Do small schools spend too much on administrators?

Yes, indeed, according to a report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.  The R1s reportedly spend only 17 cents on administrators for every dollar spent on instructional staff, while the little guys spend 64 cents for every buck devoted to faculty and other instructional folks.

This data point goes hand in hand with two of my pet peeves:  The amount of money wasted on executive search firms by higher ed institutions coupled with the incredible amount of faculty and staff energy wasted on conducting searches,  and the salaries being paid to CEOs in our industry.

Consider the typical search process for, let's say, a dean or veep.  First, a head hunter must be engaged at a not-insignificant fee.  Meanwhile, a search committee is constituted.  This can run to 10 or 12 busy people, who now will spend a significant chunk of their time reviewing the CVs provided by the search firm, meeting about them, conducting the "airport" interviews, meeting about them, interviewing the finalists, meeting about them....  As for the poor candidate, s/he must write a letter aimed at convincing the search committee that their institution has been the candidate's dream career move since s/he was an undergraduate.  Then s/he must prep for the airport interview, usually by reading a thick packet of materials fed-exed by the head hunter.  And, if s/he makes it into the final four, there is the fun of two days of being quizzed by every Tom, Dick and Harry at the institution. And, if s/he isn't the winner, well, then, it's time to do it all over again with some other institution. I wouldn't be sounding so critical if I thought we got the best people out of this grueling process.  Too often we do not.  (You know I'm right.)

I won't even get into the issue of CEO salaries this morning, except to say that the "cult of the CEO", so prevalent in the for-profit world, has come to increasingly control thinking in higher ed as well.  I wouldn't be sounding so critical here, either, if I thought the adulation was deserved.  But, again, too often our expectations are disappointed and our hopes dashed.  I'll leave this topic with just one word: Spanier.

Solutions?  Council President Michael Poliakoff suggests that the findings raise questions about the long-range fiscal health of the small-college sector of our industry.  (Surprise, surprise.) He adds, they point up the need for schools to explore shared admin services and purchasing consortia, among other solutions.  In other words, sub-out the administrative stuff and focus on the core business.  The study can be accessed here.

I would add that closing the gap between faculty and staff; cultivating a culture of faculty involvement in recruitment, retention and fund raising; rotating faculty through administrative roles so that they understand the business they are in; promoting from within... all these steps will help create a leaner, meaner, and tighter-knit organization in these times of Fifth Wave financial crises and existential challenges.

Guns and abortions: What the right and the left have in common

This post is inspired by news this morning that Iowa's three-day waiting period for an abortion is about to be tested in a courtroom.  The plaintiffs contend that the law discriminates against women in that no other medical procedure is required to entail such a waiting period under state law.

So why should anyone mind a three-day wait?  What difference does it make?

When this question occurred to me on the drive in this morning, that thought connected up with the NRA's adamant stance against any, even the most nonintrusive and commonsensical, gun-control bills.  It comes down to that darn camel's nose.

Both sides are ever-vigilant about any new law or regulation that may put their most precious issue on the slippery slope to illegality.

The other thing they have in common:  both sides accuse the other of causing millions of unnecessary deaths.

Second-Amendment advocates respond that arming the good guys actually saves lives.  Free-choice proponents point to a woman's right to control her own body, while usually adding that fetuses (feti?) aren't people.

I wonder if any of them ever take a step back from the fray to ponder the things they have in common.

Gainful employment is the challenge for all of us

A new report on the future of work concludes, "In the eyes of many students and their parents, higher education is tied to a job.  And yet the world of work is poised to undergo a number of dramatic changes over the next 10 years.  This report explores the future job market, reinventing college career services, and higher education's role in the workforce."

For many recent college graduates --- not to mention their less fortunate contemporaries who haven't attended college --- the future is now... no need to look out to the next decade.   For example, unless and until America joins the rest of the Western world in providing a single-payer healthcare system, our younger generations by and large will continue to pay through the nose for second rate coverage or do without altogether.  This is true of employees and freelancers alike.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published a series of stories recently regarding the limits of what colleges are able to do for our young people.  One story points out that in the heart of Trump country, poverty, addiction and low expectations work against the efforts of local community and four-year colleges.  Another notes that in Michigan's car-manufacturing region, high school grads today earn less than their fathers and grandfathers.  It goes on to say that the Obama Administration bet heavily on community colleges to retrain these young workers.  The auto industry itself has been bailed out time and again by Uncle Sam.  But outcomes so far have been mixed at best.  Yet another story notes similar efforts by community colleges in coal country, also with mixed results.

The overall message seems to be that we in higher ed are in an uphill fight to turn the tide that has swamped many workers' boats.

I just sent off to my publisher the manuscript for what will be my 21st book (full disclosure: two were self-published on Amazon), titled Riding the Fifth Wave: A Survival Guide to the New Normal in High Education.  (Yeh, it's the same as the name of this Blog.)  In it, as the title suggests, I analyze the paradigm shift that has occurred in our industry and I offer some suggestions on how to ride the wave to the shores of success instead of drowning in the tsunami of change.

Our survival and our success in large part depend upon how successful we make our students.  As the new report and the three stories cited above demonstrate, the "Fifth Wave" isn't threatening to drown only unprepared colleges and universities.  It is threatening to wash away the American middle class and sweep our younger generations back to the economic conditions of the first half of the 20th century.

Should video games be in your curriculum?

A neuroscientist from UC-San Francisco says that video games can improve students' memory and multi-tasking abilities, and even help treat attention deficit disorders.

I've never been much of a gamer.  I'm old enough to remember when "Space Invaders" invaded the local bars.  I recall rinky dink games on large cassettes marketed with Color Computers by Radio Shack.  And I remember trying to play a bootleg copy of "Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail" in the pre-mouse age of key-stroke codes.  My gaming experiences ended just about there.

When my kids were still pre-high school, we took them one summer to see the USA, winding up at a friend's home in San Diego.  My wife and I marveled that in the city of endless sunshine, the three boys only wanted to stay home and play video games.  What ever will become of them, we fretted.  The answer is that all three of them are doing very well, thank you, in the IT industry.

Many years later, I was back in California, attending a seminar at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey.  Another attendee went into a bit of rant about the time the younger generation was wasting on video games.  An Air Force fighter pilot with perhaps just a fleck of gray at the temples interrupted to observe that the younger pilots were better at flying the newest generation of jets than he was, for all his experience.  Why?  Because the old days of the stick have given way to control panels not unlike those used in those much-maligned games.

This is only anecdotal evidence, I know.  However, it does tend to support what Dr. Adam Gazzaley of UC-SF claims: In our brave new world of AI and bots, gaming may have a legitimate place in the college curriculum.