The numbers:
4,664 undergraduate students
4,962 faculty
5,042 administrators
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“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.
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Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members.
In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.
According to eight members of the Yale faculty, this administration size imposes unnecessary costs, interferes with students’ lives and faculty’s teaching, spreads the burden of leadership and adds excessive regulation. By contrast, administrators noted much of this increase can be attributed to growing numbers of medical staff, and that the University has proportionally increased its faculty size.
“I had remarked to President Salovey on his inauguration that I thought the best thing he could do for Yale would be to abolish one deanship or vice presidency every year of what I hoped would be a long tenure in that position,” professor of English Leslie Brisman wrote in an email to the News. “Instead, it has seemed to me that he has created one upper level administrative position a month.”
Jerryskids
The primary purpose of any organization, regardless of its stated purpose, is to perpetuate the organization. You can only be surprised by the fact that there are more administrators than students at Yale if you foolishly believe that the purpose of Yale’s existence is to educate students rather than to provide cushy jobs for administrators.
Jerryskids
This reminds me of the episode of Yes, Minister in which MP Hacker is called upon to award an honor to a hospital for being the best-run hospital in the country. Hacker discovers the reason the hospital is so well-run is due to the fact that it has no patients; while the hospital has a full complement of administrators and auxiliary staff, it had never actually been assigned any doctors or nurses. The “humor” of the episode arises from the usual contest between Hacker attempting to do the right thing by having this useless hospital shut down and the manipulations of his chief civil servant to thwart Hacker’s intent to deprive the civil service of its rightful authority to rule over the government. If you’re not familiar with Yes, Minister, you should be ashamed of yourself and immediately retire to YouTube to repair this flaw in your character.
Seattle Sam
A lot of that has to do with creating employment for the ever increasing number of ______ Studies degrees that Yale is cranking out. Where else could they find someone who would pay them for their “skills”?
Seattle Sam
As JERRYSKIDS indicates, this urge exists in all organizations. The only reason this doesn’t happen in the private sector as much is the constraint of capital markets that insist on profits. Yale has no such constraint. They just hit up the alumni for more money and the government for more grants.
OneGuy
Yale has too much money. They should be treated like a corporation and pay taxes and lose their charitable tax preferences. Ditto for all colleges.
steveaz
I just watched a biographical film about Edith Wharton, who was the first women ever awarded an honorary degree by Yale.
In this film I could not help but see the indications of the decline of America’s trans-Atlantic cosmopolitan elites. (BTW, this trundle of empty petticoats with money bothered George Orwell, too. Read his essay on the Spanish Civil War to learn more.)
Before the ‘turn of the century,’ all seemed well to this class of detached wordsmiths. But, as WWI loomed, the “Age of Innocence” was sliding down greased skids on a trajectory that could only end with a rendezvous with hell.
Luckily, Edith died before WWII started, although, it being 1937 she surely had to smell the fumes of the coming war in the refined mistrals of Southern France.
But, as is so common in the rarified circles that she and her fellow Yalies yearn to sail in, all her erudition, toy poodles, French estates and monied suitors could do nothing to identify nor stop the impending disaster. And they never seem to care to act decisively when it might matter.
Now, in 2021, the same Cosmopolitan international bankers, lawyers and ‘thinkers’ that define Yale University are barking at climate change and structural ‘racism,’ completely oblivious to the strains and fissures in the world that their word-stews and nom-de-plumes do nothing to remediate.
In retrospect, these pretty ‘thought-makers’ and fashion setters are less than worthless at divining the real dangers plaguing our societies. They are only good at ‘innocently’ chronically them in pretty tomes for their sugary social icons’ enjoyment, and at hiding their apathy in cosmetic effects, new estates (called ‘Tuxedos’ in the House of Mirth) and incestuous honorary awards.
The biography was intensely interesting to this American and I think your readership will like it too. It is streaming on VUDU for those who are interested.
Enjoy.
OneGuy
+1
“…could do nothing to identify nor stop the impending disaster.”
Everywhere you look it is stacked to the ceiling with impending disasters. I get up every morning and turn on the news expecting one or two of these impending disasters to have bloomed to fruition. If I lived in Taiwan today I would be looking for someplace to move my family just in case. Ditto for half the countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. We are blissfully on the brink and our congress, administration and military are more concerned about personal pronouns and which minority to promote without regard to their ability to fill the position. Anyone today who isn’t worried is not paying attention.
Alfred E. Neuman
Even I am worried!
Thomas Lipscomb
I’d like to have the top 5 grads of YALE this year take the SATs I took in 1957, and compare their scores to mine as a HS senior.
Academia makes sure there is no data like that available that might expose this congame in an instant.
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