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The Monty Python script our unis are following

Adam Creighton

by Adam Creighton

26 Oct 10:00am

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Filed under: Administration, Economy, Education, Funding, Money, University

19 comments

In the forest of reforms that boost Australia’s economic efficiency, one of the biggest and lowest-hanging pieces of fruit remains unpicked: emancipation of higher education from the shackles of bureaucracy.

Whaddya mean bloated? Bring me a bucket… Pic: Supplied
Australia’s universities are bloated with superfluous staff that thwart lecturers’ ability to teach and suck up funds that would be better spent on research. They are riddled with inefficiencies and perverse incentives that hobble their ability to produce rounded, competent graduates.

Take the University of Western Sydney, Australia’s largest, with a headcount of 2,487 staff in March this year. The university employed around 1,100 staff in the Vice Chancellor’s Office, the Division of Corporate Strategy and Services and the Division of Academic and Research (which undertakes no academic research).

A recently retired UWS property economics lecturer, Norman Harker, estimates that a further quarter of the staff in the teaching faculties were administrative, which implies that University-wide 56 per cent of staff are administrative.

It gets worse: cleaning and security are typically outsourced, so are not included in the above tally, and academics themselves are lumbered with copious paper work that saps around one third of their working hours.

“The administrative tail is wagging the academic dog’,” Mr Harker tells The Australian, “examination lengths, assessment processes, course and subject content and delivery are now being dictated by administrators who are not currently responsible for teaching, research or publication”.

Administrators aren’t poorly paid either: in 2011 they soaked up almost half the university’s $340 million wage bill.

An Ernst and Young report into the future of Australia’s universities, released earlier this week, showed absurd administrative burdens are the norm. Only one of the Australian universities it examined had a ratio of support and administrative staff to academic staff of less than one!

The E&Y report says professional service firms in the private sector typically have around two or three times as many front-line staff as support staff, implying universities would need to sack around half theirs to approach what might approach common sense.

Yet universities still have the temerity to tell government and taxpayers that they need more money, citing bulging lecture theatres and crammed tutorials. They could in theory free up millions of dollars every year by sacking swathes of unproductive staff.

Universities haven’t authored this Monty Python script. Their vast bureaucracies service another bureaucracy in Canberra: the federal department of education, which insists they produce `profiles’ and collect mountains of data to compile `performance indicators’.

Canberra specifies the number of places that can be offered across disciplines, penalising universities that transgress. It attaches `protocols’ to their funding that aim to influence how universities manage their internal affairs. It periodically awards extra money to universities that “promote the productivity of higher education providers” (which does not appear to have been successful), among a raft of other arbitrary conditions.

This meddling requires a huge paper trail to demonstrate compliance. The Commonwealth cannot order universities about - they are ultimately creatures of the states.

Eminent Australian economics professor Max Corden calls this system of funding Moscow on the Molonglo. As the real Soviet Union discovered, central planning is grossly inefficient but we persist with it here.

Mr Harker says: “UWS’s standards have got progressively lower and lower over the years due to the administratively dictated changes,” suggesting academics were being forced to scale up examination marks to 50 per cent to keep up pass rates.

The expansion of publicly funded higher education in Australia has proved a powerful engine of social mobility for young Australians, launching smart hardworking kids from working class backgrounds into jobs their parents could never have had.

But public support for higher education need not require funds to flow directly to the universities. The federal government could directly subsidise students’ tuition fees and leave alone the administration of universities.

Competition would soon prompt universities to slash their bureaucratic burdens, freeing up skilled workers to move to industries where they can add vastly more value. That would be a win for everyone: universities, administrators and society.

Government will need to trust universities. They performed their immense public good for centuries long before government bureaucracies became involved.

Comments on this post will close at 8pm AEST.

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19 comments

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    • Sam Scout says:

      10:03am | 26/10/12

      Adam,

      An excellent article and summaries everything that is wrong with education and governments today.

      People forget that formal education (as opposed to self-taught/lesiure learning) is a means to an end and not the end in itself. i.e. whats the point of being educated if there are no jobs/research roles to go to. An example of this is the lack of roles available to current graduates in nursing and medicine.

      Better that the administrators get the sack and the available monies be used to fund more productive jobs.

      Also many academics are being paid 17% super - if these guys aren’t smart enough to save for their own retirement should they be teaching at all.

      Reply

    • PJ says:

      02:00pm | 26/10/12

      The function of the Education sector in Australia is ‘Profit x Bums on Seats.’

      Therefore the secondary function of Australian Education Establishments is Immigration processing. Education establishments have approved Student Visas for people to come here to learn to make hospital beds or clean a ward.

      Huge business, huge amount of admin required.

      This past year 307,000 Student Visas. All needing money during non term time. Thats where you come in.

      I think the Australian education sector is out of its depth and out of control, but Federal Labor has been critical of the cuts made in Victoria to the education sector. In Victoria, these cuts have been aimed at the 5 year visa bed making courses and other VoC shams for dodgy immigration.

      Whereas The Gillard Government is slashing and cutting higher education, where people emerge that make a difference to the bottom line of the economy.

      All the cab drivers and manual car washers may be in on a Student Visa originally, but they were never really students in the real sense of the term.

    • Gordon says:

      10:05am | 26/10/12

      Great informative article, except it is the research and the teaching that get hammered each time there are cutbacks. Adam recognises that the problem is the paper-warfare demands of the “system” yet criticises the unis for needing funds to satisfy it. A voucher-style competitive system will simply see unis switching the bloated admin budget to (more) equally useless advertising & marketing BS. Why not just attack the problem at source: fire the people demanding all the bumf, and redirect the uni admin budgets to what they should be doing.

      Reply

    • John says:

      10:05am | 26/10/12

      My sister worked at ANU for several years, enjoying the HUGE maternity leave benefits that were far better than even Canberra Public Service benefits, her pay was fantastic and the workload was extremely low compared to the private sector (in which I work, and where the benefits are less, but can be classed as realistic, not OTT EU we are about to go bankrupt style benefits that public employees seem to think are reasonable)

      She quit to start a restaurant with her Chef husband and they are far happier, much more busy of course but in her words ” in a real workplace now, not a fake,  political, bitchy one.”

      Reply

    • K-Man says:

      03:50pm | 26/10/12

      Therein lies the problem.  Take one manager form the private sector, let them loose and in quick time you’ll have a productive university, not a lefty commune.

    • Noya says:

      10:41am | 26/10/12

      What a load of codswallop. By far the majority of academic staff i’ve dealt with over the past 15 years (as an administrator) would be hard pressed to find their own rooms & turn on the aircon, much less get their head around scheduling, examinations, deadlines, ldb student needs, disabled student needs, timetabling, it support & even using a photocopier.
      As a group they tend to be selfish, petty, ignorant of the needs of any staff (academic OR administrative) that isn’t in their steam.
      They constantly try to bend and break rules, either due to laziness, favouritism or ignorance, with no regard for the impact they could have on their students or the reputation of the university as a whole.
      As in any profession there are exceptions to the above, but not enough.

      Reply

    • John L says:

      12:12pm | 26/10/12

      Well, you’ve pretty much identified what it means to be an academic. These are people who spend most of their time either trying to find an explanation for the latest bit of data from their current project using the millions of bits of information gathered over years of painstaking research, or they’re waiting for a new project that might interest them, as opposed to worrying about things like pants. All those things you mentioned, like schedules, are secondary to them, possibly even tertiary, compared to their work. Rules that hinder them in some way, either real or perceived, will be broken, because they only really answer to knowledge and the gaining of it.

      What you have to remember, as an administrator, is that the university, like all universities that have ever existed, is all about the academics. What do you think you have if it wasn’t for them? It’d be some kind of alcohol and drug fueled sex camp for young adults (which it probably kind of is now, but with learning added in, apparently).

    • Noy says:

      01:03pm | 26/10/12

      John, I’m not denying they work hard, but to suggest we (superfluous staff) thwart their ability to teach is ridiculous. We ensure they’re meeting the (at times ridiculous) measures and requirements of their position, make sure they have rooms to teach in, the soft and hardware to do so, their emails are filtered and their memos are answered (and, yes, sometimes their ties are drycleaned…), all so they can either ignore us (and their fellow academics!) or else tell us our jobs are meaningless.

    • sludger says:

      01:47pm | 26/10/12

      Noy, you confuse me.  You do understand the psychological makeup of a true academic don’t you?  They exist precisely to find or explain that latest bit of data.  It is through them that great leaps forward come.  Your role is to simply support, not lecture or educate them.  Take them away, and what on earth are you there for?

    • PsychoHyena says:

      03:12pm | 26/10/12

      @Noy, and without them you’d have no job, however they would continue to receive funding without you, this is why you are classed as superfluous. You’re a nice-to-have but not a necessity, don’t like it? Get a job elsewhere.

    • John L says:

      03:26pm | 26/10/12

      Noy: I think you might have misinterpreted me. An academic’s main role isn’t teaching, it’s research. Expanding their domain knowledge is the reason they get out of bed, whenever that may be. Facing a roomful of snotty-nosed youngsters whose prime occupation is asking dumb questions is not high on the list, in some cases if it even appeared on the list they might use said list as toilet paper.

      Originally a university formed around the academics. A group of serious intellectuals would form up to find the answers to everything and over time would accrete (stupid word checker doesn’t know what that means) in the form of other people who were also driven to know these answers, even if they didn’t have the background. The original members would impart what they knew if they wished and the new members were damned grateful for it. It wasn’t an expectation.

      I’m not saying your job is superfluous or meaningless (and they shouldn’t say so either; it’s just plain rude), but from their point of view they are Changing Humanity’s Perception of the Universe and you’re getting in the way, sorry.

    • Pattem says:

      03:50pm | 26/10/12

      @John, and your whole argument mentions nothing about the student.  You state: “...like all universities that have ever existed, is all about the academics.” 

      It is not the role of the Academic to be self-serving, but to be teaching.  Students are you clients, and more important than anything else (research, grants, etc.), is looking after your clients.

      Neither the Academic nor Administrative roles would survive if it weren’t for the enrolling students.

    • kitteh says:

      10:51am | 26/10/12

      Great article. The bums-on-seats-pass-grades-for-anyone-with-a-body temp-in-the-thirties mentality of uni admin not only produces inferior graduates, but disempowers and disillusions academic staff - the real core of any university.

      Reply

    • Kassandra says:

      12:19pm | 26/10/12

      Good article Adam.
      @ Noya above:
      In the past we had relatively few administrators in the universities compared with today, at least in the faculties I was associated with, most of the administration being done by the academics themselves with a modest amount of clerical support. It was much more efficient and much more productive in my view. The profile you give of academics today is largely a product of their frustration and disillusionment with the system they have to work in. Our public health system today is another example, like our universities, of a world class system being choked to death by its own bureaucracy.

      Reply

    • Daylight Robbery says:

      12:29pm | 26/10/12

      As the rest of the world puts as much university education on line via large format on demand video feed. 1 lecture to hundreds of students in their homes.

      Any archaic failing to do any of these university will die a slow death.  Any university that cannot demonstrate vision really is a hypocrite.

      There will be more lecturer & administrator automation, less buildings.

      Having an on demand lecture to hundreds really means instead means university staff get on with assisting students with their queries providing better outcomes. This happens now with some universities though will expand & ‘large format’ video will be the kicker psychologically in emulating someone being int he room with you.

      Relaying the same model to schools, imagine a teacher pushing play on an on demand video webinar presentation to students then focusing on assisting students essentially putting two teachers in the room. All students would get the same lecturer/teacher while a teacher focuses physical assistance.

      The same would be rolling tests an exams online through forms and dynamic assistance.  Children can further test themselves at home.

      If Australia wants to lead in education it must stay in front.  There is no choice unless it be made fools by leading countries in the field.
      While education has many examples of this today there will be an acceleration
      in implementations, especially when the NBN hits full speed.

      The same goes for business as some of the leading companies can now attest. While some consider computer automation competition, it does provide greater efficiencies in assisting people to do their job better with less stress.

      Reply

    • John says:

      01:24pm | 26/10/12

      You are correct in saying that much of the increase in administrative staff is caused by demands for ‘information’ from Canberra, although the management staff of the universities have also shown a great propensity for indulging over the years in a progressive proliferation of petty processes and procedures.

      Reply

    • Mazz says:

      02:20pm | 26/10/12

      uwsdissenter.wordpress.com
      facebook.com/onlyatuws

      Reply

    • Tutor says:

      03:10pm | 26/10/12

      I have been tutoring part time at a fourth year university allied health medical clinic for many years.  It is an excellent clinic with great facilities.  This particular course has a very high practical clinical component.  The university was able to attract tutors like myself who have specialised skills and experience within our particular area of interest.  I think this gave the students a massive learning advantage resulting in well rounded competent and confident graduates.

      This year a new administrator came in who decided that patients should be booked in by room numbers rather then by the students who were treating them.  The excuse has been to make it easier for reception staff to control bookings.  The result is a significant degradation in the students learning.  Students no longer are able to follow up on their patients.  They are constantly having to redo everything that was needed to be done in the initial appointment.  They are not learning if their treatment was successful or a failure.  Other students are dispensing the devices that they have prescribed or made without understanding their rationale.  The tutors have had to see all types of patients rather then those within their specialty.  What is even worse is that the rooms they are using are the basic rooms so that the rooms designed for my specialty are not even used.  So the facilities that are top class and cost a lot are not even being used.

      This is a perfect example of how university administrators goals can be counter to the goal of educating students better. 

      Who even uses all of the useless data and stupid reports that are collected?  Of course you need to hire more administrators to do that.  In the meantime our fulltime academic staff are overworked and unable to get the extra staff needed to do a better job at producing competent professionals.

      I think there should be a quota of no more then 20% administrative staff at universities.  That way we would have better educational outcomes.

      Reply

    • Dan says:

      04:29pm | 26/10/12

      “and academics themselves are lumbered with copious paper work that saps around one third of their working hours”. So to free the academics from this copious paperwork, you need administrators. Sorry Adam, your argument does not stack up. What proportion of a defence force actually fights on the front line and what percentage supports them to do that? Look it up.

      Reply
 
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