“行政臃肿”如何导致马萨诸塞州高校人员编制和成本激增

【中美创新时报2025 年 1 月 12 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）联邦数据显示，大学聘用专业非教职人员的速度是聘用终身教授的 10 倍，《波士顿环球报》对马萨诸塞州 20 所大学的分析发现，自 2018 年以来，它们总共增加了 2,784 个全职专业工作人员职位，而新增的全职教学职位为 547 个。这吞噬了大学预算并推高大学成本。但大学表示，专业人员的激增是维持学校运转的必要条件，即使其增长速度超过了教职员工。但多少才算太多？《波士顿环球报》记者Diti Kohli对此作了下述详细报道。

五年前，波士顿萨福克大学的领导决定增加人员编制。他们扩大了学院的职业发展办公室和心理健康咨询部门，并增加了致力于“晋升能力”的人员队伍——非教职员工，负责从筹款到校友关系等各个方面。

萨福克发言人格雷格·加特林 (Greg Gatlin) 表示，这些投资有助于萨福克“兑现对学生的承诺”，并“提供额外的支持服务和传统课堂环境之外的学习机会”。

批评人士表示，这些举措导致了不平衡的增长：入学人数和收入下降，预示着一个削减成本的时代。从 2018 年到 2022 年，萨福克的全职教授队伍减少了 29 人，约 8%。但管理人员的数量——从学院校长到 IT 主管再到财务援助分析师的非教学人员——增长了近四分之一。

这不仅仅是萨福克。联邦数据显示，大学聘用专业非教职人员的速度是聘用终身教授的 10 倍，《环球邮报》对马萨诸塞州 20 所大学的分析发现，自 2018 年以来，它们总共增加了 2,784 个全职专业工作人员职位，而新增的全职教学职位为 547 个。

工作人员包括图书管理员、学生事务和财务经理，但不包括保管员或食堂员工。

一些研究人员，甚至教授本人，都将全国范围内行政人员的激增归咎于吞噬大学预算并推高大学成本。

“我不是那种认为所有行政人员都是邪恶的人，”哈佛大学计算机科学教授哈里·刘易斯 (Harry Lewis) 表示，他已经担任了 50 年的教授。“但真的需要每件事都有专家吗？大学已经陷入了一种思维方式，即你关心问题的方式就是指派一名院长和另一名助理院长以及整个团队，然后你就可以继续前进了。”

在马萨诸塞州，波士顿东北大学在专业员工增长方面名列前茅，2022 年全职管理人员数量比五年前增加了 500 名。在剑桥，哈佛大学的学生和学术事务部门增加了 200 多个职位。即使是拥有约 4,000 名本科生的波士顿温特沃斯理工学院，非教职员工管理人员的数量也增加了一倍——从 45 人增加到 90 人。

学院领导和高等教育专家表示，这种增长并不一定是坏事。取消大多数行政职位——正如哈佛大学和耶鲁大学一些人敦促的那样——将停止日常运营，而非教职员工职位的增加是有道理的，因为今天的大学比以前更加复杂。

越来越多的人申请大学，这吸引了更多低收入和多元化的学生，他们的需求更大。加强联邦法规要求新的部门，包括残疾人办公室和更大的法律团队，调查歧视和性侵犯投诉。从未踏入过课堂的专业人员支持大学收购土地、建造宿舍、翻修医院和开展研究——其中许多已成为常态，尤其是在马萨诸塞州的知名大学。

问题是什么？管理人员的增长可能不受控制。

专家表示，数十年来，学院一直在努力减轻教职员工在教学和研究领域之外的负担，这导致学院的行政级别激增，且几乎没有任何监督。管理人员雇佣了更多的管理人员，然后为这些职位提供资金，而这些职位需要更多的人。负责收紧钱袋的校长和董事们很难停止正在进行的计划，直到这些计划对利润构成威胁，而关于削减哪些方面的讨论可能会被视为对这些领导者浪费金钱的指责。

新的研究表明，学费在多年上涨后开始稳定下来。但根据教育数据倡议的数据，过去二十年，公立大学的学费平均每年上涨 7%，远远超过通货膨胀率。

“领导者可以通过多种方式控制行政成本，但没有证据表明他们在监控这些增加的成本，即使这些成本是合理的，”阿斯彭研究所 (Aspen Institute) 大学卓越计划的创始人乔希·怀纳 (Josh Wyner) 说，该研究所为高等教育领导层提供咨询。 “每个人都应该问问自己，他们所在学院的学生与教职员工比例如何，以及造成这种情况的原因是什么。”

一些学校，包括著名的常春藤盟校，雇用的员工数量几乎与学生数量一样多，“行政臃肿”已成为不满教师的争论点，他们经常在敦促对大学领导层进行不信任投票的信中提到高薪和非教职员工的招聘狂潮。

弗吉尼亚州乔治梅森大学法学教授托德·齐维茨基 (Todd Zywicki) 研究了行政臃肿问题，他简单地表达了他对管理人员的蔑视。

“实际上，没有人知道这些人都是谁，他们在做什么。”

学校本身对此提出异议。

东北大学的一位发言人表示，它在收购规模较小的学校（包括加利福尼亚州的米尔斯学院、伦敦的 NCH 和纽约的曼哈顿玛丽蒙特学院）时吸收了员工，扩大到总共 13 个校区，并加强了其合作项目。 （该校研究生入学率在过去十年也增长了 83%。）

东北大学和麻省理工学院还给出了另一个原因：研究。该校的学生与教职员工和其他教师的比例为三比一，但如果算上在麻省理工学院实验室和林肯实验室（为国防部进行研究的列克星敦设施）工作的专业科学家、研究助理和研究生，这一比例就会下降到三比一。

负责通讯的副总裁阿尔弗雷德·艾恩赛德 (Alfred Ironside) 在 2 月份写给《纽约时报》的一封信中写道：“这些都是运营一流研究机构的必备条件，在这个机构中，突破性的发现和创新为国家提供持续的服务。”

哈佛大学的一位发言人列举了许多相同的原因，包括不断增加的监管要求、扩大的学生服务和新的学位课程，以及疫情期间对更多 IT 专业人员的需求。温特沃斯没有回答有关专业人员增加的问题。

韦尔斯利高等教育援助小组的顾问卡琳·赖特-摩尔 (Karyn Wright-Moore) 说，另一个因素是学生竞争日益激烈。

马萨诸塞州的大学正在扩建昂贵的设施——游泳池、升级的健身房和“社交生活”活动——并提供越来越慷慨的财政援助，以在入学人数下降的情况下吸引学生。这些举措对管理人员来说可能是有益的，但负担也很重。例如，翻新楼层或建造新建筑需要项目经理，而有人需要阅读和审查所有新的财政援助文件。

“每个人都在寻找同样的学生，”赖特-摩尔说。“试图吸引他们，试图让大学更便宜，如果没有很多人在后端，这是不可能实现的。这是一个不会消失的问题。”

有证据表明，一些行政扩张正在发挥作用。

《波士顿环球报》分析的 20 所大学中，几乎所有大学在过去十年都升级了就业服务办公室；例如，波士顿大学奎斯特罗姆商学院去年增加了带薪兼职职业顾问。

根据美国大学与雇主协会的数据，在全国范围内，使用过至少一项职业服务的毕业生比没有使用过的学生获得更多的工作机会。

波士顿大学教授、健康心灵网络首席研究员 Sarah Ketchen Lipson 表示，在 COVID-19 疫情期间，对咨询服务、健康活动和其他心理健康资源的投资导致大学年龄成年人的抑郁和焦虑水平发生了微小但明显的变化。她补充说，考虑到心理健康是学生学业成绩和毕业可能性的“重要预测指标”，这最终将使学生和机构受益。

“这对大学的底线至关重要，但对他们的使命也至关重要”，Lipson 说。

专家表示，即使大学面临的财务压力越来越大，管理人员的增长也不太可能在短期内逆转。

特朗普政府的目标是废除多元化、公平和包容性计划；提高大学捐赠税；并重新评估联邦政府对大学的资助——所有这些都可能促使学校聘请一批律师和其他专业人士来保持合规或反击。预期的高等教育合并浪潮将需要合规经理、顾问和其他专家来引导交易和管理整合。

但马里兰州约翰霍普金斯大学教授、进步政策研究所高级研究员保罗·温斯坦 (Paul Weinstein Jr.) 表示，这种繁荣不可能永远持续下去。他说，学生和教授都意识到管理人员的增加，批评那些与学校其他部门几乎不互动的员工。

“我们正面临这个清算时刻，”温斯坦补充道。“大学将面临这样的现实，即他们拥有的管理人员数量超出了他们能够支持或证明的水平，这不会令人愉快。”

题图：萨福克大学（上图）的全职专业人员数量增长幅度最大，而教师数量增长幅度最大。Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

附原英文报道：

How ‘administrative bloat’ swells staffing, costs at Massachusetts colleges

Universities say the boom in professional staff is necessary to keep schools running, even when it outpaces faculty. But how much is too much?

By Diti Kohli Globe Staff,Updated January 10, 2025 

Suffolk University (pictured above) saw some of the largest growth in its full-time professional staff compared to the addition of instructors.Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

Half a decade ago, leaders at Suffolk University in Boston decided to bulk up on staffing. They expanded the college’s career development office and mental health counseling department, and padded the ranks of people devoted to “advancement capacity” — nonfaculty roles that run the gamut from fund-raising to alumni relations.

The investments help Suffolk “deliver on our commitment to students,” said Suffolk spokesperson Greg Gatlin, and “provide additional support services and opportunities for learning outside of the traditional classroom environment.”

Critics say the moves led to lopsided growth: Enrollment and revenue fell, foreshadowing an era of cost-cutting. From 2018 to 2022, the ranks of full-time professors at Suffolk shrank by 29 people, around 8 percent. But the number of administrators — nonteaching staff ranging from the college president to IT directors to financial aid analysts — grew by nearly a fourth.

It’s not just Suffolk. Federal data shows universities have hired professional nonfaculty positions at a pace 10 times as fast as tenured professors, and a Globe analysis of 20 Massachusetts colleges found that, altogether, they’ve added 2,784 full-time professional staff jobs since 2018, compared with 547 new full-time teaching positions.

The staff roles include librarians, student affairs, and financial managers, though not custodial or dining hall employees.

Some researchers, and even professors themselves, blame the nationwide boom in administrators for devouring university budgets and driving the cost of college skyward.

“I’m not one of these people who thinks all administrators are evil,” said Harry Lewis, a Harvard University computer science professor for five decades. “But does there really need to be a specialist for everything? Universities have fallen into a way of thinking that the way you show you care about the problem is by assigning a dean and another assistant dean and whole team to it, and then you move on.”

In Massachusetts, Northeastern in Boston came out on top in professional staff growth, with 500 more full-time administrators in 2022 than it had five years prior. In Cambridge, Harvard added over 200 positions to its student and academic affairs department. Even the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, with a student body of roughly 4,000 undergraduates, doubled the number of nonfaculty managers — from 45 to 90.

College leaders and higher education experts said that increase is not inherently bad. Eliminating most administrative positions — as some have urged at Harvard and Yale — would halt day-to-day operations, and the uptick in nonfaculty roles makes sense given that universities today are more complex than they used to be.

More people are applying to college, which funnels in more low-income and diverse students with greater needs. Heightened federal regulations require new departments, including disability offices and larger legal teams to investigate discrimination and sexual assault complaints. And professional staff who never set foot in a classroom support universities that acquire land, build dorms, renovate hospitals, and conduct research — much of which has become the norm, especially at Massachusetts’ prestigious colleges.

The issue? The growth in administrators can go unchecked.

A decades-old shift to unburden faculty of responsibilities that fall outside the realm of teaching and research has led the administrative ranks of colleges to explode, with little oversight, experts said. Administrators hire more administrators, then fund those jobs with positions that call for even more people on the payroll. Presidents and trustees charged with tightening the purse strings can have trouble stopping ongoing initiatives until they pose a threat to the bottom line, and conversations about where to cut back can be taken as accusations that those leaders have wasted money.

New research shows that the price of tuition is beginning to stabilize after years of increases. But the cost of attending public universities has climbed, on average 7 percent each year for the last two decades, according to the Education Data Initiative, far exceeding inflation.

“There are lots of ways leaders can control administrative costs, but there is no evidence that they are monitoring these increased costs, even if they are justifiable,” said Josh Wyner, founder of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, which consults on higher education leadership. “Everyone should be asking themselves about the student-to-staff ratios at their college, and what the causes of that are.”

Some schools, including prestigious Ivy League institutions, employ nearly as many staff as they have students, and “administrative bloat” has become a point of contention among dissatisfied faculty, who often cite the high salaries and nonfaculty hiring sprees in letters urging no-confidence votes in university leadership.

Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor in Virginia who researched administrative bloat, put his disdain for administrators simply.

“Literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing.”

The schools themselves dispute this.

A spokesperson for Northeastern University said it absorbed staff as it acquired smaller schools — including Mills College in California, NCH in London, and Marymount Manhattan in New York — expands to 13 campuses total, and bolsters its co-op program. (Its graduate student enrollment has also increased by 83 percent in the past decade.)

Northeastern and MIT also gave another reason: research. Its ratio of students to faculty and other instructors is three-to-one, but it goes down to when counting specialized scientists, research assistants, and graduate students paid to work in MIT’s labs and the Lincoln Lab, a Lexington facility that conducts research for the Department of Defense.

“These are the essentials of running a top-flight research organization where breakthrough discoveries and innovations provide continuous service to the nation,” Alfred Ironside, vice president for communications, wrote in a February letter to The New York Times.

A Harvard spokesperson cited many of the same reasons, including growing regulatory requirements, expanded student services, and new degree programs as well as the need for more IT professionals during the pandemic. Wentworth did not respond to questions about the uptick in professional staff.

Another factor, said Karyn Wright-Moore, a consultant with the Higher Education Assistance Group in Wellesley: mounting competition for students.

Massachusetts colleges are expanding pricey amenities — swimming pools, upgraded gyms, and “social life” activities — and offering increasingly generous financial aid to attract students amid declining enrollment. These initiatives can be beneficial but burdensome for administrators. Renovating floors or erecting new buildings takes project managers, for instance, while someone needs to read and review all the new financial aid paperwork.

“Everyone is looking for the same students,” Wright-Moore said. “Trying to get them, trying to make college more affordable, is not something that happens without a lot of people on the back end. It’s a problem that is not going away.”

There’s evidence that some of the administrative expansions are working.

Nearly all of the 20 colleges the Globe analyzed upgraded their career services offices in the past decade; Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, for instance, added paid, part-time career consultants last year.

Nationwide, graduating seniors who used at least one career service receive more job offers than students who go without, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Investments in counseling services, wellness events, and other mental health resources during the COVID-19 pandemic led to small but noticeable changes in levels of depression and anxiety among college-age adults, said Sarah Ketchen Lipson, a Boston University professor and principal investigator of The Healthy Minds Network. That ultimately benefits both students and the institutions, considering that mental health is a “significant predictor” of students’ academic performance and likelihood to graduate, she added.

“It’s vital to colleges’ bottom line, but also to their mission” Lipson said.

Even as financial pressures on universities grow, experts said, the growth in administrators is unlikely to reverse in the short term.

The Trump administration aims to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; boost the tax on college endowments; and reevaluate federal funding for universities — all of which could prompt schools to hire a cadre of attorneys and other professionals to stay in compliance, or fight back. An anticipated wave of higher ed mergers will need compliance managers, consultants, and other experts to shepherd deals and manage integration.

But Paul Weinstein Jr., a Johns Hopkins professor in Maryland and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, said the boom cannot last forever. Both students and professors are catching on to the uptick in administrators, critiquing the floors and floors of employees who scarcely interact with the rest of the institution, he said.

“We’re coming to this reckoning moment,” Weinstein added. “Universities are going to be faced with this reality that they have more administrators than they can support or justify, and it’s not going to be pleasant.”