@ucbalumnus I did not write the above statement. 
Ugh, similar user names.
You are severely underestimating the costs of administration. See the following article about the price UC Berkeley is paying for the âOffice of Equity and Inclusion.â
This is money they could be spending on teachers instead of administrators, but as the following article illustrates, the University of California currently has more administrators than tenured or tenure track faculty.
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html
My facultyâs union has just had a go-round of this with the university system administrationâwhen the union asked for the salaries of administrators (not required to be listed publicly under state law, but subject to information requests), the administration limited their response to the top levelsâchancellors and vice-chancellors and president and vice-presidents and provosts and vice-provosts, basically. It took quite a while to get them to provide all of the administrators (e.g., deans, campus directors, people with titles like associate vice-whatever, or assistant provost of somesuch).
If youâre basing your assumptions about the costs of administration on whatâs listed as an administrator on a website, well, youâre not really learning much about it.
@Zinhead The example you cited has annual salary of 182-282k a year. My assumption was 700k salary + benefits a year, which is much higher than 182-282k salary. And you said I severely underestimated it? I do not get it.
@prof2dad - You cited a total of 32 administrators. There are more than 10,500 administrators in the UC system. That is an average of more than 1,050 per campus.
@dfbdfb If you are not happy about the way my university and UCB define their (top) administration, it is fine; you have all the freedom to define your version of administration. It is just that I can think of at least 4 staffs in my business school who have a fancy title, somethings like âdirectorâ or âvice-whateverâ (so that it is easier for them to go out to raise money, etc.), and their pay is less than 70k a year. I just do not think they are at the level of being a part of administration because they are in no way my supervisor and their work is actually to support my research and teaching.
Back to the original topic, who are these exploited adjuncts who werenât capable of running a 30 minute google search on tenure track job prospects before entering grad school?
@Zinhead if you read it carefully, I made it quite clear from the beginning that it is about top administrators at the level of president, VPs, provost, vice-provosts, and deans. The number of this group is usually around 20-40 depending on the size of the university.
The need to separate this group from the staffs is that, as I stated earlier, the criticism from the faculty is concentrated on the proliferation of these top administrators. But the reality is that the proliferation at lower-ranked staffs is actually more of a main driver of budget and tuition because the number of lower-ranked staffs is far more than that of top administration. Another reason for this separation is that the pay between top administrators and staffs is very different. It makes no economical sense to lump them together if one really wants to get to the bottom of it.
I have been in faculty union negotiation meetings with the top administrators a few times. I know the union has to fight with the administrators using the top administratorsâ proliferation as a leverage; we did it all the times. It has been a good strategic move, but it has little to do with the truthfulness of our argument. In this kind of fights, it is more important to get a good deal, instead of getting to the bottom of it.
A number of good points have been made about administrative bloat and the âadjunctivizationâ of academia. Coup;e these with the fact that the liberal arts in general â and the humanities in particular â have gotten a bum rap in todayâs world (I would go as far as to say that these subjects have been vilified of late as witnessed by the title and premise of this post).
Given that one of the criteria used for gauging school success is looking at the âreturn on investmentâ in the years immediately after completion of undergraduate studies, humanities and liberal arts majors often donât have salaries that are as high as their counterparts that have obtained âpre-professionalâ and âprofessionalâ degrees such as engineering, computer science, business, etc. While the latter group might fare better on these ROI measures than those that have majored in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, if one looks at both groupsâ respective salaries 15 or 20 years down the line, humanities majors do just fine, thank you very much.
The problem as I see it is not that there are too many PhDs in the humanities being minted, but rather that humanities programs are, as discussed above, hiring adjuncts and âhighway fliersâ at a fraction of the cost of tenured and tenure track professors, and that universities are not able to replace tenured faculty as they retire. Departments see enrollment dwindling, which creates a vicious cycle. I predict that the pendulum will one day swing back as we realize that we have generations of students graduating college that cannot read or write well and that donât have sufficient critical thinking or rhetorical skills to make logical and persuasive arguments.
Data regarding administrative bloat at the UCs show that the biggest problems are not necessarily at the top levels of administration, but rather at mid-level management levels. @prof2dadâs figures are supported by an article in the LA Times, wherein among other things, they note:
"While big paychecks for those in UCâs senior management group â including the president, the chancellors and other top administrators â attract the most attention, they comprise less than 1% of the $27-billion budget, officials say. It is the next layer of well-paid administrators that has grown most significantly over the last two decades. From 2004 to 2014, the management and senior professionals ranks swelled by 60%, to about 10,000, UC data show.
âThere is a huge cadre of middle managers and upper middle managers, and that is where the bloat is,â said Charles Schwartz, a UC Berkeley physics professor who retired in 1993 and has spent much of his time since then crunching the budget and issuing a series of sharp critiques.
Administrators now outnumber tenure-track faculty members, whose ranks, over the same decade, grew by just 8%, from 8,067 to 8,722, and have not kept pace with rising enrollment.
As more of the teaching burden has shifted to adjunct and part-time instructors, students say their face time with tenured professors has shrunk and their class sizes have grown."
And so it goesâŠ
Hereâs the article:
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html
@roethlisburger - your point brings out one of the complications of the adjunct situation. By now a lot of people entering humanities Phds are told about the lack of tenure-track jobs. At the very least, the pressure builds in the first two years when graduate students see themselves in a highly competitive environment with not too many job prospects, other than working as adjunct instructors. Still, many remain and try to be the exception or ultimately make do by teaching courses here and there. Also, the pay for an adjunct course can vary depending on the institution, upwards of $6-7K in some places, although that tends to be major universities. I think some places pay in the low $2Ks. Some people choose to keep it going for years and even make a career of it. No big money and very little job security, but the alternative might be a job in an office 40 hours a week. Still, universities could be more supportive by offering adjuncts full-time teaching (or a good number of courses) and health care (some do).
There was this page that shows surveyed mid career pay percentiles by college major, though it has obvious limitations by the nature of the survey (though better than random anecdotes of âX got a BA/BS in ___ and later became a CEOâ or âY got a BA/BS in ___ and never was able to get a career track jobâ): http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html .
For pretty much all college majors, the top end (90th percentile) ended up being paid well. But some majors are relatively flatter, with the lower percentiles do reasonably well (e.g. nursing, physician assistant), while others are very unequal, with the lower percentiles doing poorly (e.g. music, art history, anthropology, philosophy), implying that graduates are more likely to be in winner-take-all job markets. These do not seem to be all that surprising.
Humanities PhDs should become university administrators.
âTenured â or tenure-track â computer science professors are so cutting-edge their work is DECADES ahead of not just the classroom, but also the industry.â
Lol. It depends.
Re post #133, well, the good ones are that cutting edge.
On the question of the increase in the number of administrators: At my university, I would estimate that the number of high-level administrators, including the president, vice-presidents, . . . to assistant vice presidents has gone up by about 50% in the past 10 years. The salary budget for the deanâs office within my college (one part of the university) has more than doubled in that period. Part of this is a proliferation of assistant deans. Part of it is just more staff.
There has been a slight decline in the number of faculty at the universityâby maybe 10% or so in the last 20 years. However, the number of âAdministrative Professionalsâ has more than doubled in the same time frame. This number used to be half of the faculty number. Now it is equal to the number of faculty. It is true that many of the Administrative Professionals do not make especially high salaries, but when 1000+ people are added in a job category, it tends to drive the budget and costs up.
Harvard is generally considered to be toward the theoretical end of the computer science spectrum. As part of a recent initiative to bolster their department, they have hired six new professors.
Their three most senior hires (all full professors with named appointments) are from industry. One worked for MIcrosoft in the Boston area and was also an adjunct professor at MIT, another worked for Microsoft in the Boston area, and one worked for Microsoft in Silicon Valley.
Their third most senior hire (an associate professor) is from Microsoft
Of their two most junior hires (both assistant professors) one is from industry (a post doc fellow at Facebook) and one is from academia (post doc at MIT)
In the field of computers there is a very close relationship between the leading edge computer development companies (not IT companies) and academia. People and ideas readily flow back and forth across the boundary with some top people straddling the boundary as adjuncts.
Top departments typically have a mix of âLecturersâ (people who are great at teaching), âProfessors of Practiceâ or âAdjunctsâ (who can bridge the gap between theory and âstate of the artâ practice) as well as Professors doing leading edge research that can translate that research into the classroom.
This gives schools located in a âcomputer development hubâ (such as SIlicon Valley, Boston or Seattle) an advantage because industry research labs can be tapped to teach some leading edge courses.
No one should want to send their kids to a school where the professors research is âdecades aheadâ of their classroom teaching because by definition their kid will derive no benefit from the research going on in that environment.
Computer Science is not a great example for this thread, because (at least at this moment) it is one of the few areas of academia that is having a hard time finding enough people.
Indeed. And this certainly doesnât apply to all STEM fieldsâŠeven ones related somewhat to CS like EE.
An older cousin who spent a decade as tenure-track/tenured faculty as an EE Prof left academia to co-found an engineering tech startup a decade ago partially because he found the level of research in his area of academia was 5-7 years or more behind that of private industry.
And incidentally, this was long after he dropped Harvard from consideration for PhD because back when he applied, they were even more behind and lacking in resources compared to the Top 8 department where he earned his PhD.
Interesting. My statement was based on the experience of three different computer science professors (all tenured, all grads from top 10 computer schools worldwide) - two are tenured professors in the Boston area (but not Harvard) the other is a professor at a top school on the West Coast.
All three do very theoretical stuff, but youâre right, all three also have a lot of industry contacts - one has done quite a bit of consulting with a major SVcomputer company, and the other two regularly work with INRIA
Can we all agree that thereâs not just one strand of research in any given discipline? Itâs entirely possible for it to be simultaneously true for academic research and industry research (and government research, for that matter) to be decades ahead of each other in the same field.
Also, @Mastadonâs point a few posts ago is important: Comp sci isnât really a useful field for this thread, because the supply of potential faculty members is so tight. Rather, the link that started this thread applied to other fields (the vast majority of them), where thereâs an oversupply of potential faculty, given current market conditions.
I donât know a large number of graduate students, so my info is anecdotal, but all of the young people I know that are pursuing PhDâs in humanities or arts majors are doing so because they couldnât get decent paid work out of college. So after sitting around and volunteering for a year or so, they started on their next degree - MFA, PhD, or Masters. Some with the Masters found that didnât really help with employment, so they went back to the familiar environment of the university. Iâm not sure if each of these long-term students would have chosen to earn PhDâs or other grad degrees if the job market had been more welcoming.