For the last few months leading up to Wednesday’s University of California Board of Regents meeting, the state has persistently asked that the UC open up its books and listen to state suggestions as a way to reduce its cost structure.
And as an olive branch of good faith to Gov. Jerry Brown, the Board of Regents approved the formation of an advisory committee to review University finances in areas such as enrollment, online education and most notably in administrative costs.
The general public perception has been that the UC is grossly overpaying a large and unnecessary staff of administrators; however, that perception is based on skewed numbers, and ultimately distracts from larger issues around UC funding, which include – but are not limited to – a lack of state funding.
If we want to alleviate the UC’s funding problems, we should not place undue focus on cutting costs through administrative salaries, but instead gear our efforts toward securing appropriate state funding and trimming costs in ways that do not compromise education quality.
And reducing the pay of UC administration will have an effect on education quality; many UC administrator salaries are below market value, and lowering them further will likely drive administrators to another university system. For instance, our chancellors are actually underpaid in comparison to chancellors at other public universities such as those at the University of Texas.
Furthermore, the numbers supposedly highlighting administrative bloat are skewed and therefore, improperly perceived. One of the most wrongly perceived and highly cited statistics published by the UC Berkeley Faculty Association regarding UC administrative bloat shows a 252 percent increase in senior management, while total employees have only increased by 51 percent, from 1991 to 2012.
However, the classification of “senior management” in studies creates a misconception about the total increase in senior management at the UC. The study artificially inflates the senior management count by combining two very different groups, the Senior Management Group and Managers and Senior Professionals.
The Senior Management Group is what we think of when we think of highly compensated executive administrators. It includes a variety of assistant and associate chancellors who help develop policy and direction and report directly to the for the UC. However, Managers and Senior Professionals is a broad category that consists of both managers and professionals that serve more as mid-level management and consultants to nearly all departments at the UC.
The fact of the matter is that not all UC administrators make exorbitant amounts of money. Of the three percent of UC employees that make over $200,000, 81 percent are educational faculty, 3 percent are of the Senior Management Group, 3 percent are deans and 6 percent are physicians, doctors and nurses, according to a December 2014 UCOP Report.
In reality, the majority of administrative growth has been the result of a 10 percent increase in staff at UC teaching hospitals since 2006, according to the UCOP report. In comparison, UC non-academic staff has only increased by one percent since 2006.
Undoubtedly both the Managers and Senior Professionals and the Senior Management Group have grown at the UC, and Brown’s input on trimming excess administrative bloat may prove to be beneficial for students and the UC as a whole. But it does not deserve the kind of attention and derision it often gets from students and the general taxpaying public alike.
So far the state has been winning the public perception battle against the UC administration by portraying it as greedy and overpaid. But let’s not pretend that reducing administrative pay will solve critical issues such as continued state divestment from the UC and rising tuition at the university.
Granted, this person has a history of writing things like tuition hikes are necessary, but his argument is pretty flawed in of itself.
He argues that there is a lack of state funding, but I have already shown (http://165.227.25.233/2015/01/12/submission-deflating-uc-administrative-bloat-better-than-hiking-tuition/ ) that while the state spent $477 million less in state general funding since 2007-08, the state has also provided $500 million increase in state aid and $107 million in Middle Class scholarships in the same period.
He argues that lower administrative salaries mean fewer administrators to attract; he makes the assumption that more bureaucracy is better for students and faculty, and education as a whole. I take the apparently controversial position that the UC should invest in hiring more faculty and students, which I believe have the most impact in improving educational quality.
Furthermore, the reason why I and others include “Senior Management Group” and “Management and Senior Professionals” (SMG and MSP) together is because the UC actually puts them together in its data reports. Regardless of that detail, he completely overlooks the fact that this group in of itself has grown immensely. If the first group has grown enormously, that will probably cost a lot of money. If the second group has grown enormously, that will also still probably cost a lot of money. He does not address the underlying issue of, why has this group grown so tremendously. Apparently hiring thousands more SMG and/or MSP positions, most of which are NOT instructional-related, in the midst of the budget crisis 2007-08 to 2014-15, is good for the UC budget? That sounds preposterous to me.
Even if you look at the UCLA job listings for management positions (https://hr.mycareer.ucla.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/frameset/Frameset.jsp?time=1422045989332), you realize that the jobs UCLA is asking are NOT directly related to instruction, which I believe is not going to better educational quality. My favorite position listed is a “Director of Development, Asia”
Also, he talks about how tenure faculty make a lot of money in comparison to management positions. My response is of course, this is a university, what do you expect? Most of the positions and salaries should go to faculty to begin with. The problems is that even that small amount of percentage that goes to non-faculty salaries is more than enough to freeze tuition hikes. AFSCME 3299 estimates that at least $450 million was spent on 793 UC employees in 2013. The amount of money the UC is asking for is about $100 million from the state.
And the percent increases of staff are extremely dubious at best. Literally look at the statistical summary data (http://legacy-its.ucop.edu/uwnews/stat/). His reference, as does the UC in general, does not disclose what it means by “staff.” His percentages misrepresent the actual increases in growth of “staff”; he doesn’t compare the growth of “staff” with growth of students or of tenure track faculty; he only compares the growth of staff categories with each other, which does not tell us that much about overall staff or administrative growth.
Additionally, you can’t just attribute administrative growth (or staff growth in this matter) to just health care services because the campuses that have the most growth in “Senior Management Group” and “Management and Senior Professionals”, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, don’t have hospitals.
I don’t think it’s justifiable for the UC to, since the budget crisis in 2007, to hire about 2,511 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) SMG and MSP and 7,912 FTE “Professional and Support Staff” while only hiring 209 FTE tenure track faculty. It’s bad budget balancing and it doesn’t give a good education.
If they really cared about quality of education, would it not be reasonable to hire faculty and cut non-instructional related staff? If they really want to not increase tuition, would it not be reasonable to stop hiring more administrative positions?
–Todd Lu