University Administrators Will Outnumber College Faculty by 2014; It’s Already A Reality at UM-Flint

Mark Perry:

According to Malcom Harris writing in n+1:
“And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.”

One thought on “University Administrators Will Outnumber College Faculty by 2014; It’s Already A Reality at UM-Flint”

  1. The question is not whether someone is labeled an administrator but whether the job they do actually contributes to the mission and whether their compensation is fair compared to those doing the direct work. The numbers alone do not count.
    As a rule of thumb, I have heard, for every soldier on the front lines, there are ten others supporting him. Do these ten others also constitute unnecessary overhead?
    On the other hand, many people are getting work done, not because of administrators, but in spite of them. So, here, it’s not the number of administrators but their incompetence that is the issue.

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