Last time we wrote on this subject was September 2011, when for the first time UC senior administrators officially began to outnumber faculty. Now, via Charlie Schwartz, we have the most recent data on administrative bloat at the UC, which goes up to October 2012.
Schwartz writes:
This shows the continuing outsized growth of the management cadre (defined as the employees classified in Senior Management Group and Management & Senior Professionals): their numbers grew by 252% over the 21 year period while total employee numbers grew by a mere 51%. (The total number of employees shown in this graph is scaled down so that one can compare the relative growth, over time, of each population.)
For another comparison, the latest total number in this management category (SMG + MSP) is 9,457 FTE (full time equivalent employees) while the number of Regular Teaching Faculty is 8,657 FTE.
Similar graphs for each individual campus of the university system can be found here (.doc) or here (.pdf). For several campuses we note a mild decrease in the Management numbers in the past few years but then a new upward surge with the latest data.
Elsewhere I have written about the repeated requests for UC’s top officials to either justify this apparent bloat or to get rid of it; and their inability to do either. My previous estimate was that, if the apparent excess is not justifiable, then UC is wasting something like $1 Billion per year.The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself. While budget cuts at the state level are an important piece of the crisis of higher education, the administrative bureaucracy at both campus and system level is by no means an innocent actor. It is the UC administration that must be held responsible for expanding, intensifying, and accelerating the processes of privatization.
