A report released just this month by the American Institutes of Research (AIR) sheds some light on the problems afflicting American colleges. Entitled Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive? Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education, the report examines spending at American colleges during the years 2000-2012. The findings are illuminating.
At first glance, the news is good. Between 2000-2012, the total higher education workforce actually grew by 28 percent, despite the Great Recession of 2008-present. Why did higher education grow while some sectors of the economy shrank? The short answer is: Millennials. Simply put, there’s an up tick in student populations. Another echo from the post-war Baby Boom, there is a bulge in the college-age demographic. Thus, even during the Great Recession, colleges hired new workers in an attempt (and not always a successful one) to keep pace with rising student enrollment.
However, most employee growth at colleges during the last twelve years has not been in the form of teachers. It is in the form of non-instructional employees, who comprise a clear majority of the college labor force. Among them, the report defines two classes: salaried administrators, whose numbers have grown substantially, and support staff such as secretaries and maintenance workers, whose numbers have actually dwindled.
The report notes that salaried “administrators have assumed a much larger presence on college campuses than ever before.”
As mentioned in Part I of this essay , administrations have several sound explanations for at least some of their growth. Other justifications are perhaps less sound. One example is to blanket much of what they do under a vague banner of their own invention: “Student Services.”
After all, who can argue with the importance of serving students?
But make no mistake: so-called “student services” are still non-instructional. What are they exactly? A far ranging spectrum too broad to comprehensively list here.
Some of it is vital, like dormitories and cafeterias. Some of it is non-essential to education but still of tremendous value, such as counseling and health centers. And some of it, like campus festivals and concerts, leads many faculty to roll their eyes and suspect that “student services” has become a cover for unworthy administrative expenses.
Regardless, none of it is designed for the classroom. And from 2002-2010, as paradoxical as it sounds, spending on instruction declined while spending on “student services” rose.
When peeling back the layers of administrative growth, the AIR report finds that it is a two pronged development. First comes the hiring of managerial administrators. These tend to get the most attention, as they include high powered administrators who often boast shiny titles, expansive offices, and six-figured salaries bolstered by expense accounts. Shiny titles and big salaries tend to ruffle feathers at colleges for several reasons:
- They seem incongruous at a non-profit institution.
- They seem incongruous within the culture of academia specifically, which prides itself on a professorial workforce that has chosen “a calling” instead of prioritizing material gains (Whether or not this is true is debatable, of course, but it’s a common perception within academic culture.).
- The professorial workforce is composed of intellectuals trained to analyze and critique, and its members are often quick to question the legitimacy of shiny titles and big salaries/expense accounts for non-instructional administrators.
But what the report makes clear is that the expansion of top rank administrators and their sometimes shockingly large salaries is not, in and of itself, what drive up costs. After all, a quarter-million dollar salary to one individual really is a drop in the bucket of most college budgets.
Rather, it’s that most of these new high-ranking administrators require, or at least demand, a sizable staff of administrators working under them. After all, they’re managers. The crux of their job is overseeing the work of others. A manager without a workforce is like a god without parishioners: that fancy title just ain’t worth much.
According to the AIR report, the rising cost of administrative salaries is due to the expanding rank of subordinate administrators (not to be confused with staff such as secretaries), as much as the new top level executive administrators whom they answer to.
How this plays out across academia depends to a large degree on the type of school being examined. At private research colleges, which tend to have more money than public institutions, the rate of administrative growth was higher even than the rate of student growth, sometimes substantially. At public colleges, however, administrative growth barely kept pace with student growth.
Regardless, as college administrations have grown, the ratio of faculty and staff to administrators has declined at all types of institutions. And the decline has not been small. At most colleges, the faculty/staff : administrator ratio plummeted by about 40% from 1990-2012.
As the report bluntly states: “On most college campuses, the majority of workers are not teaching students.”
Taking this all into account, it should come as no surprise that at colleges and universities across America, the ranks of full time teachers have dropped. This is true of both Tenured and Tenure Track (TTT) faculty and contingent faculty (those with less pay, fewer benefits, and no job security). Together they comprise between one-fifth and one-quarter of the total workforce.
In other words, about 4/5 of employees at American colleges are either not teachers or only teach part time. And of the remaining fifth, a growing share of full time teachers are contingent faculty.
Adjunct faculty, in the form of part-time workers and graduate assistants, constitute more than one-half of the teaching workforce at mos
t colleges. New full time faculty are still being hired. However, it is at a rate that usually lags behind student enrollments, even when one includes new contingent full time faculty hires.
While all schools rely heavily on adjuncts, community colleges are the most dependent. They are essentially riding a flotilla of part time teachers. This underscores the fact that public colleges which emphasize teaching often get the least amount of public resources, while schools that emphasize research almost always take home the lion’s share. Clearly an argument can be made that this is a disservice to students.
Add it all up, and the report finds that the number of administrators and adjuncts, as a percentage of the workforce, grew at every type of college in America. Meanwhile, the percentage of staff employees (such as secretaries and maintenance) has decreased at every type of college, and the percentage TTT faculty has decreased at every type except for public research universities (1% increase, behind the rate of increasing student enrollment) and private research universities (3% increase, about even).
In no category of school do TTT faculty comprise so much as a quarter of the workforce.
The growth of contingent faculty, and especially part time adjuncts, has contributed to a downward shift in faculty compensation. Predictably then, faculty salaries do not explain skyrocketing college tuition. In fact, like most American workers, full time faculty have suffered stagnant wages over the last decade. From 2002 (six years before the Great Recession) through 2010, college expenditures on salary for full-time faculty were essentially flat. Meanwhile, adjuncts are often paid starvation wages, or just a notch above, depending on the school.
But if faculty expenditures don’t explain rising costs, neither is the answer simply “administration.”
The AIR report cites rising administrative costs, both in the form of salaries and non-instructional projects such as construction, as a factor in rising college college costs. It’s simply beyond dispute. However, it is not the only factor, and maybe not even the most important one.
In addition to increasing administrative salaries, one factor is the rising cost of salaried benefits for all administrators, faculty, and staff who receive benefits. For example, America’s stunningly inefficient healthcare system, which gobbles up about 18% of Gross Domestic Product, continues to claim a growing share of university expenditures.
Health care and other benefits of salaried administrators and TTT faculty that are driving up costs, even almost no adjunct faculty receive any of these benefits, and most contingent full time faculty receive either none or only partial benefits. This situation is at once a clear indication of labor exploitation, and also an indictment of larger social and economic problems in the United States.
Another factor that explains rising costs is the decline in government subsidies, mentioned in Part I off this essay. This affects all schools, but particularly public schools. The downward trend is longstanding, but the Great Recession put sharp spurs to it.
While a small handful of schools such as Harvard and Yale boast endowments larger than the GDP of many nations, and enjoy the fiscal flexibility that comes with them, the vast, vast majority of Am
erican colleges do not have a rainy day fund anywhere near large enough to help them cope with these complex changes.
As a result, colleges have scrambled to adjust. The stunning rise in tuition rates over the last three decades is one result, and so too is the equally shocking rise in exploited contingent faculty. And while it seems likely that many colleges have made some poor choices while trying to adjust, larger structural forces have greatly limited their options.
Both parts of this essay were originally published as a single article at 3 Quarks Daily.