The Cost of Central Administration
The administration breaks rules, gets paid ever more, to ensure students have no real say in the organization of their education.
And while we’re on the point, here’s a great reason for transparency the administration probably wouldn’t want you to know: The Implementation Team and Provost Tom Sullivan, who could approve their recommendations, are making big money for breaking the rules. From the budget years 2004-05 to 2008-09, institutional support at the University of Minnesota increased to $322 million from $178 million — more than any other expenditure. Julie Tonneson, the budget director at the University Office of Budget and Finance, said that institutional support “is basically central administration.” The rampant proliferation of central administration has put at least an additional $143 million burden on the laps of students and taxpayers.
Meanwhile, as central administration fattens, student aid and research have suffered a five-year net decrease — the only expenditures to do so.
Comments
This is terrible. UM is so over-administered it actually hurts the day-to-day functioning of the university, as decisions become ever more bogged down or buried in layers of bureaucracy, and functions are redundant. So UM spends increasing amounts of money to make itself increasingly inefficient. What is the matter with us??!
Posted by: Eve Browning | March 11, 2009 5:42 PM
The fish rots from the head.
Posted by: anonymous | March 11, 2009 5:48 PM
Eve Browning is right. The easiest and best place to cut a university's expenditures is salaries paid within the managerial ranks. I'm an educational administrator, and my administrative funds at this point come almost entirely from private sources.
Posted by: Slugger | March 12, 2009 7:19 PM