Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion.”
His submission is part of a new Globe Opinion section called College Town. You can sign up for College Town’s free weekly newsletter here.
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.
Bloat begets more bloat
Administrative staffing is supposed to exist to administer education to students, to take up essential tasks that would be too burdensome to place on faculty. These include scheduling of classes to minimize conflicts, assigning classrooms, making textbook orders, and keeping buildings and rooms habitable. But such tasks are now a rather small part of what most administrators do. The net effect is that colleges have turned into sprawling institutions involved primarily in self-maintenance rather than education.
A recent study at MIT shows that since the mid-1980s, the student body has grown about 8 percent and faculty about 9 percent, while the number of administrators has increased by 189 percent. There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.
These numbers capture the first stage of administrative bloat. Let’s call it Bloat 1.0.
The story of Bloat 1.0 is that through a combination of local, state, and federal laws, fear of litigation, or simply the need to do something in the face of some problem, administrators start creating rules and mandates that take on a life of their own. For instance, the California State University system, which has half a million students, enforces a rule that all meetings on campus where food will be served have a “certified food handler.” If no on-campus certified handler is available for, say, a student club having a pizza party, then a designated club member must take a special class to get such a certification.
In many public universities, if a student wishes to invite a guest speaker, the guest must register as an independent contractor, acquire a budget code, and send an invoice, and the club itself must get a preapproval and a postapproval for the payment. Burdensome rules like this make students want to reconsider or even give up on their more ambitious, self-directed initiatives.
At the University of California, where I work on the Riverside campus, the hiring process for faculty positions requires a brief report on every candidate who applied for a job and didn’t get it. Candidates on any short list must submit official legal affidavits that they have not been found guilty of any form of workplace misconduct before they can advance to a final round of interviews.
All of these mandates require someone on campus to verify, process, and enforce them. And for every violation, there must be some process by which sanctions get recorded or appealed. Rules like these pervade the entire university, for low-stakes and high-stakes practices, many connected to the educational mission, but most unconnected. Because every rule must have administrative oversight, compliance, documentation, and sometimes even legal review, the university has to manage all the people involved in making, enforcing, and reviewing these rules. More people are in charge of standing in the way of the educational mission than actually facilitating it.
Which brings us to Bloat 2.0. The promise of digital infrastructure is to be able to do bureaucratic tasks more cheaply and efficiently. In principle, just like spending on administrative staff should make the essential functions of administration less burdensome, spending on software should make spending on administrative staff less essential.
But in higher education the opposite has happened. Millions and millions of dollars are being spent on digital infrastructure and the hiring of administrative staff who must oversee and mitigate problems caused by the digital infrastructure itself.
The University of California system promised that $170 million in spending on a single digital infrastructure project would cut administrative bloat by $753 million over its lifetime. Instead, the project took seven years and ballooned to $942 million in cost — and the finished project was so poorly designed and difficult to use that an entirely new IT unit had to be created just to keep the software functional. The savings on staffing were zero.
Making and passing out a syllabus now requires rounds of compliance with a variety of rules set by administrators, the state, and the federal government. Every professor knows that what starts as a two-page syllabus of readings and assignments now ends up being six to eight pages because of a variety of statements that administrators require or advise us to include — such as policies and procedures for students who are pregnant, bullied, sexually harassed, in need of religious accommodations, having their civil rights violated, or sensitive to disturbing content. Taking attendance requires ensuring that students are logged on to the right software, are connected to the right Wi-Fi routers, and have their geo-locating trackers on. One professor at UC San Diego tells me that new course approvals went from a six-month process to a two-year backlog, largely because of expensive software that requires ongoing maintenance.
The causes of Bloat 1.0 and Bloat 2.0 are related. Administrators seek to turn every problem into a process and integrate every process into software. They then outsource the implementation to others. When staff, faculty, and students then have such a poor experience with the processes, their backlash requires even more staffing to mitigate the disasters. There have been no efficiency gains or staffing savings in the administering of higher education in the last 20 years, from either 1.0 or 2.0.
Every administrator and every software contractor has an incentive to appear to be of ongoing usefulness to a university. And so more mandates and rules beget more reporting needs, more software requires ongoing “efficiency” upgrades and revisions. The result is that the basic tasks of actually administering an education suffer while the university transforms itself into a high-maintenance bureaucracy of employee management.
What we professors do is quite simple. We stand in a classroom and teach. Being a student is quite simple. You go to class, read books, maybe do experiments, and get together to talk about what you’ve learned. Despite the huge revolution in technology, teaching and learning have not changed that much — not nearly so much that student clubs now need to undergo food handling training to have a pizza party.
We need a moratorium on new rules and new software purchases until we’ve pruned what does not serve the fundamental mission of teaching and learning and in fact gets in the way of it. The pruning needs to come not just from universities’ administrators themselves but from state and federal government mandates, as well as accreditation agencies.
Finally, universities must stop falling in love with every new piece of software, both educational and administrative, that the tech industry or their own IT departments pitch as essential. Administrators spend on software as if it is a durable investment, when all of the evidence shows that it consists of highly perishable, high-maintenance, and often unnecessary products that make bloat worse.
Pruning of bloat is not only for cost-cutting and efficiency. An overregulated education is suffocating to students. We want our young people not just to follow rules but to question them, and to abandon them when they do not serve the right purposes. We want our college graduates to control the technology that shapes their future, not have it control them.
If every aspect of their schedule, their education, and their college life is just a lesson in bureaucratic rule-following and constraints placed on them by user interfaces in software, that is a lesson they will take into the rest of their lives.