28% Growth in Higher Ed Workforce = Less Teachers

By Professor Doom

  

     Growth, growth, growth, it’s all admin ever seems to talk about. Higher Education has been grown, I must admit. There certainly are more students on campus, much more. My workload is easily double what it was 20 years ago, at least as far as teaching.

      So, more students. What else has changed? A report from last year sums up the details:

The overarching trends show that between 2000 and 2012, the public and

private nonprofit higher education workforce grew by 28 percent, more than 50

percent faster than the previous decade.

     Definitely some growth here. But what, besides student base, has been growing?

Growth in administrative jobs was widespread across higher education—

but creating new professional positions, rather than executive and managerial positions, is what drove the increase. Professional positions

(for example, business analysts, human resources staff, and admissions

staff) grew twice as fast as executive and managerial positions at public

nonresearch institutions between 2000 and 2012, and outpaced enrollment growth.

     No real surprise there. In addition to larger classes, administrative ranks have grown, and grown, and grown some more. I used to work as a small community college where a single procedural error on my part would cause 4 or more bosses to come a’running to let me know.

     My class sizes are larger, because of the enrollment growth. I grant that economy of scale works to a point, although I honestly don’t believe universities should charge for courses with enrollments in the hundreds—these kids are, at best, teaching themselves, and, more realistically, are just taking bogus coursework of no value. Apparently there’s no economy of scale for administration, as administrative positions outpaced enrollment.

     If there’s no economy of scale, then why the fetishization of growth, over things like quality and price? Oh, right, the benefactors of the growth, administration, don’t care about quality and price.

      I’ve certainly discussed insane Poo-Bah pay before, but where else is the growth in administration going?

Colleges and universities have invested in professional jobs that provide noninstructional student services, not just business support. Across all educational sectors, wage and salary expenditures for student services (per FTE staff) were the fastest growing salary expense…

     The report shows that the administrative growth has poured into student services, but allow me to fill in the details for this, from my own direct observation on a campus where about as much floor space was devoted to student services as to education.

…Another group of deans constituted themselves as the “War Zones Task Force.” This group recruited staffers, held many meetings, and prepared a number of reports whose upshot seemed to be that students should be discouraged from traveling to war zones…

     Before I start, I remind the gentle reader that most of the money flowing into education doesn’t go into education any more. Instead, it goes into “fiefdoms”, little administrative kingdoms filled with deanlings with fancy-sounding titles like “Executive Assistant Associate Supportive Vice President of Student Sustainability”, or other such nonsense. These deanlings’ jobs are inscrutable, and they mostly waste time going to corporate retreats and babbling corporatespeak at each other. No faculty, and almost no student, will ever even meet most of these deanlings, which have nothing to do with the published educational mission statements of education, research, or job training.

  

     Of all the fiefdoms, “student services” is the best kind of fiefdom to have.

     Ostensibly, a student services fiefdom is to service the students in some way, but realistically, they’re pointless money-soaks of no educational value. Let’s talk about how easy it is to have a dozen $100,000 a year deanlings do absolutely nothing in this fiefdom for at least a decade, with nobody finding out.

     First, a student services fiefdom needs to “get the word out” once it gets established. Obviously, students won’t go the place if they don’t know about it. So, the first year of the fiefdom will have nothing to show at all, and, depending on the size of the campus, it might take at least 3 years before they might be expected to demonstrate a roomful of students that have benefited from the new fiefdom. Millions in administrative salaries spent on…nothing measureable.

      Second, the customers are students. It’s a trivial matter to say “students are using us, but don’t want to give us their names”, and privacy laws protect them. If you’re in a student services fiefdom dealing with stress, anxiety, failure, sexual assault, or bullying, this can take you very far. There’s no way this type of fiefdom can be shut down: what Poo Bah wants to be on a campus that’s not willing to do something about bullying or sexual assault? Heck, the merest hint that this fiefdom might get shut down will probably force the Poo Bah to hire an EXTRA $100,000 a year deanling. Millions more spent, just to protect the ego of the Poo Bah.

     Third, did I mention the customers are students? Even if you’re in a fiefdom that isn’t dealing with a hot-button issue, even something as tame as “tutoring”, you’re still pretty golden. Tutoring services might make the student sign in or register, but so what? You just put down names of students that might not be doing well in classes. When the fiefdom is up for review every three or four years, well, gee, those students have long since dropped out and thus can’t be tracked down. If they’ve graduated, well, gee, that means the tutoring worked! I’ve seen many “tutoring halls” packed with minimally paid student tutors, ruled over by deanlings, and with zero students in them for hours on end (in case you’re wondering, I volunteered my time to work in a few just to see with my own eyes that what I saw from outside the doorway was pretty accurate). Millions more spent with no way to tell for sure if it was used wisely.

     Fourth, these really are students…they’re pretty easy to please when you don’t ask them to study or do work. I’ve seen more than a few such fiefdoms offer “free pizza” parties, and it’s a simple matter to give a student a few slices of pizza in exchange for him to fill out a positive evaluation form showing that the student thinks the fiefdom is doing a good job. I’ve earlier mentioned a few sex-themed workshops presented by fiefdoms, which is just taking the pizza party concept to a lower higher different level. Yes, I’ve had my share of free pizza at these parties…but in terms of taxpayer dollars, I reckon every slice I’ve had represents about $30,000 or so of taxpayer money…it’s only that low because I can put away quite a few slices.

     But all the report says is “more administrators are working in student services”. I don’t blame the report for not giving the background for what these fiefdoms are about, but “working” is a strong word for it.

      It’s a 34 page report, and I’m only up to page 3 here, but one more quote is worth addressing, because it really tells the tale in higher education:

     As the ranks of managerial and professional administrative workers

grew, the number of faculty and staff per administrator continued to

decline.

     More administrators, more students…less educators. When the whole “more money for higher education” idea was sold to the voter, neither Left nor Right ever hinted that this would be the end result of all that money.

     More next time. In the meantime, the gentle reader may wish to see how one building describes all that is wrong with higher education today…and explains another source of irrelevant growth.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

    

University of Tennessee: Stop Using “Him” or “Her”

By Professor Doom

     When writing of the madness of today’s higher education, I’ve been picking on California a bit much. This is a little misleading, because the foolishness that dominates higher education isn’t restricted to California, it’s country-wide. No state is immune from the corruption and incompetence that defines much of higher education today.

      So let’s look at the madness at the opposite side of the country from California:

University of Tennessee tells staff and students to stop using 'he' and 'she' - and switch to 'xe', 'zir' and 'xyr' instead

--there are actually 9 new words being added to the vocabulary. The reader can click the link to see them, but will possibly become less intelligent by doing so.

     The point of this was to make a campus of 27,400 students, already larger than some towns, “inclusive” by no longer including language references to gender in pronouns. The simple fact that using this language exclusively to this one campus will exclude normal people from knowing what the heck is going on when they come to this campus clearly didn’t occur to administration. This is insane, although  already some faculty penalize students for using “wrong” gender pronouns.

     Officials have since insisted that the guidelines are not compulsory and that they do not want to 'dictate speech'.

Donna Braquet, who runs the university's Pride Center, wrote the guidelines, which are accompanied with a long table demonstrating how to replace the regular parts of speech.

      While not mandatory, there’s a real risk here. The sane people will simply continue to use the English normal people use…and will quickly become excluded by the “inclusive” nutbars that think changing the language in this way will accomplish something.

      I feel the need to point out here that gender is “baked in” to many languages in the West, but is far less a part of Eastern languages. Mandarin, for example, doesn’t have distinct gender pronouns—this presents an extra hurdle for native speakers of this language when they learn English. If admin had their way, Chinese students coming here would have an extra hurdle on top of that. It’s worth noting that despite this supposedly “superior” aspect to the language, there are still the same gender “issues” in China as here. These issues have nothing to do with the language.

      She also advises staff members not to call roll in class, and to instead greet every student by asking them to announce their name and pronoun of preference.

     Because so much of tuition is now paid for by Federal loans, the Feds want to know that the students are at least coming to class. While admin prefers professors to commit fraud and just say everyone is coming to class (because that way admin can claim more money for itself), the rules mandate that you should call roll every day. It’s reasonable enough, although with the large huge gigantic Brobdingnagian classes of today, simply calling roll is a significant chore, consuming, over the course of a semester, an hour or more of class time. Professors have no real chance of learning student names…the possibility that the professor will recall “pronoun of preference,” beyond what should be obvious, is goofiness that only an administrator with no classroom experience would consider. 

     Now, this “suggestion” has been roundly, and justifiably, mocked as absurd, but, as is so often the case, the news article misses the real issue here.

      “Donna Braquet, a gay rights official at the university, wrote the guidelines,…”

     See, the above is the real problem. Higher education is getting more, and more, and more expensive, even as the teacher’s pay drops, in many cases, to below the poverty level. All the money flows, not to education, but to a bloated administrative caste that literally has nothing to do but try to figure out a way to justify their highly paid jobs.

      Part of the tuition expense is to pay for, and I’m obviously serious here, “gay rights officials” governing our universities. Where exactly do they work? In fiefdoms, in this case the Office for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee. These kinds of fiefdoms are overrunning our campuses, sucking up dollars by the oceanful. Each fiefdom has its own staff, each usually making far more than any educator or researcher.

     Inside this particular fiefdom is the sub-fiefdom where Donna Braquet rules:

Effective immediately, the OUTreach: LGBTQ+ and Ally Resource Center is now the Pride Center.

    

     Donna is the director of the Pride Center, which, mercifully, includes only a few assistants to Donna’s needs, as well as keeping the Center open for 12 hours a day, most days (seriously, do we really need this fiefdom to be open this much? Do they honestly get many students coming in at 8:30 pm looking for help with gender pronouns?).

      There’s a fundamental rule to fiefdoms: do not interfere with any other fiefdom. Each fiefdom is staffed with administrators whose primary concern is feathering xyr (sic, “xyr” is a proposed new word) own nest, and secondary concern is for maximum sycophancy to the ruler of each fiefdom.

      So, when a ruler comes up with an idea, no matter how idiotic (and it gets far worse than today’s topic), there’s nobody to stop it. The Poo Bah is so far removed from campus events that he may as well not be there (in fact, getting rid of the Poo Bah would be wonderful for education). The other fiefdoms won’t stop a stupid idea because doing so might lead to interference with their own stupid ideas…and nobody inside the fiefdom will dare tell the ruler xe (sic, and I defy anyone to pronounce that in a way that doesn’t sound much like “she”) is being ridiculous.

     There really needs to be an honest discussion about all these little fiefdoms on campus.  More accurately, there needs to be an annihilation of these fiefdoms, which consume much of the resources of higher education today. Not only could tuition then be lowered to more reasonable levels, but higher education would be greatly improved without all the distractions these useless fiefdoms cause.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

  

Community College and Poverty

By Professor Doom

     It’s a been a while since I’ve explained the “bread and butter” of community colleges. While their primary victim is the remedial student, the big source of money for many community colleges is the Pell Grant.

     The Pell Grant is basically free money for college. You show up and say you need money. The college signs you up for basic courses, and then gets all the money from the Pell Grant scheme. Whatever money that isn’t spent on tuition and fees is then “refunded” (that’s their word) to the student. This leads to an unofficial holiday on campus: Check Day. For many students, once they get the checks, they’re gone.

      There’s no record keeping from one campus to the next, so community colleges have bands of nomadic students wandering between them, getting their checks, disappearing, than showing up at the next campus down the road.

     While this business plan is incredibly fraudulent, it’s the business plan of many community colleges—they don’t care about fraud, they care about growth. I’ve covered this community college business plan before, but it’s worth asking why we have a million students or more doing this, for what amounts to a few hundred bucks a month. Yes, we really have over a million fraudsters in the system, as I’ve personally seen campuses with 40% scammers, and official estimates put it at 25%, with at least 6 million community college students in this country overall. A recent study touches on the systemic fraud, above and beyond administrative encouragement of fraud:

Food and Housing Insecurities In The Community College

     Now, the study only looks at California, so we have to take a few grains of salt to extrapolate what’s being seen in the study to community colleges elsewhere, but let’s look at the results all the same:

      Approximately a third (32.8%) of students experienced housing insecurity.

     Alas, statistics in a vacuum like this are meaningless. If 50% of the general population experiences housing insecurity, this study shows that community college students are relatively wealthy. If it’s 5% of the general population, now we have, as the study claims, evidence that our community college students are in poverty. Sadly, the study doesn’t give any relative statistic, so we just have to take it on faith that the results here mean what the study says they mean.

      I couldn’t find any study that would allow an apples-to-apples comparison…it’s a shame the study here didn’t make that a little easier to figure out.

     Similarly, the study finds around 12% of community college students suffer from food insecurity…I’ve never really seen a college student in real danger of starvation, but we’ll go with the flow here.

      The study naturally shows that students in these situations are going to community college with more purpose to get a job (shocking, right?) and that worries about food and housing cause these students stress (shocking again, right?). The study also shows that students in these situations tend to have lower grades…not exactly a shock, either.

     And, of course, the study shows that students in these situations are far more likely to be trapped in hopeless remedial programs, programs that we’ve long known to be wildly ineffective.

      This is such a damning indictment of our community college system, a system that targets the most vulnerable, sucks the last bit of money they have, and spits them out with nothing. I feel bad for the students.

     That said, I hate what this study is trying to imply with the “students that have insecurity do worse in school.”

     Part of the reason higher education is so ridiculously expensive right now is our campuses are bloated with an administrative caste to support every student whim, and, yes, every student need. Every campus now has multiple fiefdoms with names like “Institute of Student Appeasement” and I know what’s going to happen when administrators see this study. I’ve seen fiefdom after fiefdom founded, and every time, the Poo Bah justifies it because “Having this fiefdom will improve student success on campus!”

      For one concrete example, it’s why we have fiefdoms now to give students safe spaces. Some study, somewhere, showed that students who are afraid don’t do as well in class (shocking, right?). Need another concrete example? It’s also why we have Diversity fiefdoms on campus. Some study, somewhere, showed that students who feel like they belong on campus are happier, and happier students do better in class (shocking, right?).

      This is all rubbish, of course, because our graduation rates have been dropping steadily, despite the proliferation of these obviously useless fiefdoms. We have schools with 0.6% graduation rates now...how can we possibly claim these fiefdoms are doing any good?

      So, now we have a study saying we need to have a housing fiefdom, and a student feeding fiefdom.

      I don’t want to come across as a jerk, or unfeeling, but studies like this don’t sway me. I know higher education’s purpose is education and research. But this study tries to lead the reader into thinking higher education’s purpose should be to feed and house students. Yes, we can have scholarships, and scholarships based on need are fine, but the schemes like the Pell Grant aren’t about scholarship, they’re about sucking in huge numbers of students so the school can get soak up huge sums of money.

      Most of that money just goes to administration, as I’ve shown time and again on this blog. Yes, crumbs will go to our starving, homeless students, and my asking to shut down the Pell scheme might come across as my wanting to deny crumbs to our starving, homeless students.

     That’s not true.

      I’m fine with government programs to house and feed our homeless, starving, citizens. On the other hand, I’m rabidly against making it higher education’s mission to feed and house our students. Studies like this merely open up more avenues of plunder for administration.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com