graduation rate as a measure of productivity. There are a ton of cost production function studies that use number of degrees awarded. There's a lot of literature that talks about the multi-product output nature of higher ed: instruction, research, and public service.

  So, what's more likely, that institutions with limited resources (and in the case of publics and many private, starved for resources) are ceaselessly wasting those resources on unproductive support staff, or that other outputs of higher ed are increasing?

  If the question this study tries to answer is WHY staffing has increased as it has, it does a sophomoric job of trying to answer that question.

• Non-instructional staff growth where?
• Posted by Melton McLaurin , Professor Emeritus/History at UNC Wilmington on April 20, 2009 at 11:30am EDT

• Nothing new here. I recall a study some 5-6 years ago which revealed that student support staff had grown at about twice the rate of instructional staff. This piece would be more enlightening if it revealed WHERE support staff had grown most rapidly. Some support staff do, as one response noted, directly support instructional staff. Others have no relationship to classroom instruction.
  In general, the college/university experience now presents students with an upper middle class life style, a situation that drives up the cost of education. With the NCAA advertising that it is "the other half of education," and student services programs claiming they are the "other half of education," one wonders if instructors are really necessary.

• Setting priorities
• Posted by Adjunct at various programs on April 20, 2009 at 11:45am EDT

• What both Louis Proyect and News Flash really raise is the issue of the definition and mission of higher education, and its appropriate management. As long as universities are considered centers dedicated to producing the next educated generation of society, then faculty have to take precedence over administrators, and administrations have to set financial priorities that include keeping systems up to date rather than expending money in salaries to manage ones that no longer work. Also, my comparative experiences as an adjunct in several university programs have revealed wide discrepancies with respect to the wise use of admin staff. While the ratio of adjuncts to full time faculty is similar, there is a blatant and breathtaking amount of administrative bloat in some of these schools, and those do not do as well by their students in terms of class size, facilities, or student-teacher relationships. Those that do the best job educating do indeed have smaller admin staffs, but the whole university operates much more efficiently, and lacks for nothing. Moreover, I would argue that is what those who pay high tuitions, finance universities through their taxes, and most responsible and forward-thinking legislators expect for their dollars.

• Staffing up/Productivity down
• Posted by Unproductive management , Financial Aid on April 20, 2009 at 11:45am EDT

• I hope the authors didn't get a grant for this study.

  From my own experience in over 20 years of student financial assistance, we are dealing with more programs, more regulations regarding programs, and more reporting requirements each year. Technology has helped in some aspects, but managing that technology has added another level of staffing.

  This type of study could have some value if the simple question - Why has staffing increased in proportion to faculty? - had been addressed. It may have even been a starting point to argue for or against regulation and reporting as it is now practiced.

• Another view
• Posted by Bob on April 20, 2009 at 12:00pm EDT

• "But the rate of growth has come among support staff employees rather than instructors".

  I would say that a better comparison would be to show that the "rate of Production" has come at the expense of middle managers. Folks such as Assistant Registrars, Assistant Bursars and Assistant Directors of Financial Aid being replaced by "technicians". The technicians do not have the same level of education, training or experience, but less cost often equals less filling.

  This should not be construed as a criticism of paraprofessionals! Most are asked to do the same jobs as professionals for less money and a larger caseload, but without the training. The downward compression hurts both middle and entry level positions.

• Of course staff increased
• Posted by William , Instructional Technology at Small private college in Midwest on April 20, 2009 at 12:30pm EDT

• It does not surprise me at all that the number of staff has escalated in the last 20+ years in relation to the student body. In my professional realm, the proliferation of IT and the web in the 90s and the expectation that everything will be available online (grades, courses, you name it) coupled with the fact that most institutions chose to develop IT and web resources internally because the cost of staff was often cheaper than the cost of IT products certainly assured that IT staff was going to erupt.

  Outside of IT, the increased expectation among students and families that there will be staff (and I mean plural staff persons) available to facilitate everything imaginable (study abroad, career counseling, events, dorms, etc.) also ensured that those professional ranks would increase as fast or faster than student enrollment and degrees awarded.

  These things have also taken place in a context where keeping student-faculty ratios low, which also necessitates the increase in faculty ranks as student enrollments increase.

  Higher education is an enterprise that is beholden to the demand of students for its services. Despite their derision of higher education for its costs, some (perhaps many?) families would unfortunately turn their noses at a bare-bones institution that had excellent instruction in all academic fields but offered basic dorms and few frills (no huge athletic centers, no free nightly events, etc.).

• Campus Staff Increases Study
• Posted by John Thelin , Professor, History of Higher Education at University of Kentucky on April 20, 2009 at 6:45pm EDT

• I am refraining from comment on this study's inferences about productivity. However, I do wish to comment on the justifiable concerns of some analysts about the validity of reliance on federal data to discern instructional from non-instructional positions.

  Note that many state universities tend to over-report their number of faculty. How so? On the required Distribution of Effort forms (DOE) many persons who do primarily administrative work are reported as "faculty "simply by noting that their administrative duties are 49%, their faculty work is 51%. -- often a deliberate mis-reporting of time allocation. This often happens with Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, department chairs, et al. Also, faculty numbers tend to be inflated by including former Deans, Provosts, Presidents who "return to their teaching and research" often with few teaching or research responsibilities, all the while retaining almost all their full administrative salaries. This statistically may increase mean faculty salaries and increase the apparent number of instructionors, but it is deceptive and disingenuous.

• Academic Labor
• Posted by George T. Karnezis on April 22, 2009 at 5:30am EDT

• "More than 60 percent of those jobs were in instructional staff, but the vast majority of those jobs were part time."

  Well, duh? What other professions are there that would allow their workforce to be chopped up into little part-time bits? How many part-time Coaches, or Deans, or Provosts or VP's for Academic Affairs or Department Heads, or College Presidents are there? Betcha the proportion of part-time teachers in colleges is larger than the proportion of part-time janitors or maintenance crews working in colleges. But maybe not? Any stats on this?

• commoditization of staff
• Posted by back office deadweight on April 22, 2009 at 9:45am EDT

• "Betcha the proportion of part-time teachers in colleges is larger than the proportion of part-time janitors or maintenance crews working in colleges. But maybe not? Any stats on this?"

  Well not here because janitors are classified employees and union-represented whereas faculty and staff are "unclassified" and non-represented. A major portion of the part-time force is to avoid paying benefits, specifically health insurance. We sure would do well to pass universal health care coverage. This could be extremely transformational.

  Instructional staff have been extremely good at getting out the word that they are not happy with their situation but it's not different from many other non-faculty staffers. Any dip in soft money here and _chomp_ my position gets cut. I've been stuck on 50% since 1/1/2008. And what puts the icing on
  the cake is that there's no way to pick up any other job here to make up the difference. All jobs in my field (IT) are asking for 100%. (There is no transfer system nor real preference for hiring experienced employees. No matter how long you worked here you compete with anyone off the street for another position here, and this being IT there's a huge bias for youthfulness.) In my opinion it would be a lot more humanitarian and efficient for the institution to pool staff resources and stop treating people this way. At the beginning of a grant they want the best and the brightest at 100%. When funds run low, they whack off the low-status support people's percentages. This happens over and over again. Getting a job in research at one of the top 10 research universities is like investing in the stock market. Should we be treating academic staff employees like commodities?

  It is true though that the faculty are more and more being treated like commodities. Tenure does not equate 100% money for career life. What does tenure mean if the institution says it can't support you at all or maybe only 10%? In many respects at research institutions tenure is more like a franchising gig where the faculty are allowed to use the institution's name for obtaining grants. If grants aren't forthcoming then the faculty's compensation may well be cut too. The increasing requirement for faculty to get funding for their own positions and their staff's positions certainly affects this productivity thing. The definition of productivity from the point of view of the people working at the institution is more like 100% funding and 100% benefits and there's nothing in there about degrees nor teaching.