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In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized administrative bloat at Stanford University, writing that the institution “employs more administrators than it enrolls undergrads.” DeVos’s commentary, which takes aim at Stanford’s handling of false sexual-assault accusations made by a student, repeats a sentiment that’s circulated in many publications in recent months. The Free Press, for instance, noted that Stanford has nearly enough administrators “for each student to have their own personal butler.”
That eye-popping claim capitalizes on a frequent criticism of higher ed: that it relies on an ever-increasing tally of administrative staff whose duties are of dubious value, whose often heavy-handed decisions tend to lead to controversy, and whose presence on the nation’s campuses is driving up the cost of college.
DeVos’s numbers are correct: Stanford enrolled 7,645 undergraduates in the fall of 2021 and employed 8,800 full-time staff members outside of its medical school who didn’t have teaching as a primary duty according to data it reported to the Department of Education. But the numbers also ignore several layers of nuance, one expert says. (While Stanford offered the data, university officials did not respond to a request for comment; the Department of Education referred The Chronicle to a 2022 statement about proposed changes in Title IX guidance.)
Undergraduate education is only a part of what they do.
For one thing, Stanford, like many highly selective research institutions, isn’t focused on only the undergraduate experience. “A lot of people don’t understand how a large research university functions, and especially these super-elite ones that have small undergraduate populations,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But even in your big public flagships, undergraduate education is only a part of what they do. There’s a lot of graduate education and a lot of research, and that’s where a lot of the staff and administrators are.”
That’s true of Stanford, which in the fall of 2022 had 10,035 graduate students and devoted $1.82 billion to externally funded research projects, including its Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which employed 1,700 people in 2021-22.
Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, doesn’t account for those differences, making it difficult to discern which administrators are working directly with undergraduates or with graduate students or on external research projects. In the fall of 2021 — the most recent data available through Ipeds — Stanford’s payroll included 9,201 full-time staff members outside of the medical school, 8,800 of whom didn’t have teaching as a primary duty. That number has increased by 35 percent in the past decade.
Included in that total were 294 research staff members and 1,011 people in “management occupations,” which can include chief executives and managers in fund raising, facilities, computer systems, and more, according to the government classification system Ipeds uses. Stanford also employed 1,173 people in “computer, engineering, and science occupations,” a category that includes such positions as customer-support specialists, web developers, architectural drafters, and life-, physical-, and social-science technicians. The university had 703 employees in “office and administrative support occupations,” and — the largest category of staff members — 2,725 people working in business and financial operations. That category can include business managers, project managers, and accountants, Kelchen said. “A lot of what used to be considered just purely staff secretarial support, they’ve moved into this ‘business and financial operations,’” he said. “For example, anything with HR is there; compliance; anyone who touches finance, essentially.”
DeVos’s column highlights how administrative staffing numbers can easily be turned into grist for a wide variety of criticism. The former secretary, who during her tenure sought to strengthen rules protecting the rights of students accused of sexual assault, wrote about a case at Stanford in which an employee in its housing department was charged with filing false reports of rape. The university spent more than $300,000 on an investigation and improving security measures in the wake of initial claims, which were also part of the impetus for a campus protest. The situation, DeVos wrote, was “complicated by the incessant buildup of nonteaching bureaucrats.”
Other voices in higher ed have complained about the influence of administrators, but for different reasons. Some professors, for instance, protested Hamline University administrators’ intervention after an art-history lecturer showed a painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an online class (the lecturer’s contract was not renewed; Hamline’s president announced her retirement on Monday). One faculty member wrote in The Chronicle about her “cartoonish cancellation” by University of Michigan administrators when she became the subject of an equity-office investigation there. Meanwhile, some say the proliferation of administrative staff is necessary — because students clamor for more mental-health services, for example.
In addition to student demand, risk-management and legal concerns can drive some of the growth in administrative positions. Kelchen pointed out that Stanford’s Title IX website lists 20 employees, two of whom are students. “We could have a discussion about whether they should have five or 50″ employees in that office, he said. “But even if they have 50, it’s a small percentage of their staff.”
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Megan Zahneis
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