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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: 2) by kazzie on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:20PM
Are you referring the the UK situation between 1962-1998? Yes, the Government paid for all tuition in that period. Since then, they've been contributing a progressively smaller proportion of tuition costs.
I grant you that numbers attending university have increased over the decades, (See Tony Blair's policy that 50% of young people should go on to Higher Education, ref [bbc.co.uk]) and that probably couples in with much of the increase in admin overhead mentioned in TFA. The number of places offered by universities was strictly controlled by government until 2012 (by which time students paid for the full cost of tuition from student loans, so no direct cost to the government), when they started relaxing limits for high-graded applications. Universities can now take on (pretty much) as many students as they can get, but it doesn't cost the government anything (depending on how loan repayment is managed.) (ref [jobs.ac.uk])
Similarly, pay rates for Vice-Chancellors has ballooned (unlike other pay grades such as academics) and is now becoming a political issue. (ref [bbc.co.uk] ref [bbc.co.uk])
But I don't agree with you that "No one has cut public funding to universities", "the government pays for the vast majority of the tuition", or "the government has more than doubled the amount it spends on university per student over the last few years". Citation needed, perhaps?