The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more details would be really helpful. For example MIT and CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy, but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.
I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.
There's some examples in the first link, with the implication they're representative (unknown whether they are, yet, "detail about the distribution")
> Purdue administrator: a “$172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar” who defended their role to a Bloomberg reporter by stating “‘[my] job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what’s going on in the other committees.’”
> serve primarily as liaisons between bureaucratic arms. “Health Promotion Specialist”, “Student Success Manager,” and “Senior Coordinator, Student Accountability” are all positions currently available on higheredjobs.com. A Harvard Crimson article considered the university’s recent Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage”, a 24 member-strong committee including 9 administrators.
I have a suspicion that as an entity such as a University (or government, or business, etc) gets larger, its bureaucracy/administrations needs grow (at a much faster rate)
I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.