College campuses need to be liberated from their administrators
Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of “Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion.”
When I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, 25 years ago, I had a job in the counseling office checking students’ graduation requirements. Three of us, on a work-study wage, took about 10 or 15 minutes to serve each student who walked into the office. We’d match their transcripts with requirements and offer advice about which classes would be good for them to take in their last semesters in college.
For the last few years, Washington University in St. Louis has been working to get software to do the same job, integrating graduation requirements with enrollment, transcripts, and financial aid systems. It’s part of a software system that has cost the school $99 million to implement. At that price, the school could have hired 20 work-study students for well over a century. A faculty member at Wash U who is also a student adviser tells me that some students now need an hour to figure out if they have satisfied their major requirements, using a piece of the software so unwieldy that it requires ongoing mitigation, updates, and video training for staff, faculty, and students.
The public knows that the skyrocketing cost of higher education is to a large extent the result of skyrocketing administrative costs. But why is it so expensive to administer a college education? The answer lies in a particularly toxic combination of rules, mandates, and regulations — and the fact that schools are paying exorbitant amounts for the digital infrastructure to implement them.
Not only is this excessive administration helping to make higher education too expensive, but it’s stifling the development of some of the most important traits we want in college graduates: agency and autonomy.
