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Meaningless tasks and faux-business strategies prioritised by British universities have skewed their real roles of teachinig and research. Looking at decades of university growth, most expansion has been by university administration, not faculty. On the other side of the pond, one US study found that between 1975 and 2008 while the number of faculty had grown about 10% the number of administrators had grown 221% during the same period. In the UK, the large majority of universities have more administrators than they do faculty members. We are on the way to realizing an “all-administrative university” if nothing is done. André Spicer at The Guardian comments that since universities are broke, we should cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:04AM (2 children)
Government pours money into education, so there is little negative feedback for ineffective and inefficient institutions. In fact, those are the ones that flourish under these circumstances. I thought this was well known? The same destructive process is going on with the research, healthcare, and military industries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:58PM (1 child)
It's not so much that there is no incentive, but that there's often incentive in the wrong direction (I don't really know if things work the same in the US, but I guess so). Basically, if you spend less money than you got granted (because this year you happened to need less), then next year you'll get granted less money (because you just proved you don't need that much). But it may happen that next year you will need the full grant. You of course don't know yet if that will happen next year, but you certainly don't want to risk to run out of funding next year just because you were too cost-effective this year. So near the end of the year, you'll look for ways to spend that money, even if you don't really need the stuff you buy.
In other words, if you save money, you are punished by having less available next year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @05:17PM
I did say that the wasteful institutions "flourish". Efficient ones will be starved of funding...