Another Look at Administrative Bloat in Higher Ed

I've written various pieces before (see here, here, and here) about the real issues of cost in higher education, and how the public debates seem to miss the point in their desire to hawk one ideological view or another. A lot of things drive up the cost of higher ed. One of my favorite bogey men is the story of "administrative bloat".

Now, on its surface "administrative bloat" is real insofar as universities and colleges today employ a lot more non-instructional staff than they did in past years.  Some of this is technology driven - 50 years ago universities didn't have IT departments with groups of computer programmers. Faculty like to believe that administrative bloat is a fundamental product of administrative motivations - that administrations (assumed in subtext to be greedy and selfish) will grow and metastasize in much the same way that Thomas Piketty argues capitalism produces inequality. There are certainly cases of this kind of "frivolous bloat", although it is not as common as some of the faculty hawks believe.

Often unnoticed in these discussions is a third force driving administrative bloat: mandates from the outside world. Some of these mandates are from the marketplace - parents and students want universities with certain kinds of amenities and services (how many schools, for example, have done away with their Career Center in this job-focused age?) And some of those mandates come from the government.

It is into this category that a story in today's Chronicle titled "Why Colleges Are on the Hook for Sexual Assault" falls. The meaning and mandate of the Federal Title IX statute has been expanded significantly in the decades since it was founded, and recently especially in the realm of rape and sexual assault. Universities now find themselves essentially having to set up professional criminal justice systems, with top-quality capabilities to investigate, handle due process, and render verdicts which will stand up to both legal and public scrutiny. In other words, universities now need their own court systems.

This is a series of tasks which universities are ill-suited to do. Even a decent-sized institution like my employer only has a handful of people on campus who have anything resembling professional competence in these areas. To do this and do it right, the university would have to hire a number of people, some of them pretty highly-paid professionals with experience and credentials. In other words, more bloat.

The price of not doing this for any university is twofold. If a student has a bad experience and blames the institution for it, that school may find itself the subject of a Federal investigation - never a good thing. Moreover, the bad press generated will almost certainly drive students away, which in today's lean times can be catastrophic. So anybody not moving in this direction is gambling with the future of the university.

Most of us agree that sexual assault is a terrible thing and needs to be stamped out. I don't object in the slightest to building improved systems to treat victims better and, hopefully, reduce the incidence of rape and assault. But we have to understand that there is a cost to doing so, and that cost is being imposed on universities - which will mean, ultimately, higher tuition and all the rest of it. Somebody has to pay, and the broader public (through their state legislatures) has long since decided that it isn't going to be the taxpayers. So students are, in essence, being told to fund their own solution to the problem. And there will be a few more highly-paid administrators on every campus for faculty to complain about.

The Media, the IRS "Scandal", and the Fact-Free Paranoia of our Day

The New York Times has an excellent investigative piece on the IRS/Tea Party Scandal currently making the rounds. Anybody with the slightest interest in this case - regardless of political stripe - should read this piece thoroughly.

The crux of the report, with a pretty thorough review of facts as they are knowable now, suggests two things:

1) The IRS office in question, located in Cincinnati, performed an almost impossible task badly, an occurrence entirely explainable by reference to bureaucratic and organizational incompetence rather than ideologically-motivated malfeasance. Evidence for the former is so overwhelming as to be conclusive. Evidence of the latter is so thin that, to borrow the British phrase, you wouldn't hang a dog with it.

2) It's not entirely clear, other than from one directive among a great many, that conservative groups (Tea Party or otherwise) were treated any worse than others. To know whether they were or not would require a grasp of basic statistics and a willingness to count and compare the appropriate things, which no reporting (including the above-referenced piece) has yet done. As usual, innumeracy continues to bedevil us.

As an administrator who runs an office that is frequently overwhelmed with paperwork, has been chronically understaffed, and is often expected to do too much by people who don't have much understanding of what we do or why, I am sympathetic to the bureaucratic argument here. This is how bureaucratic organizations, especially ones that are both maligned and neglected (as this branch of the IRS has been) work. Prior to this "scandal", anyone with a working knowledge of organizational function could easily have foreseen significant problems. The only difference now is that Congressmen and pundits with political interest have seen an opportunity to use these problems to partisan advantage, resulting in another round of paranoia-tinged, table-thumping Washington Kabuki theater.

What struck me as particularly ironic today is that, while it ran the piece linked above in today's news section (to be fair, headlined on the front page), it was running this piece in last week's Sunday Op-Ed section. Written by Ross Douthat as part of the NYT's effort to prove that it is willing to print both conservative and liberal opinions, the piece is a fact-free paranoid rant, dripping with sarcasm and filled with references that have nothing to do with the IRS or the case at hand. It is an excellent example of the "thoughts" of someone whose mind is already made up, so don't bother with the facts.

In other words, a week before its reporters could put together an in-depth investigative report (because investigative journalism takes time), the NYT was shooting itself in the foot by printing a blowhard who had already decided he knows what the "real truth" is.

Because it was published a week earlier, and because it is shorter and pithier than the rather lengthy investigative article, $50 says that more people will read Douthat's ramblings to the end than will read the news piece.

This pattern is not all that surprising these days. Opinion can be manufactured in seconds, and nobody (especially media organizations) wants to be seen as withholding sober judgement until the facts come in. So with every new event and "scandal", we get treated to a barrage of half-baked blowhard nonsense first and foremost. If we are patient and wait long enough, we might eventually go to enough information to start to understand the truth. But by then, the blowhards who command most of our attention have moved on to the next manufactured crisis.

I have a simple proposal - one which I doubt will gain much traction, but which I will at least try myself. Let's turn off the blowhards. Don't watch cable news (mostly blowhards these days), don't read the op-ed sections of newspapers, don't click the links your friends post on Facebook - regardless of their ideological slant. Opinion has become the junk food of our information stream - terrible for our minds, but addictive to our tastes. Let's cut back on the Doritos and eat more fruits and veggies - things that take time to grow and procure, but which are far, far better for us.

Corruption in Education: It's the Assumptions, Dummy!

Concerns have been circulating for some time that teachers, or possibly even entire schools, have been cheating on behalf of their students on standardized tests. These concerns were widely publicized by, among others, Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame. The data they presented was pretty compelling - patterns in test answers indicated that cheating was definitely taking place.

Now the story is back in the headlines - this time with an entire school district. The former Superintendent of the Atlanta schools, along with 34 other administrators and teachers, has been indicted on charges of racketeering, theft, conspiracy, influencing witnesses, and making false statements. The superintendent faces 45 years in prison if convicted - punishment that would run beyond what many convicted Wall Street swindlers have faced in recent years. A total of 178 teachers and administrators were implicated district-wide.

That there is cheating and corruption on this scale in American public schools will come as a shock to some - although the "dramatic increases" in test scores seen in the Atlanta schools should have been enough to raise eyebrows rather than garner invitations to the White House. The article linked above should be read widely by anyone who is interested in K-12 education in America today. This isn't to say that every school district in America has this problem - but if you think it's confined to Atlanta, I have a bridge to sell you.

What's more interesting to me is how we got here. This kind of corruption is a direct product of No Child Left Behind and the high-stakes "accountability" testing that it ushered in. NCLB rests on a set of assumptions that, when exposed, are absurd. The entire system relies on a set of sticks and carrots, with standardized test scores designed to trigger either benefits to those who do well or punishment to those who fail to make the grade (with a decided emphasis on the punishment side, embodied in the widespread term "failing school"). And because you can't punish students directly, these carrots and sticks have been directed at districts, schools, and (increasingly, especially here in Ohio) individual teachers.

If you believe that this kind of accountability is going to improve children's education, you have to accept two assumptions. One is that standardized tests actually measure the educational outcomes we want. That belief has been widely debated and criticized, and I won't rehash that debate here.

Even if you believe that standardized tests are reliable and valid measures of student education, believing that carrots and sticks will change those outcomes requires a second assumption: that the fundamental obstacle preventing kids' learning is the motivation of teachers. You are, in essence, arguing that teachers are either lazy or incapable.

If the former is true, then threats and rewards should induce them to do what they could otherwise do, but won't. If the latter is true, then the system should force out teachers and replace them with others capable of doing the job (at the prevailing wage structure for teachers, no less).

Since we don't see mass teacher firings, the primary mechanism here is motivating the existing teacher workforce. People who believe in the NCLB approach think that if you threaten teachers, they'll suddenly start doing a good job - which they could have been doing all along, if only they were properly motivated.

This is, of course, an absurd assumption. Of all of the obstacles preventing kids (especially kids in inner-city districts like Atlanta) from learning, the motivation level of their teachers is pretty low on the list. Yet somehow, introducing "accountability" is supposed to solve everything.

That this kind of absurdity should produce widespread cheating and corruption, as it has in Atlanta, should not surprise us. NCLB has turned school districts into a version of Kafka's The Trial - a world in which truth is irrelevant and real progress is impossible. In such a world, what else should we expect? Teachers and administrators faced a terrible choice: cheat or be fired.

We should all hope that Dr. Hall, the administrator at the center of the whole mess, is sentenced to a goodly long prison term as an example to others. But even for her, the incentives were skewed. Until she was caught, cheating earned her the highest honors - invitations to the White House, plaudits from politicians and the business community, and some $500,000 in "performance bonuses".

Given the obstacles faced by a large number of the 52,000 children in her district, there was no way for her to earn these things honestly - especially without large numbers of additional resources to invest in Atlanta schools, which she did not have. It's unfortunate that she made the choices she did - but if we present people with a system in which cheating is the only way to get ahead, we shouldn't be surprised when some of them do.

It may be too much to ask that this one case, as shocking as it is, will cause us to reexamine the NCLB approach and the absurdist assumptions which underlie it. Maybe we need to indict a dozen more major urban superintendents. I hope that it doesn't take that long, and that we can someday soon rebuild our approach to education on the basis of a more rational set of assumptions.

The Cost of Higher Education Is Hidden In Corners You Don't Expect

I’ve written before about some of the forces driving the growth in higher education administration. While it’s easy for some faculty to assume nefarious motives, the fact is that a lot of the growth of administration – which also contributes to the growth in tuition cost – is the result of factors beyond universities’ control.

I ran into another one of these factors yesterday, in an area we don't usually think about as a major driver of college costs. We have been working in our office with a graduate student who is just finishing up his Master’s degree. He specializes in Student Affairs in Higher Education. I’ve known for some months that he was on the job market; I had even written a letter of support for him. I had a chance to catch up with him and learn about the job he’s landed at a small private college not too far down the road. He’s a bright guy and a hard worker; I’m sure he’ll do well.

Because his primary area of specialty is Student Activities, our conversation turned to comparisons in that area. I pointed out that 20 years ago at my alma mater, there were no “student activities staff”. Students organized (or semi-organized) their own activities, by and large. If you wanted to form a group and get funding from the college, the process was fairly easy and straightforward – fill out a form or two, slap together a budget, pitch your case to the student government that controlled the purse strings (not much staff involvement there, either), and off you go.

I participated in several organizations and activities in college, for the most part run entirely by students. I don’t even know if the staff were aware of what we were doing. Case in point: at some point around my sophomore year, somebody started a tradition (calling it an “organization” would be stretching the term) called “Nearly Naked Nighttime Frisbee” or Triple-N F. Basically, a group varying in size between 5 and 20 would go out nearly every Wednesday night at midnight and toss a Frisbee around, wearing as little as possible, regardless of the weather. It was goofy, and fun, and probably slightly risky (especially at -10 degrees, which it sometimes was), but that’s what college was for.

I learned from my departing graduate student that today’s landscape has fundamentally shifted. Most colleges and universities are deathly afraid of lawsuits and bad press, and so they don’t want to have any activities that aren’t sanctioned and supervised by the institution. There’s also been a resurgence in recent years of the old in loco parentis notion, egged on by sometimes-overprotective parents whose demands for “accountability” from their children’s college borders on micromanagement.

If all activities have to be sanctioned and vetted and supervised, that takes staff. And paperwork. And more staff to handle the paperwork. As both economists and physicists remind us, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So there has been an explosion of student activities staff. Even my own alma mater now has a Vice President for Campus Life, an Office of Student Life with a Director, and an Assistant Director of Student Involvement – and I think they’re hiring another student activities person. That’s 3-4 people, where 20 years ago there were either none or maybe one.

Why do colleges hire all of these folks? The fear of lawsuits and bad press may be somewhat overstated, but it’s rooted in reality. And the pressure from parents is real. It certainly isn’t because students are any more devious, sneaky, or dumb than they were 20 years ago. I don’t think there’s been an explosion of student talent for getting into trouble that would justify an arms race in student life staff.

We hear lots of people, especially parents and politicians, complain about the cost of higher education. What we need is a clearer set of ideas about where those costs come from. In the last decade or two, the demands on colleges and universities have gone up exponentially. When those demands are made by the people who pay the bills (parents and governments), we can hardly be surprised that the costs rise on a similar curve.