A couple of weeks ago, the Delta Cost Project produced a report titled “Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive? Changing Staffing and Compensation Patterns in Higher Education.”  The authors examined several decades of IPEDS data to better understand the hiring and compensation trends that might have driven tuition increases across each sector of higher education.  Overall, the report concluded that higher education institutions’ workforces had increased on average by 28% in the last decade as college enrollments increased at a similar pace.

However, the sound bite that won the news cycle asserted that this report supported the “administrative bloat” meme – the claim that an explosion of non-faculty hires has driven increasing tuition costs and has eroded institutional support for (or as some folks would spin it – the supremacy of the) faculty.  The report did highlight several national trends over the last decade including increases in part-time faculty, increases in mid-level administrators, increases in the cost of benefits for all types of employees, and a drop in the ratio of faculty to administrators (i.e., there are more administrators per faculty member now than there were 20 years ago).

But all of these numbers in the Delta Cost Project report portrayed national trends.  A number of faculty and administrators asked me to examine our own Augustana data to compare whether our trends replicate these national data.  So I presented our local data to the Faculty Senate last week and have linked the power point for you to see here.  In order to make any sense of the rest of this post, you’ll have to click on the power point and have a look at the graphs in it.

I’d like to quickly point to a couple of take-aways and then ask the same question that I asked at the end of my presentation.

First, as you can see from the graphs in the power point, Augustana has not mirrored the national trends in the relationship between faculty and administrator positions.  In fact, we’ve gone the other direction.  Faculty positions have increased while administrator positions have declined.

Second, our own increasing use of part-time faculty parallels the national trends, although to a far smaller degree.  Similarly, albeit to an even smaller degree, we’ve increased the number of non-tenure track full time faculty in recent years.

Now I don’t expect for a second that presenting our local data will forever quiet the claim that administrative growth at Augustana is out of control.  But I would like to ask one question: What do any of these numbers have to do with student learning?  Do we know that more faculty, a lower student-faculty ratio, or a lower faculty-administrator ratio somehow improves our retention or graduation rates?  The little evidence we have would suggest that none of these changes produce any effect.  Likewise, there is little evidence to suggest that more administrators,  a lower student-administrator ratio, or a lower administrator-faculty ratio is a quick fix either.  The fact is that we have no idea what the ideal mix of faculty and administrators might be.  In fact, the answer might not be in the numbers themselves, but rather in how all of our faculty, administrators, and staff collaborate to create the best possible conditions for student acclimation, learning, and growth.

Make it a good day,

Mark