Too many college administrators

Irony isn’t new to the political scene, so when it was on display during President Obama’s appearance at the University of Michigan calling for federal action to contain college costs, it was not a bolt from the blue.

The irony was there on two fronts; the president calling for reduced spending when his administration has broken all records for spending and then doing so on the campus of a university that exemplifies most federal agencies in its employment practices.

A piece in a Michigan news paper, the Flint Journal, identifies the problem, “The University of Michigan-Flint’s administrative ranks have grown the fastest among the 15 public universities in the state, according to figures from the Michigan Higher Education Institutional Data Inventory released earlier this year. The data showed that the percentage growth in full-time administrative and professional staff positions swelled 74 percent between 2005 and 2009 ...” Confirming these data, an investigation by the journal Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor has 53 percent more full-time “administrators and professionals” (9,652) than full-time faculty (6,305), or a ratio of 1.53 administrative and professional positions for every full-time faculty member.

Is it possible that the skyrocketing numbers of administrative and professional positions in our universities have a little to do with the rising cost of tuition? What private sector business has this ratio of administrative personal to productive workers? What are all of these administrators and professionals going to do when we run out of OPM? That would be Other People’s Money.

Joe H. Heater

Palatine