[jasonhong]

It's possible that there may be too many administrators at a university, but from my perspective after 20+ years in academia, one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face.

For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down.

In the past, professors used to handle some of these things informally and part-time on top of their teaching and research, but it really has to be professionalized and be done full time because of risks and costs of getting it wrong.

Taking a step back, discussions about "too many admins" also feels not all that different from those threads on HN saying "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?" Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.

[like_any_other]

> "I could build product XYZ in a weekend, why do they have so many employees?"

Unlike product XYZ*, there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. At some point you have to ask - do you want to save the cancer, or the patient?

*I am humoring your hypothetical, but there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies, e.g. the Britten V1000 motorcycle, or the recent article about wedding planning software (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43133174), or the older article on the windows terminal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725133)

[itishappy]

> there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations.

> there are in fact many cases where a small team outperforms bloated, ossified companies...

Sounds like the perfect time to start a disruptive university program! Where's Andrew Carnegie when you need him? Any relevant examples in this space?

[bobbiechen]

I remember reading interesting things recently about Arizona State University and the "New American University" model - https://nadia.xyz/asu is a nice summary

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>In place of large, on-campus administrative bureaucracies, UATX plans to make administration remote, outsourcing positions abroad. Not only will this arrangement save university funds, Howland noted, but it would also pay foreign workers livable, US-level wages. Further, the school will forgo—along with competitive varsity sports—what he called “club-med amenities”: climbing gyms, student recreation centers with ball pits and golf simulators, napping stations, private pools, and the like. UAustin has even rethought the principle of reserving classroom space for each academic department—at UATX, departments will have control over their budgets and bid for classrooms in a market. The money saved by this and other initiatives, Howland said, will go towards instruction.

https://dartreview.com/a-radically-different-model-of-americ...

[ModernMech]

It's interesting, but not the kind of thing I'd expect to disrupt much. Looking into the details a little more, this place has a long ways to go before it lives up to those claims. Far from doing away with administrative bureaucracies, the academic catalog currently lists roughly as many administrators as faculty.

In boasting it won't have "club-med amenities" you might expect it to be cheaper than typical schools, but the tuition is $30k, and the total cost to attend is almost $60k! You can go to state college for less than that and they have an order magnitude more classes to take. Not to mention climbing walls.

[milesrout]

Good luck getting accredited so your students are eligible for federal student loans. Who effectively accredits universities? Other universities, indirectly. It is a cartel.

[exe34]

> there was a time in very recent history when these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations.

as the comment you're replying to has already stated:

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits. I'd even make an analogy to increased malpractice insurance costs for doctors due to increasing number of lawsuits doctors face. > For example, there are more compliance costs around IRBs for human subjects, export controls of potentially sensitive data, companies we can't work with (e.g. in China), contracting with companies we can work with, intellectual property and startups, Title IX, discrimination, Federal funding do's and don'ts, cybersecurity requirements, travel to foreign countries (soon to be implemented), and a lot lot lot lot more. Also, like security, these things only ratchet upward, never down.

[like_any_other]

First, I don't think we should take it as a given that all the admin. growth is just efficiently working on complying with regulations. And I'm pretty sure foreign countries, and travel to them, already existed in 1976. As did patents, contracts with other companies, and sanctions that US entities had to respect - remember, in 1976 there was the cold war.

Second and more importantly - these same schools ran successfully with much smaller administrations. The regulations you cite are not a law of nature - are universities or their bloated administrations lobbying to have this regulatory burden reduced or streamlined? It sure doesn't look like it.

[scheme271]

Are you using 1976 as a baseline? Given this and your other comments in this thread, it seems like it. I'm sure the regulatory and compliance environment have changed significantly in the last 50 years. E.g. OSHA and other agencies have significantly increased the monitoring and procedures needed to run a chemistry research lab due to accidents and deaths.

[like_any_other]

The ancestor comment cited statistics on admin. growth from 1976 to 2018, that is why I mention 1976. Otherwise, your comment is very representative of the defenders of admin. bloat - a learned helplessness in simply assuming that all this busy-work must be serving some purpose, then pointing some example of superficially beneficial regulation.

But even if we grant that all the regulations are as crucial as chemistry lab safety, that doesn't explain the bloat:

regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time. - https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

[stogot]

This answer eliminates the “regulations are the reason” counterclaim

[coliveira]

It is just funny how technology was supposed to help society become less bureaucratic, but it has done just the opposite. Now to do anything, you need a bunch of administrators that will manage the systems that one needs to be "more efficient"!

[lc9er]

Do you work in higher ed? It’s ok to admit that you weighed in on a topic you don’t understand, then bow out gracefully, since you’ve repeatedly been given accurate responses to your assertions.

[like_any_other]

More than half of the explanation for the administrative bloat since 1976 was blamed on factors that did not change much since the 1960s - with the notable exception of foreign sanctions, which were much worse due to the cold war. Also blamed were IRBs, which have been a requirement since 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research_legisla...

The "accurate responses" were non-explanations. Like blaming being three hours late on a single red light.

[skywhopper]

You really don’t know what you’re talking about. Please stop.

[fluidcruft]

Most IRB's further outsource to consulting firms and blindly do what the consultants tell them to do (not included in head counts). That is just to say the administrative people added are just trained to follow expensive rules and lack any domain knowledge whatsoever.

[miohtama]

Compliance industry has gone from $0 to $90B in twenty years. It does not produce anything real, except lobbying for more compliance needing more compliance services, software and lawyers.

Here is a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...

[brookst]

I did work for a compliance as a service company 35 years ago. Customs brokers go back much farther than that. I’m very suspicious of the claim this whole industry didn’t exist 20 years ago, which makes me suspicious of the other claims.

[da_chicken]

I work at a public K-12 in IT. We were definitely doing compliance reporting 20 years ago. Compliance is pretty central to the IEP process created in 1975, but it goes back further than that.

We were cleaning out old cabinets that had been stored for many years. We found aggregated student data reports so old that my grandmother (still alive at 106) would have been among the headcount. 90 years ago we were doing compliance reports. The reports were very simple, but there were no computers to create them. They would have involved just as much time as we spend on today's reports only we have a hundred times the data in them.

[SubiculumCode]

As a fellow academic at a major research institution, I agree that the regulatory aspect (IRB, grant money auditing, etc) is a huge financial burden requiring many staff. This is not something that universities can easily reduce without loosening requirements at the Federal level

[AdrianB1]

The numbers in the post that you respond to are picturing a different situation: there are almost 3 admins per professor. That means the universities are not teaching places, but administrative places with some teaching as a secondary activity.

I think people overcomplicated universities and that is what makes admins needed. Taking a step back, we need to make universities teaching places again, with 1 admin for 3 professors, not the other way around. Imagine savings, needing less grant money, less audits, less funding that comes with strings attached.

In the end I think people make up too much irrelevant work. And that needs to go away.

[nhma]

A more relevant metric than admins/professor would be admin staff/scientific staff. Given that a research group under a professor will probably contain numerous associate professors, assistant professors, postdocs, PhDs, and research assistants who all generate some admin workload, 3 admins per professor does not sound outlandish.

[BrenBarn]

I'm not sure what the person meant in the comment you're replying to, but it sounds like in your comment you're reading "professor" as "full professor", which is not how I'd read it. I'd read it as basically "faculty member".

[eli_gottlieb]

Postdocs, PhD students, and RA's are not faculty either.

[chabska]

An airline has three times more aircraft mechanics than aircraft pilots. Would you say this operation is an aircraft repair and maintenance shop that happens to do some airplane flying on the side?

[coliveira]

Universities became complicated because it is now a business. If you have a business, you need to complicate it to justify higher prices over time.

[skywhopper]

You are misinterpreting what’s going on. Universities are places where lots of people live and work. There’s support staff for all of that. Some activity that goes on is teaching. Some is research. Some is community engagement and outreach. All of those functions also need support staff, particularly research. At many large universities, research is the primary function, not teaching. Research requires a lot more support staff than teaching.

[AdrianB1]

I think I am not misinterpreting. I expect an university to do teaching and focus on teaching (including some research). I expect any auxiliary activity to be minimized as much as possible, from cafeteria workers and campus electricians to HR and accounting.

[skeeter2020]

do you think this is parallel to the growth of "you MUST attend university" mindset?

[dpe82]

Bureaucracies are masters at creating work that justifies their own existence and growth.

[skeeter2020]

But historically universities DID deliver the same product in a weekend. It really feels lika a lot of the extra admin burden was generated itnernally and self-imposed. Each piece of DEI is small and well-meaning, and now we have these massive institutions that have to cut PhD students of all things to balance the books.

[sdenton4]

A major source of administrative and non-teaching staff is that many universities have added things like 'a hostpital' on the side. This is reasonable when you're running a med school with a research component: you need patients to work on, after all. The hospital provides a high standard of care to the community that it serves, and creates both revenue and costs, far in excess of any DEI program.

[dcow]

Not challenging your point, just also pointing out that this scenario was already factored in (i.e. hospital admin not included) when calculating the initial ratios.

[milesrout]

>Sure, but building the product isn't the hard part, it's sales, marketing, customer support, regulatory compliance, HR, data scientists, UX designers, and all the other functions needed to transform it from a product to a business.

Most of those are not needed or are needed in drastically lower quantities. UX designers in many companies are very obviously just redesigning things for the sake of justifying their salaries.

[teleforce]

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits

I think this a gap that can be easily and fittingly addressed by explainable AI (XAI) hopefully with much cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.

I've got the feeling that Elon proposed DOGE as a trojan horse for doing this sneakily:

1) Reduced the budget to make govt more efficient so staff number reduction is inevitable

2) Sell and provide XAI based solutions for regulatory compliance, etc (accidentally his AI company name is xAI)

3) Repeat these with many govt's organization, research, academic institutions

4) Profit!

But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.

[ModernMech]

> But apparently the US research universities like UPenn did not get the memo and cut the number of graduate research students instead of the admin staff.

If you reduce the number of staff, the people who are going to hurt first are the graduate researchers. I run my lab with a whole host of college and department staff who make all of our jobs easier. If you cut them, their jobs are going to fall to professors, and if they have to do more admin work, graduate teaching and research assistants are going to get more shit work, and also there's going to be fewer than them.

For instance we have a whole office that help us get our research funded. These people are "bureaucratic administrative overhead", but they make everyone's job easier by providing a centralized resource for this particular problem. Get rid of them an you can save millions of dollars in salaries, but you're going to lose more than that in lost contracts and professor/student productivity. This would mean students probably would get cut anyway, so they're making the smart move of supporting only the students they can, and not leaving anyone out to dry.

[coliveira]

> If you cut them, their jobs are going to fall to professors

yes, then you hire more professors, instead of hiring more staff! Funny how people don't seem to realize the obvious.

[ModernMech]

I thought the purpose of this was to reduce waste. Firing a low cost administrator and replacing them with N highly-trained (and higher cost) Ph.D.s is not efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

[coliveira]

The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research. You cannot do that if you take all the resources and spend on managers and administrative staff.

[ModernMech]

If that's the goal, firing the administrative staff will have exactly the opposite effect. Administrative staff and managers free researchers to do research. If administrative staff and managers are fired, researchers will be administrating and managing instead of researching.

Getting rid of administrators doesn't obviate the need to administrate. It has to be done, so we do it efficiently using shared resources, which brings economies of scale -- that efficiency Musk keeps talking about. What you're arguing for is increasing waste so everyone has less time to do critical work.

Here's an analogy:

To support the roof of a house, you need a few support beams. To support the roof of a skyscraper, you need many more support beams. You can't support the roof of a skyscraper with the number of support beams that support the roof of a house.

University research started as a house, but now it's a sky scraper. You're coming into the skyscraper saying there's too many beams, but you're judging by house standards. Maybe there are, but most of them were put there for good, well-considered reasons; as a layman you have no idea which are load bearing, so if you come knocking them down you endanger the whole tower. Which is a shame because it's gotten really really tall - taller than any other tower in history - so toppling it because you don't understand it would be a huge loss for everyone.

[teleforce]

> The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research

Given that my comments are downvoted like crazy, I've got the feeling that the US university including the Professors (tenured) are missing the forest from the trees regarding this issue.

I once asked a senior and prominent US Professor regarding their multi-million dollars grant for single project that can be easily spent on multi-project with similar or higher impact in other countries. His answer was they have to spent a lot on students, and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.

[danny_codes]

I wouldn’t trust an LLM to do anything compliance related. Sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit

[teleforce]

> cheaper cost using automation, reasoning and decision making with minimum number of expert staff in the loop for verification and validation.

[javagram]

Verification and validation of LLM output in this context would mean doing all the same research, training etc done today for human staff and then comparing the results line by line. It would actually take more time. How do you know if the LLM failed to apply one of hundreds of rules from a procedure unless you have a human trained on it who has also examined every relevant document and artifact from the process?

[teleforce]

> one clear driver is continually increasing rules, regulations, and compliance, along with fears of audits and lawsuits

As mentioned by the GP posts the main problem is the increasing rules, regulations and compliance need to be processed the admin staff not the research contributions itself (these invention and innovation parts are performed by the graduate students and professors who are getting cuts by the limited budget).

This AI based system will include (not limited to) LLM with RAG (with relevants documents) that can perform the work of the tens if not hundreds jobs of the admin staff. The agent AI can also include rule based expert system for assessment of the procedures. It will be much faster than human can ever be with the on-demand AWS scale scaling (pardon the pun).

Ultimately it will need only a few expert admin staff for the compliance validation and compliance instead tens of hundreds as typical now in research organizations. The AI based system will even get better over time due to this RLHF and expert human-in-the-loop arrangement.