Page 269 - Crisis in Higher Education

240 • Crisis in Higher Education

3. Nonexempt support staff: Jobs in this category are office and clerical,
technical and paraprofessional, skilled craft, and service and main-
tenance staff. At research universities in 2015, only 7 of 150 job cat-
egories had a median salary that exceeded $50,000, and those were
primarily skilled trades such as electricians and plumbers. 17

To put the size of administration in perspective, the number of executives
(190,000) and professional managers and specialists (566,405) was about
756,000 in 2015. In the same year, there were about 675,000 full-time or full-
time-equivalent faculty members. Thus, it took about 1.12 administrators to
1
oversee and manage the work of one full-time faculty. This seems wasteful
to the nth degree. The ratio is probably higher than this because the num-
ber for administrators does not include academic department chairs who
are counted as faculty because their workload involves a significant teach-
ing commitment. Moving on to nonexempt support staff, a rough estimate
of size is likely to top 1,000,000. This is based on the number of nonex-
empt staff (176,123) reported by the institutions (781) that responded to the
CUPA-HR survey compared to the total number of institutions in the United
States (4,500). 18,19 (The calculation is 176,123 divided by 781 and multiplied
by 4,500.) This is not a precise estimate but an approximation that gives a
sense of the problem. Thus, the ratio of full-time administrators—executives
(190,000), professionals (566,405), and support staff (1,000,000)—to full-time
faculty (675,000) was 2.6 to 1 and is likely higher today. Staggering?

11.5.3.1 Improving Productivity for Executive-Level Administrators
When economists discuss productivity, they are usually describing labor pro-
ductivity, which is output divided by labor used. To increase productivity, an
organization can have the same output using fewer employee-hours, more
output with the same number of employee-hours, or a blend of more output
and fewer hours. In the case of universities, outputs may be measured as the
number of students taught or graduates produced. The sheer magnitude of the
increase in full-time administrative position, 369% from 1978 to 2014, indi-
5
cates that more is needed than a small change here and a little tweak there. 20
Table 11.2 lists possible job titles and duties for an office of the provost
at public universities. It is an expansion of the “Executive VP & Provost”
box in the organization chart in Figure 11.1. This list does not include sec-
retarial or clerical staff within the provost’s office. Excluding the executive
assistant and the senior vice provost, each member in the list has deputies,