Bureaucrats Paid $250,000 Feed Outcry Over College Costs

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

By John Hechinger - Nov 14, 2012

J. Paul Robinson, chairman of Purdue University’s faculty senate, strode through the halls of a 10- story concrete-and-glass administrative tower.

“I have no idea what these people do,” said Robinson, waving his hand across a row of offices, his voice rising.

The 59-year-old professor of biomedical engineering is leading a faculty revolt against bureaucratic bloat at the public university in Indiana. In the past decade, the number of administrative employees jumped 54 percent, almost eight times the growth of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000 chief diversity officer. It employs 16 deans and 11 vice presidents, among them a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief.

Administrative costs on college campuses are soaring, crowding out instruction at a time of skyrocketing tuition and $1 trillion in outstanding student loans. At Purdue and other U.S. college campuses, bureaucratic growth is pitting professors against administrators and sparking complaints that tight budgets could be spent more efficiently.

“We’re a public university,” Robinson said. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible. Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”

U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security, according to U.S. Education Department data.

Spending on administration has been rising faster than funds for instruction and research at 198 leading U.S. research universities, concluded a 2010 study by Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas.

“Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” Greene said in a telephone interview.

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Purdue says bureaucratic expansion hasn’t led to higher tuition.

Rather, state funding, which makes up 13 percent of its budget, hasn’t kept pace with the university’s rising costs, according to Timothy Sands, the school’s acting president. Purdue has beefed up its staff for fundraising and marketing, partly to attract full-paying students from other states and around the world, Sands said in an interview at his office, overlooking the school’s main quadrangle.

To maintain its position as a top-ranked university, Purdue must also administer hundreds of millions of dollars in government and industry research grants, Sands said.

“This is a $2.2 billion operation -- you’ve got to have some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it,” Sands said. “We’re about as lean as we can afford to be.”

Purdue officials acknowledge that, as the administration has expanded, spending on instruction has lagged behind. The university plans to hire more than 100 engineering professors in the next five years. The average full professor at Purdue gets a $125,000 salary, according to the university. Unlike many other colleges, Purdue hasn’t turned to low-paid, part-time faculty, a move that has offset the declines in tenured professors elsewhere, the school said.

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