> Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide.
The common refrain about higher education costs is state governments have cut back on subsidies, so it's interesting seeing this stat for Harvard since it doesn't get the same level of state support, has an endowment, and still saw tuition double.
Harvard's status as a premium product might be harder to maintain if they didn't inflate their prices to stay above their "standard" competitors (state schools).
They can maintain their elite status while heavily discounting tuition to those with financial need, since the very image of "premium product" means that there will always be people willing to pay for it. It is essentially a self-fulfilling idea.
I recall visiting Harvard during a high school debate tournament, and being utterly unimpressed with the facilities compared to what I had seen at non-ivy-league schools. The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
I'm struggling to find the article, mainly because Google is fixating on the generic terms of my search. But, university endowments are effectively hedge funds with a non-profit status. A lawsuit sometime either in the late 80's or early 90's challenged this, and the university successfully argued that because of how much scholarship money they issue they should continue to be considered a non-profit. In particular, the ratio of students on tuition assistance was cited as justification. That established a precedent where universities are incentivized to continually raise tuition while simultaneously appearing to give out more financial aid.
Be warned, though, I may be misremembering. So please do correct me if I am wrong.
The sticker price for Harvard (or any top-tier, high-endowment uni) is not representative of what most students will pay.
70% have aid of some sort, those with parents earning less than $65k/yaer generally pay very little, and majority pay the same or less as they would have in-state.[1]
Harvard is need-blind (like all other Ivy League schools). If you are admitted and can't pay the tuition they will cover it 100%. In that sense a higher tuition is a good thing, since the elite will pay it no problem and it will be used to subsidize those who cannot.
Harvard has a pretty steep discount rate these days. People love to point to tuition and compare it to 30 years ago. The way college is priced has changed. Very few people pay full sticker price at Harvard anymore.
The argument for high tuition private school is to not leave money on the table from rich people who can afford to pay full price. Middle class people pay a big discount, while working class people don’t pay anything. For a state school, you can have a billionaire’s kid enrolled but you are only getting the $14k in state tuition from them and therefore might not be able to support many students at the bottom since you are giving a discount to anyone in state.
But in fact, every student pays a different amount.
The very high sticker price of tuition exists to let the schools charge each student a customized price by applying discounts (e.g. scholarships and aid) as they choose. They can compete for students this way. The most desirable students (by whatever criteria the school has chosen) are offered more discounts.
This system operates at every level. A student of medium-high desirability, say a well-off white kid with good-but-not-great grades, might be offered discounts from a less well known regional school, but not from a nationally recognized school, even if her family can afford to pay full fare anywhere.
Why is the author focusing only on the supply aspect? I would guess that Harvard is charging the amount that they think will maximise their profit. Or at least factoring that in. Isn't that what happens in a free market?
The admission departments need to be leaner - much much leaner. Coming from India I find American admission process ridiculously bloated. I mean asking an undergraduate to do an essay of what excites them. Interviewing an 18 year old about their plans for life. Seriously, I’ve never seen a bigger fucking waste of time. Run standardized tests and admit based on actual knowledge and ability. The rest is bullshit.
While you might be right on some of this. I think the colleges are looking for people not based on standardized tests alone. Most standardized tests are just rote learning and memorization.
I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.
The problem is that standardized tests are more a measurement of access to resources and parental support than raw knowledge or future success. It does feel nice to say that everyone is equal, but not everyone has an equal chance.
In theory, squishy admissions processes exist to identify those students who have raw potential, but may not be identified by standardized test scores.
High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary (but I could also argue that's really just a measure of how well you 'conform' to standard educational expectations early in life, not really how 'able to succeed' you are, but that's a different conversation).
Harvard's freshman class is around 2000 people. They probably get more than that many applicants with perfect test scores.
I suspect if you apply to Harvard and can point to a film you made with your friends that placed well in some film festival or have some success with your music on Spotify or have done some stand up comedy or painted a mural in your city or something else that showcases talents that are more rare than high grades, you have a much better chance at being accepted. They want an interesting and diverse freshman class. To succeed there academically you really don't need perfect test scores. There really isn't any point in focusing solely on that.
I’m glad my daughter doesn’t have to aspire to take a grueling east/south asian style admissions test for her life to not be extreme poverty. It doesn’t measure intelligence or aptitude or ability to conduct research, it measures the ability to take a high stakes test effectively. That’s useless once the test has been taken. I have had a very successful career as a computer scientist, but my standardized test scores were abysmal due to some childhood ADD and a late in life diagnosed bipolar disorder (which is very common in highly intelligent people). While my intelligence tests consistently put me in the 99.9+ percentile, my standardized test scores placed me pumping gas for a living.
I’m certain my daughter will have my challenges, and I am glad for me, her, and all like her we didn’t grow up in India.
The thing here is that elite universities aren't necessarily "best" at education in all cases, rather their value is in networking which makes them more like clubs/societies with an educational component.
Standardized testing is the reason why India – despite its billion strong population and heavy cultural emphasis on science and engineering – is unable to produce a single ounce of innovation. Students are only taught rote memorization from primary school onwards. They spend their formative years in before-school and after-school coaching doing more of the same, all to crack that single test which will determine their future (and a large number are driven to suicide because of it). No curiosity, no outside interests, no social skills, no independent thought. All of these are discouraged in favor of memorizing equations.
Institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford produce leaders and entrepreneurs. India's top engineering colleges (IITs) are meanwhile ranked nowhere globally, and its top graduates dream of getting a cushy job at Google, nothing more.
There are a lot of problems with American universities, but the lack of entrance exams is a feature, not a bug.
Is this article bringing any new perspective to the table? I suspect there is a quarterly Crimson tradition of superficial administration-bloat-decrying by Harvard sophomores with nearly-parodic bylines like (in this case) "Brooks B. Anderson, Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House". What's missing is a comparison to other schools, a comparison to corporate bloat or lack thereof, or any reflection on the causes of the cost increase beyond "bureaucracy is bad". I was actually quite surprised to learn that Harvard tuition costs have only doubled in real terms over 36 years. To me that doesn't seem like a lot when considering the increase in demand for college education (UC tuition has increased 4x in the same time period). Is 2x a lot compared to other things? The article doesn't say, choosing instead to quote Josh Hawley and deride easy targets like inclusive signage committees.
> As I made my way to the Parking Office, I had to ask myself: Where did all these people come from? And do we really need them here?
Did you? Instead of yourself, couldn't you have asked someone who actually knows the answer to these questions, like the administrators themselves, or former college presidents or something? Do an actual investigation and write a real article, not a low effort opinion piece.
This is not really specific to the Crimson though, I have this same issue with all opinion writing and I don't understand why newspapers do it. I've never met someone who pays for a publication but would stop if it didn't have op-eds. I don't think it's just about outrage clicks or something, editorials and op-eds have been around forever so there must be some population that loves them for some reason.
Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?
Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:
I suspect headcount actually makes the situation look better than it actually is. A lot of administrators also get paid a pretty large amount—more than many faculty, sometimes a lot more. So administrative spend may be at ratios even higher than the 3:1 administrator-to-faculty ratio quoted in the article.
FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker
This does sound like a real problem, but what does taxation or a large endowment have to do with it? There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit.
The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs.
Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department.
So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
In SF, a similar problem in the public school district (the majority of the budget goes to administration, not teachers or schools) is in part due to tort-happy parents and a huge amount of regulation and compliance needs. Unfortunately, it sort of snowballs, because vital functions like payroll get starved of funding (and thus competence), and that exposes the district to legal troubles and liability, which further costs the district and starves funding from vital functions…
This piece raises points we've heard before, but I can't tell whether this particular act of expressing them is some kind of shrewd grandstanding maneuver, or a political blunder.
An undergrad (first year?) Government student, fortunate enough to be at Harvard, writes an opinion piece, in Harvard's newspaper, saying that many administrators at Harvard shouldn't be there.
If, at any point in the next three years, the student finds they need the assistance of an administrator, that could be awkward-or-worse for the student.
And maybe they're not planning on trying to get accepted to grad/law school anywhere with administrators.
> I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
I'd expect that this level of rhetoric wouldn't play well at Harvard, and I'm surprised if a student there thinks it would.
Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
Ah yes, good ol’ bureaucratic retribution for questioning the bureaucracy. If Harvard administrators give this student a harder time because of the piece they wrote, aren’t they proving the students point, to a certain extent?
Also, how would this be connected to conservative ideas? Theoretically, liberal ideas are the ideas that are critical of institutions. This all seems so backwards, no?
Now there are all kinds of non-core administrators very ancillary to education whose job is to keep busy having people do things that are again, not core to education/academics.
Yes, they should cut the fat. Yes that will eliminate make-work jobs. That's the whole point.
> Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?
The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing
These arguments would have a lot less traction if more people were aware of the mind-numbing levels of paperwork involved in applying for and managing federal research grants. Not to mention running a hedge fund...excuse me, endowment the size of Harvard's.
And a lot of those diversity and student affairs jobs these writers especially love to hate on handle things like compliance and risk management. Kind of important when you're running a highly visible and deep-pocketed organization like Harvard!
Bullshit Jobs by anthropology professor Graeber talks about this a lot, but comes to a different conclusion - that leadership for universities should be from Professors and that we should have a universal basic income so that useless administration will not be forced to spend 8 hours a day pretending to be useful.
Don't fire them all, but coming close probably wouldn't hurt. As evidence I offer the below.
My rural college and surroundings depended on a student-staffed fire department to for emergency medical services, fire-prevention and protection.
- Because many emergencies need a quick response, volunteering students lived behind the fire-department in a dilapidated college-owned building. ~30 meters door-to-door.
- Housing on-campus attached us to an administrative process. Volunteers registered as a special interest group focused on community service. This was an administrative formality to house firefighters next to their fire station to protect life and property.
- The special interest process occurred before the lottery to allocate block housing. I was confident that volunteers' 1K+ hours of combined community service and recent suppression of a small dorm fire served as proof positive that we were a bona fide community service organization.
- According to the student housing administrator we were not! We did not adequately perform (paraphrasing) on-campus education related to our community service and were to be housed together in a building several minutes instead of seconds from the fire station. All attempts at rational resolution were pointless/ineffectual.
- This standoff persisted for weeks until the mayor and a trustee got wind of it, putting the matter to bed.
Net, a campus administrator wanted to endanger thousands of people by arbitrarily increasing a fire department's response times over a (deliberately?) misguided interpretation of our inadequate provision of on-campus services a few weeks after we put out a fire in a dorm. We also started burning a mock dorm room on the central quad's lawn after this to amply demonstrate our on-campus education efforts.
After having spent far too long in an academic institution, whose administration was the most riddled with errors, incompetence, and bloat that I've ever encountered, this article makes me feel happy. It's not an easy problem, but at least someone notices.
I'm in a public university IT department on the administrative side.
If the professors would like to do admissions, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to do budgeting, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to do HR, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to run the ERP, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to run the Learning Management System, then I encourage them to do so.
etc etc
Fortunately all of the profs I've spoken to have a brain and understand division of labour. Which is great because I love working with them to build fun IT solutions that make their lives, and the educational experience better! If I wanted to make professor level money I'd work literally anywhere else.
Harvard keeps begging for donations from me. My policy is that as soon as my net worth (currently rounds to $0) is greater than theirs (currently > $50,000,000,000), I will start giving them money. But not before then.
I don't know why the public conversation is always around "Harvard is doing xyz". Yes it is one of the top educational institutions in the country, but it is also private. The number of administrators they have should not be your concern. Putting political pressure on a single elite university (or group of universities) admitting a thousand students per year isn't going to solve the country's problems with higher education.
Instead redirect that anger towards your state's public university system. Ask your elected politicians why funding was cut down to zero during the 2008 recession and never restarted. Ask why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state and they continue to spend billions on stadiums, despite the fact that the sports has a negative return in all but the top ~5 NCAA division I programs. Ask why enrollment and graduation rates continue to decline while administration costs keep going up. Fighting the Harvard boogeyman isn't going to fix any of this.
Your hard working kid isn't entitled to Harvard or MIT, but they should be entitled to a seat at your local state school at a reasonable cost.
Cute headline, though the author quickly concedes that the proposal in the headline is absurd so at least there's that.
The intense focus on administrative employees in universities mostly comes from young people confronting old, large institutions for the first time in their lives. They're not really wrong, but it's important to note that very little of the bloat people complain about is unique to academia, at least in a broad sense. Large organizations waste a lot of money. If I were feeling cheeky I could even argue that university bloat is a feature since it better prepares students for dealing with institutions in the real world. A lean, mean, educating machine wouldn't provide students the opportunity to work out their angst about this in a relatively consequence-free environment.
>I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
I cannot speak for Harvard, but I can speak for other academic institutions. The bloat is very real.
The weirdest thing is that lecturers are paid _only_ in terms of teaching students, but not for any time doing any administration (which there is a lot). Meanwhile, you have buildings filled with administrative staff, whom are hidden away, hard to contact and get annoyed when a form they invented is not filled out correctly.
I think generally, as long as things are working, there is no real incentive to reduce bloat. My hope is that during the recession these institutions look to reduce the operations overheads from the correct places.
> In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost.
I'm assuming this calculation was run using a standard inflation adjustment. However, Harvard is in the Boston metro, which has experienced significantly more housing inflation than the country as a whole. (This matters because housing costs filter through the entire local economy.)
Would be interesting to tease out how much of the price increase is a direct result of the increase in housing costs driven by the failure of housing policy.
Edit: The St. Louis Fed has the Boston housing index increasing from 86.15 in January 1986 to 426.44 in July 2022. BLS's inflation calculator puts $86.15 of buying power in 1986 being equivalent to $232.88 in July 2022. So it would appear that housing alone could be responsible for roughly half of the increase. Given the increase in healthcare costs over the period, it would also be interesting to do a similar analysis around those numbers.
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
The common refrain about higher education costs is state governments have cut back on subsidies, so it's interesting seeing this stat for Harvard since it doesn't get the same level of state support, has an endowment, and still saw tuition double.
[+] [-] zdragnar|3 years ago|reply
They can maintain their elite status while heavily discounting tuition to those with financial need, since the very image of "premium product" means that there will always be people willing to pay for it. It is essentially a self-fulfilling idea.
I recall visiting Harvard during a high school debate tournament, and being utterly unimpressed with the facilities compared to what I had seen at non-ivy-league schools. The money you pay for tuition really isn't going into a better education, it's maintaining the illusion that draws big names as both students and professors, and all the networking opportunities that then manifest as better outcomes for graduates.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|3 years ago|reply
Be warned, though, I may be misremembering. So please do correct me if I am wrong.
[+] [-] alistairSH|3 years ago|reply
70% have aid of some sort, those with parents earning less than $65k/yaer generally pay very little, and majority pay the same or less as they would have in-state.[1]
1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/it-costs-78200-to-go-to-harv...
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jp57|3 years ago|reply
The very high sticker price of tuition exists to let the schools charge each student a customized price by applying discounts (e.g. scholarships and aid) as they choose. They can compete for students this way. The most desirable students (by whatever criteria the school has chosen) are offered more discounts.
This system operates at every level. A student of medium-high desirability, say a well-off white kid with good-but-not-great grades, might be offered discounts from a less well known regional school, but not from a nationally recognized school, even if her family can afford to pay full fare anywhere.
[+] [-] carom|3 years ago|reply
I have only ever heard that it was the availability of non dismissible loans that inflated the price.
[+] [-] n4r9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gautamdivgi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway23236|3 years ago|reply
I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university.
The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge.
Can other people do that without going to these schools? Sure. But these schools are looking for those people.
[+] [-] Loughla|3 years ago|reply
In theory, squishy admissions processes exist to identify those students who have raw potential, but may not be identified by standardized test scores.
High school GPA and class rank are a more accurate indicator of success in postsecondary (but I could also argue that's really just a measure of how well you 'conform' to standard educational expectations early in life, not really how 'able to succeed' you are, but that's a different conversation).
[+] [-] criddell|3 years ago|reply
I suspect if you apply to Harvard and can point to a film you made with your friends that placed well in some film festival or have some success with your music on Spotify or have done some stand up comedy or painted a mural in your city or something else that showcases talents that are more rare than high grades, you have a much better chance at being accepted. They want an interesting and diverse freshman class. To succeed there academically you really don't need perfect test scores. There really isn't any point in focusing solely on that.
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|3 years ago|reply
I’m certain my daughter will have my challenges, and I am glad for me, her, and all like her we didn’t grow up in India.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|3 years ago|reply
Run standardized tests and admit based on actual knowledge and ability. The rest is bullshit.
Isn't that what India does, and isn't the system rife with cheaters?
[+] [-] bachmeier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
Institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford produce leaders and entrepreneurs. India's top engineering colleges (IITs) are meanwhile ranked nowhere globally, and its top graduates dream of getting a cushy job at Google, nothing more.
There are a lot of problems with American universities, but the lack of entrance exams is a feature, not a bug.
[+] [-] idontpost|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|3 years ago|reply
> As I made my way to the Parking Office, I had to ask myself: Where did all these people come from? And do we really need them here?
Did you? Instead of yourself, couldn't you have asked someone who actually knows the answer to these questions, like the administrators themselves, or former college presidents or something? Do an actual investigation and write a real article, not a low effort opinion piece.
This is not really specific to the Crimson though, I have this same issue with all opinion writing and I don't understand why newspapers do it. I've never met someone who pays for a publication but would stop if it didn't have op-eds. I don't think it's just about outrage clicks or something, editorials and op-eds have been around forever so there must be some population that loves them for some reason.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] manv1|3 years ago|reply
1. it's easier to hire people than to fire people
2. more budget is better than less budget
3. performance is, for the most part, irrelevant as long as the process is followed
These three simple laws can account for pretty much all the issues with bureaucracies in general.
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
You need some sort of external pressure to keep it down, otherwise companies and organizations end up obese.
[+] [-] tester756|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UIUC_06|3 years ago|reply
Then I found they already had! https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580
Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?
Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:
https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...
If anyone wants to dig through all this, have a big time.
[+] [-] gchallen|3 years ago|reply
FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker
[+] [-] amluto|3 years ago|reply
The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs.
Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department.
So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
[+] [-] suchire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
An undergrad (first year?) Government student, fortunate enough to be at Harvard, writes an opinion piece, in Harvard's newspaper, saying that many administrators at Harvard shouldn't be there.
If, at any point in the next three years, the student finds they need the assistance of an administrator, that could be awkward-or-worse for the student.
And maybe they're not planning on trying to get accepted to grad/law school anywhere with administrators.
> I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
I'd expect that this level of rhetoric wouldn't play well at Harvard, and I'm surprised if a student there thinks it would.
Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?
[+] [-] not-my-account|3 years ago|reply
Also, how would this be connected to conservative ideas? Theoretically, liberal ideas are the ideas that are critical of institutions. This all seems so backwards, no?
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
Now there are all kinds of non-core administrators very ancillary to education whose job is to keep busy having people do things that are again, not core to education/academics.
Yes, they should cut the fat. Yes that will eliminate make-work jobs. That's the whole point.
Look at all these jobs and compare against admin jobs in the 1980s: https://www.higheredjobs.com/admin/
[+] [-] elgar1212|3 years ago|reply
Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?
The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing
[+] [-] spencerflem|3 years ago|reply
With that said, this is definitely a problem even to people on the left.
Universities are now run by administrators for the purposes of securing more funds and less for teaching and research.
[+] [-] projectazorian|3 years ago|reply
This. Or they're planning to drop out and get a job in the Thiel universe.
[+] [-] killingtime74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectazorian|3 years ago|reply
And a lot of those diversity and student affairs jobs these writers especially love to hate on handle things like compliance and risk management. Kind of important when you're running a highly visible and deep-pocketed organization like Harvard!
[+] [-] spencerflem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sklargh|3 years ago|reply
My rural college and surroundings depended on a student-staffed fire department to for emergency medical services, fire-prevention and protection.
- Because many emergencies need a quick response, volunteering students lived behind the fire-department in a dilapidated college-owned building. ~30 meters door-to-door.
- Housing on-campus attached us to an administrative process. Volunteers registered as a special interest group focused on community service. This was an administrative formality to house firefighters next to their fire station to protect life and property.
- The special interest process occurred before the lottery to allocate block housing. I was confident that volunteers' 1K+ hours of combined community service and recent suppression of a small dorm fire served as proof positive that we were a bona fide community service organization.
- According to the student housing administrator we were not! We did not adequately perform (paraphrasing) on-campus education related to our community service and were to be housed together in a building several minutes instead of seconds from the fire station. All attempts at rational resolution were pointless/ineffectual.
- This standoff persisted for weeks until the mayor and a trustee got wind of it, putting the matter to bed.
Net, a campus administrator wanted to endanger thousands of people by arbitrarily increasing a fire department's response times over a (deliberately?) misguided interpretation of our inadequate provision of on-campus services a few weeks after we put out a fire in a dorm. We also started burning a mock dorm room on the central quad's lawn after this to amply demonstrate our on-campus education efforts.
[+] [-] goatcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheracctfo|3 years ago|reply
If the professors would like to do admissions, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to do budgeting, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to do HR, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to run the ERP, then I encourage them to do so.
If the professors would like to run the Learning Management System, then I encourage them to do so.
etc etc
Fortunately all of the profs I've spoken to have a brain and understand division of labour. Which is great because I love working with them to build fun IT solutions that make their lives, and the educational experience better! If I wanted to make professor level money I'd work literally anywhere else.
[+] [-] chihuahua|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
Instead redirect that anger towards your state's public university system. Ask your elected politicians why funding was cut down to zero during the 2008 recession and never restarted. Ask why football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in the state and they continue to spend billions on stadiums, despite the fact that the sports has a negative return in all but the top ~5 NCAA division I programs. Ask why enrollment and graduation rates continue to decline while administration costs keep going up. Fighting the Harvard boogeyman isn't going to fix any of this.
Your hard working kid isn't entitled to Harvard or MIT, but they should be entitled to a seat at your local state school at a reasonable cost.
[+] [-] noelsusman|3 years ago|reply
The intense focus on administrative employees in universities mostly comes from young people confronting old, large institutions for the first time in their lives. They're not really wrong, but it's important to note that very little of the bloat people complain about is unique to academia, at least in a broad sense. Large organizations waste a lot of money. If I were feeling cheeky I could even argue that university bloat is a feature since it better prepares students for dealing with institutions in the real world. A lean, mean, educating machine wouldn't provide students the opportunity to work out their angst about this in a relatively consequence-free environment.
>I propose that we cut the bloat. Knock on every office door and fire anyone who does not provide significant utility to the institution.
It's that easy!
[+] [-] bArray|3 years ago|reply
The weirdest thing is that lecturers are paid _only_ in terms of teaching students, but not for any time doing any administration (which there is a lot). Meanwhile, you have buildings filled with administrative staff, whom are hidden away, hard to contact and get annoyed when a form they invented is not filled out correctly.
I think generally, as long as things are working, there is no real incentive to reduce bloat. My hope is that during the recession these institutions look to reduce the operations overheads from the correct places.
[+] [-] runako|3 years ago|reply
I'm assuming this calculation was run using a standard inflation adjustment. However, Harvard is in the Boston metro, which has experienced significantly more housing inflation than the country as a whole. (This matters because housing costs filter through the entire local economy.)
Would be interesting to tease out how much of the price increase is a direct result of the increase in housing costs driven by the failure of housing policy.
Edit: The St. Louis Fed has the Boston housing index increasing from 86.15 in January 1986 to 426.44 in July 2022. BLS's inflation calculator puts $86.15 of buying power in 1986 being equivalent to $232.88 in July 2022. So it would appear that housing alone could be responsible for roughly half of the increase. Given the increase in healthcare costs over the period, it would also be interesting to do a similar analysis around those numbers.