Behold the Glory of the University of California System

 

I’m doing research for a consulting project and came across this little gem. It’s a simple breakdown of staff and students in the entire University of California system that gives a pretty clear indication of why the state is falling apart. (The information comes from UC Financial Reports).

Academic staff—18,896 (Fall 2011) — [update: this number would be better labeled full-time instructors. UC considers student TAs and non-instruction research as academic staff, and list 42,327 FTEs as Academic staff. However, subtracting TAs and research, this number is pretty accurate.]

Administrative staff—189,116 (Fall 2011) — [update: this number appears to come from the headcount reports, and does include health care and allied services. UC lists the most recent headcount, 194,783, as 142,163 FTEs.]  See links below in comments.

The student numbers are accurate.

Students                      236,691 (Fall 2012)

Undergraduates          184,562 (Fall 2012)

Postgraduates              52,129 (Fall 2012)

More administrators than undergraduates and 10 times as many administrators as instructors. Seems like an excellent use of resources to me!

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  1. The King Prawn Inactive
    The King Prawn
    @TheKingPrawn

    Surely there’s a typo. If that is the reality then…I got nothing. Wow.

    • #1
  2. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    I looked into it further because I thought the same thing.  Not a typo.

    • #2
  3. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    It would be useful to know what percentage of the admin. staff is actually necessary, e.g., food service, maintenance, campus police, etc.  Any chance of a breakdown?

    • #3
  4. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    In the Annual Reports, the lines are simply labeled faculty and staff.  They don’t break it down.  If they did, it might not look so bad.

    • #4
  5. Roberto Inactive
    Roberto
    @Roberto

    Sandy:

    It would be useful to know what percentage of the admin. staff is actually necessary, e.g., food service, maintenance, campus police, etc.

    I am not certain that even those functions should be considered necessary. Exactly why does a campus need its own police force separate from everyone else who lives in the same municipality? What is the point of a campus running a food service? Are students and staff unable to shop for groceries on their own? In fact every campus I have been on had multiple fast-food joints and other eateries, the campus run food service was entirely redundant. 

    • #5
  6. Hope Inactive
    Hope
    @Hope

    While I fully believe that the number of administrators in education is a huge problem (one of many in higher education), one thing that is likely a big factor in producing overall numbers like this is the medical side of the UC system. University hospitals and medical research centers are huge, and most of the people working there are likely classified as non-academic staff/admin.

    • #6
  7. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    From the reports, these numbers appear to be strictly from each of the city campuses, i.e. Riverside, Davis, Berkeley, LA, etc., and did appear not include hospitals and such.  But the numbers include part time staff, so the totals are inflated by about a third.  There are 139,965 Full Time Equivalents, so this the 189,116 probably includes students that work for the school in some part time position while enrolled, though that isn’t spelled out.

    • #7
  8. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    But still, that’s a lot of staff (cleaners, cooks, landscape people, administrative assistants, etc) in proportion to the number of students paying for an education.  These people are all being paid with money that might be better served actually paying those who provide the instruction.

    • #8
  9. iWc Coolidge
    iWc
    @iWe

    Wowsers.

    • #9
  10. MikeHs Inactive
    MikeHs
    @MikeHs

    <sarc I am just so happy to be supporting this. </sarc>

    • #10
  11. captainpower Inactive
    captainpower
    @captainpower

    Can you link to source?

    • #11
  12. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    Do you know if the Addministrative staff includes possitions like Post Doctoral Fellows, Research Assistants, Research Scientists, Science Core Facility Staff? In other words is that everyone else who works at the university who isn’t officially a professor? Because the UC collages have several large research universities. Here at the University of Chicago I am willing to bet lab techs outnumber undergrads and teachers.

    • #12
  13. captainpower Inactive
    captainpower
    @captainpower

    DutchTex: hese people are all being paid with money that might be better served actually paying those who provide the instruction.

     Or reducing tuition.

    Apparently, in the long distant past before my time (the 1970s) tuition used to be free for California residents. (source).

    I can’t find a source, but I seem to recall that the University of California system’s charter also said it wasn’t to charge tuition, but they get around it by charging fees or something or other. (I welcome confirmation or refutation.)

    • #13
  14. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    The project I am working on had me looking into Davis, CA, and by extension UC Davis.  I read that UC Davis employs 28,000 people.  It has 32,000 students.  That didn’t seem right to me, so I went to googled employment numbers.  And promptly fell into a trap of Wikipedia, which is where those initial numbers came from.  I looked into the sources that the Wikipedia article used, and discovered bad labeling, and of apples to oranges comparisons.  So, I’ll stick with FTEs.  Here’s a link to annual reports (which don’t provide a break down in staff).  Here’s a link to the home of the reports with statistical breakdown (both in FTE and headcount).  I’ll update numbers above.

    • #14
  15. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    I’ll add that it is accurate to say that UC Davis employs 29,000 people and has 33,300 students, but those two categories overlap.  But the data aren’t broken out in a way that would give me an accurate number about how much overlap there is.

    • #15
  16. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    This is the wrong approach guys. 

    There are a lot of research universities in the UC system. Lots of medical schools, for example. Do you know what the ratio of “students” to “employees” is in a typical medical school? About 6 “employees” per “student”. 

    So these numbers mean nothing. Who is to say what is the “right” number? Universities don’t just teach English 101 to undergrads. They also do lots of research.

    And as was pointed out, many of the students themselves work in the university, and are counted as “staff”. 

    So you’re using the wrong “metric” to measure the wrong “outcome”.

    • #16
  17. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    PS: And if you think that this is somehow an indication of a “broken” system, then please explain why is it that the UC system has so many very highly ranked universities? 

    The “rank” of the university synthesizes a bunch of information to give us about as close to a measure of a “desirable outcome” as we can think of. And many UC universities do extremely well. 

    • #17
  18. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    AIG,  I admit to posting too quickly, before I really looked into the numbers.  I agree with your points.  However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that there are only 18,000 or so full time instructors teaching 236,000 students.  The TAs and adjunct professors (I used to be one) that take up the slack might be good, or they might not.  They are rarely evaluated, and certainly not paid in a way that would incentivize quality work.

    • #18
  19. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    AIG:

    PS: And if you think that this is somehow an indication of a “broken” system, then please explain why is it that the UC system has so many very highly ranked universities?

    The “rank” of the university synthesizes a bunch of information to give us about as close to a measure of a “desirable outcome” as we can think of. And many UC universities do extremely well.

     You’re right.  Several do extremely well.  They were great schools back in the 70s and 80s before they started costing so much too.  And they are now costing the state of California and the students that pay the tuition a great deal of money.  Here’s a link to the chart below with inflation adjusted tuition.  There’s also the matter of the debt bomb that will happen as a result of the retirement payment the state has promised all the employees of the UC and CSU systems.

    • #19
  20. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    UC inflation adjusted tuition
    UCs inflation adjusted tuition

    • #20
  21. user_49770 Inactive
    user_49770
    @wilberforge

    Would this be an outside overview or have internal audit privelages been granted.
    Are things like headcounts per area, actual salaries, real estate holdings etc, available.

    If they hired you, which sounds unlikely, you will never get to look under the sheets as it were and the outcomes of the study may be news fodder rather than productive.

    For what it is worth, used to do that for a living when it meant something and made a difference. It was a Love, Hate relationship and dangerous.

    • #21
  22. SParker Member
    SParker
    @SParker

    captainpower:

    DutchTex: hese people are all being paid with money that might be better served actually paying those who provide the instruction.

    Or reducing tuition.

    Apparently, in the long distant past before my time (the 1970s) tuition used to be free for California residents. (source).

    I can’t find a source, but I seem to recall that the University of California system’s charter also said it wasn’t to charge tuition, but they get around it by charging fees or something or other. (I welcome confirmation or refutation.)

     I don’t know if this helps.   (But it does discuss the situation the year I matriculated.  Good God!)  I’m not sure the system ever  really had free tuition.  You can see from the link that there was a metaphysical argument going on about fees and tuition.  Which distinction I have never entirely understood.   Even after a UC education.

    • #22
  23. Kay of MT Inactive
    Kay of MT
    @KayofMT

    I don’t think its fair to use UC-Davis as an example. It is a huge medical school and hospital, and the only trauma center in Sacramento. It also has one of the best Veterinary Schools in the country. I had brain stem surgery there in 2007 and believe me, I am grateful for the nursing staff and neurosurgeons, because there is not a comparable medical facility in Montana.  Same with UCLA, and UC- San Diego, a huge medical centers and the research staff in both hospitals are necessary. And of course you are going to have staff in hospitals that are not part of the student body. These schools and hospitals are not solely supported by student tuition. Using statistics of numbers does not deal with the reality on the ground.

    • #23
  24. outstripp Inactive
    outstripp
    @outstripp

    This imbalance could be readily adjusted by just hiring a few thousand professors of Marxist-Lesbian Studies.

    • #24
  25. AIG Inactive
    AIG
    @AIG

    DutchTex, seems to me those numbers you gave for tuition indicate that the UC schools are far too…cheap. 

    The average UC student has about $17k in debt when graduating. That’s peanuts. 

    Compare the average tuition at UC Berkeley, which ranks high up there with some of the best private universities like Duke. UC Berkeley costs the students multiples less. 

    I’ve always maintained that these state schools need to jack up their tuitions, because right now they are obviously too low and being subsidized by taxpayers. 

    But that would probably only result in making them even better schools, as they shed the “dead weight” of students and programs which are not going to survive the tuition hike. 

    As for the comment about full time faculty vs TA/adjunct. Well, adjuncts play an important role in most schools. Not every undergrad class needs to be taught by a full professor. And many advanced classes need people with real-world experience, which are usually adjuncts. But then you also have the RAs, the post-docs etc. You have the mountains of medical professionals in the med schools etc. All in all I don’t see this as a problem.

    • #25
  26. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    All of this is incidental to the project I am working on.  It actually has to do with farmers markets.  Davis happens to have a great one, and my research included who main employers are.  UC Davis is the largest employer by several orders of magnitude in Davis.  28000 people work there.  The next largest employer has 900 employees.  That didn’t seem right at all, so I started looking into it further.

    wilber forge

    :

    Would this be an outside overview or have internal audit privelages been granted. Are things like headcounts per area, actual salaries, real estate holdings etc, available.

    If they hired you, which sounds unlikely, you will never get to look under the sheets as it were and the outcomes of the study may be news fodder rather than productive.

    For what it is worth, used to do that for a living when it meant something and made a difference. It was a Love, Hate relationship and dangerous.

    • #26
  27. DutchTex Inactive
    DutchTex
    @DutchTex

    The state of California has great schools and hospitals, no doubt.  I’m glad of that, as I was born in one of the hospitals.  And, yes, we all know the adage about the three kinds of lies.  However, the state is going broke.  The hospitals are going after shrinking insurance (state and private) dollars, the schools are spending money on diveristy czars and fancy gyms, and the state is on the hook for a big chunk of it–including retirement through a system that is already broke.  

    The state of California is not the only one having this problem, to be sure.  But they are really good at creating a bureaucracy.  Victor Davis Hanson has written plenty on it.  I’ll leave you with an article he wrote last year.

    • #27
  28. Paul A. Rahe Member
    Paul A. Rahe
    @PaulARahe

    It would be interesting to see what a state university without a medical school looked like. I have always taught in private institutions, and I can say this after forty years. With the exception of Hillsdale College, in every case that I know, the teaching side of the institution grew modestly at best over the decades while the administrative side grew by leaps and bounds. The number of vice-presidents, associate provosts, assistant provosts, associate deans, assistant deans, and their support staff multiplied over and over — and with it the amount of time that faculty members had to devote to paperwork of all sorts (much of it worthless) grew and grew and grew.

    • #28
  29. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Valiuth:

    Do you know if the Addministrative staff includes possitions like Post Doctoral Fellows, Research Assistants, Research Scientists, Science Core Facility Staff? In other words is that everyone else who works at the university who isn’t officially a professor? Because the UC collages have several large research universities.Even on the “teaching” campuses, a lot of resources go for research.

    By the breakdown, it sure looks that way. Many years ago, I worked as a research associate in a couple of UC system labs. A small stable of big shot scientists (generally also faculty members,) a larger number of postdocs and grad students who did a lot of the grunt work and some of whom taught or at least led discussion sections, and an even larger number of research associates, animal care techs, custodians and so on.

    We watched the budget, too. A lot of projects got done by postdocs rather than research associates because RAs were on the clock and got overtime. Postdocs, on the other hand…

    • #29
  30. MikeHs Inactive
    MikeHs
    @MikeHs

    DutchTex – I’m grateful that you are looking into UCD as we are now “UCD parents.”  We’re going to be investing here for a few years.

    • #30
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