Bureaucracy U

When IU increased tuition and fees by 5.5 percent at the end of May for the Bloomington campus, IU Student Association President Justin Kingsolver complained student voices were surreptitiously ignored.

“Why are we not making the decisions?” Kingsolver said. “We are footing one-seventh of the bill. Why are we not asked?”

Kingsolver never received his answer, but nevertheless the answer should have been obvious enough: tough decisions had to be made and administrators were set on raising tuition from the beginning.

The Indiana legislature cut $10.4 million in funding for IU-Bloomington earlier in the spring and the University had more than $600 million in repair and maintenance projects backlogged.

Unfortunately, the IU Board of Trustees saw tuition increases as the best option in approaching these problems, and they knew IU students would not be too happy about it.

But was a tuition increase really the trustees’ best and only option?

In short, no. The problem with their solution is that it did not fix the biggest issue: administrative bloat.

Administrative bloat is one of the least talked about problems in higher education, but quite possibly the greatest cause of tuition inflation.

In 2010, the Goldwater Institute, an independent government watchdog group based out of Phoenix, published a study entitled “Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education.”

Based off information provided by the government sponsored National Center for Education Statistics, researchers found that from 1993 to 2007, the number of full-time administrators for every 100 students at 198 of the top public and private schools in the country increased by an average of 39 percent, while the number of professors and researchers rose only by an average of 18 percent.

In addition, the inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student rose by a staggering 61 percent, while spending on instruction only rose 39 percent.

How do IU’s numbers compare to these averages? Between 1993 and 2007, IU surpassed the national average by increasing the number of administrators per 100 students by 55.7 percent.

During the same time, it also decreased the number of instructors, researchers and other service personnel per 100 students by 6.7 percent, which put it well below the national average of 18 percent.

Furthermore, in inflation-adjusted numbers, IU increased its spending on administration per student by 57.6 percent and its spending on instruction per student by only 26.3 percent.

Granted, these numbers are four years old, however, unless IU has drastically reversed its course since 2007, they are probably still good indicators of the current state of affairs.
If anything, the trend suggests the number of administrators per 100 students has probably only increased since 2007 and the number of instructors decreased.

What does this all mean for IU? It means by placing a disproportionate emphasis on bureaucratizing the University, education at IU inevitably suffers.

It means students are forced to cope with larger class sizes, fewer courses to choose from and higher tuition increases, as we saw this May.

IU has dropped from 67 to 75 in the annual U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” rankings and its in-state tuition has risen in inflation-adjusted numbers by 94 percent from $4,328.92 in 1993 to $9,028 today.

But more than falling rankings and rising tuition, the bureaucratization also means IU has failed in its mission.

One has to wonder how fewer instructors and researchers translate into “challenging and inspired undergraduate, graduate, professional and life-long education,” which, according to the Office of the Provosts website, is a part of IU’s mission.

Unless you take “challenging” to mean larger classes and less face time with instructors, the decreasing number of instructors per student makes no sense.

The addition of even more administrators to the system also means less efficiency.

There is a well-known theory that suggests the more bureaucracy you add to any system, the more costly and inefficient it becomes. And anyone who has ever tried to navigate IU’s bureaucracy knows this to be true.

In many cases, the addition of “Green Deans,” diversity officers and bias-incident teams can be found to be at the root of the problem.

The corollary of this is that the University has seen activism as a place for growth, putting sustainability, diversity and therapy for those who have been offended ahead of learning and research.

If IU really wants to save some money next time around, instead of reaching into student bank accounts, it should reach into University offices where administrators outnumber teachers almost two to one.

­— nperrino@umail.iu.edu