Administrative Bloat

Impact

Reduces resources for the core educational mission.

Definition

Excessive growth of administrative staff and bureaucratic processes within institutions, often detracting from or failing to contribute to the core educational mission.

Proposed Solution

Management decisions regarding process creation and removal can influence the dynamics of administrative bloat.

Key Characteristic

Administrative roles are often vague and confusing.

Example Institution

Yale University employs over 5,460 administrators for fewer than 5,000 undergraduate students.

Associated Researcher

Todd Zywicki, George Mason University law professor and co-author of 'The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education'.

1960s

1990s-2020s

2000s-2020s

2012

Recent years

“Administrative bloat is what occurs when the cost and scale of a university’s administrative structure either fails to contribute to the institution’s core educational mission or actually detracts from that educational mission.” [...] state schools is up 212% over the past 20 years. His definition of administrative bloat relates directly to cost, “Administrative bloat is what occurs when the cost and scale of a university’s administrative structure either fails to contribute to the institution’s core educational mission or actually detracts from that educational mission.” He does say that someone must fill out the infrastructure that provides a foundation for the experience of both educators and learners such as presidents [...] In her article related to administrative bloat, Rogers (2012) suggests that if an administrator disappeared, no one would notice for a year or two, whereas a missing professor is noticed right away. Many times when administrators are away faculty take over and fulfill duties seamlessly here at CSUF. In the past decade that has occurred numerous times, as interim administrative positions were a normal thing on this campus. She references Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College

Often referred to as administrative bloat, the growing number of non-instructional jobs at universities and colleges can be linked to the continuing rise in college tuition. As author Richard Vedder states, “When I started teaching in the 1960s, there were typically around two faculty for every non-faculty support person.” He continues, “Today, there are more administrators than faculty at most schools.” [...] Administrative bloat is a serious issue at colleges and universities, and not only because of the related costs. Administrative roles are notoriously vague and confusing, and even trying to grasp for the sake of this article what jobs fall under the category of “administration” has been a task. However, this piece from Inside Higher Ed does give a fairly coherent breakdown of what counts. As IHE states, administrators are those employees “whose role and responsibility is to manage and oversee [...] Where administrative bloat is concerned, cost is a major consideration. Maintaining a large administrative staff requires funding. The data below show the total number of administrators per UNC-System school, as well as those administrators’ combined and average salaries.

market share since the change \parencitekanter2018haier. Therefore, administrative bloat may be a contingent outcome influenced by management decisions, rather than an inevitable one. It is crucial to investigate how these managerial decisions impact administrative costs and waste. [...] The intuitive explanation for why administrative bloat may occur is that increasing administrative burden reduces the resources possible to allocate to the removal of obsolete processes or the creation of useful processes. The strength of this reinforcing feedback may dominate the organizations under certain conditions. In practice, we rarely see an organization exhaust its resources all on administration. When an organization is in the parameter space that sets it on the trajectory of [...] We develop a quantitative model to understand the dynamics of administrative bloat in organizations arising from the interaction of the obsolescence of processes due to changing conditions and well-intentioned management heuristics. Our model shows two possible outcomes: a sustainable equilibrium and a runaway administrative bloat scenario. The outcome is determined by management’s tendency to create processes in response to problems and remove processes in response to administrative burdens.

In recent years, Yale has achieved the unfortunate distinction of having more administrators and managers than undergraduate students. For its fewer than five thousand undergraduate students, Yale proudly employs an army of over 5,460 administrators. Like many of its peer institutions, Yale faces an epidemic of administrative bloat: a self-perpetuating ecosystem of expensive career administrators who are far removed from the classroom. In the last three decades, the number of administrators and [...] It’s hard to say exactly how all these administrators are spending their days. As Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor and co-author of “The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education,” explains, “The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing.” The plethora of bureaucrats causing this administrative bloat seem to be made up [...] the classroom. Managing administrative bloat is essential for the future success of American higher education.