Administrative bloat has become the calling-card for campus reformers, but here at Dartmouth, the slight increases in staffing numbers are less clear-cut.
Over the past few years, there has been only slight growth in Dartmouth’s senior administration. Since 2012, three senior administrative positions have been added, three have been removed and three have been renamed or shifted between different administrative divisions.
The entirely new additions are the vice provost for student affairs, the senior vice provost for research and the senior vice provost for academic initiatives. The director of institutional research was removed from senior administrator status, the vice provost position was eliminated and the jobs of senior vice president and senior advisor were removed.
The College added 441 staff positions between 2010 and 2015 — the most recent year for which figures are available — representing a spike of over 14 percent, according to the College’s publicly available Common Data Set statistics released through the Office of Institutional Research.
The growth of staff at Dartmouth is not unique amongst colleges and universities nationwide. University of St. Thomas theology professor Randall Smith has written extensively on administrative bloat in academia, something that he compared to lemmings rushing to follow the leader.
“It’s like an army adding 15 more colonels and 50 more generals, but no more privates,” he said.
Johns Hopkins University political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg, author of “Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters” (2011), said the number of university administrators across all schools has increased by roughly 300 percent over the past four decades. If the number of administrators were cut back to what it was 40 years ago, he said, colleges could cut tuition substantially for their students.
“If the number of deans and deanlets and ding-a-lings was decreased to the number we had 40 years ago, the savings could reduce tuition by 40 percent,” he said.
Colleges often cite federal and state mandates, especially around data reporting, as the impetus for increased administrative positions. These mandate-based posts only account for around a third of total administrative growth, Ginsberg said, with the rest being internally generated.
“Colleges choose to spend their money on administrators rather than on education,” he said. “The bloat — one might say blight — of administrators is harmful in another way as well: it gradually and inexorably changes the goals of a college.”
Over the 2010 to 2015 period, Dartmouth added 47 faculty members in the arts and sciences division. An additional 15 faculty members joined one of the professional schools — the Tuck School of Business, the Geisel School of Medicine or the Thayer School of Engineering. This represents a 6 percent increase in faculty over five years, accompanied by a 14 percent increase in staff over the same time span.
Looking further back to 2005, however, the total growth of faculty has exceeded that of staffing. While the College’s faculty size increased by 6 percent between 2005 and 2015, there has been a 14 percent growth in staff over that same period. The College’s staff numbers dipped between 2005 and 2010 before rising again in the past five years, peaking at 3,603 in 2014.
The OIR is a six-person office whose job is to research the College, primarily focusing on demographic statistics like those released in the Common Data Set and other files. It is headed by the associate provost for institutional research, a position once considered — as director of institutional research — a senior administrative position. Today, the post is not considered senior administration, according to organizational charts available on the OIR’s website.
A position is considered “senior administration” if the office-holder is “in charge of a major division,” College spokesperson Diana Lawrence said.
It is easy for administrators to deflate administrative hiring numbers by only referring to high-level posts as senior administration, Smith said. Colleges do so by hiding larger administrative growth in middle-level posts well below the senior administrative pay grade, where such additions are less noticeable to casual observers.
“We’re not just talking about vice presidents or deans or something like that — although usually there are a few more of those — we’re talking about a whole midlevel staff of people,” he said.
Additionally, each new vice president, vice provost or dean typically needs their own staff, he said.
Ginsberg agreed, adding that colleges try to “hide” new administrators and staff.
“It’s often difficult in a private institution to find out how many administrators there actually are,” he said.
Not all administrators are bad, Ginsberg said, but the proliferation of administrators at the college level spells doom for college budgets and education generally.
“We’ve gone beyond the useful to the harmful,” he said. “Administrators, counselors — they do things that we need, but we don’t need six of them to do what one could do.”
Lawrence wrote in an email that the senior administrative turnover at Dartmouth “has been conservative.”
One new position, that of senior vice president for advancement, actually substantially consolidated administrative functions at the College, Lawrence said. The role was created under former College President Jim Yong Kim to centralize oversight of the alumni relations office, development division and the public affairs office. Under interim College President Carol Folt, however, the public relations functions were once again spun off, a change that College President Phil Hanlon made official, recreating a senior administrative post to oversee the public relations staff.
Senior vice president for advancement Robert Lasher did not respond to a request seeking comment.
Lawrence noted that positions are adjusted in response to institutional priorities. She described the “higher education marketplace” as national, commenting that the College must compete for the most talented senior leadership in the country.
The College is in “the low to mid range” in comparison to other Ivy League institutions in terms of compensation for senior administrators, Lawrence said. A 2014 report from The Chronicle of Higher Education found that of the then-incumbent Ivy League presidents, Dartmouth ranked second-to-last for compensation. The most highly paid Ivy League president was Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger who made $3.4 million in 2014. Jim Yong Kim made just over $750,000.
One position not considered senior administration is vice provost for enrollment, a job created this year. Lee Coffin will also assume this position in addition to the senior administrative role of dean of admissions and financial aid later this year. Coffin, who did not respond to a request seeking comment, will take on both roles going into the next round of admissions to the College.
The dean of admissions and financial aid post was previously held by Maria Laskaris who has taken over the new — and non-senior administration — job of special assistant to the provost for arts and innovation. Laskaris also did not respond to a request for comment.
Laskaris’s new role focuses on the Hood Museum of Art, the Hopkins Center for the Arts and the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network. The role is an entirely new one that previously was encompassed within lower levels of management at the respective institutions.
When Coffin’s vice provost role was announced, University of California, Los Angeles education professor Patricia McDonough said in an interview at the time that the job was likely tied to the new concept in admissions known as “enrollment management.”
Lawrence declined to release the salaries for either positions, but according to HigherEdJobs.com, a database that collects information on the salaries of academic administrators at the post-secondary level, a chief enrollment management officer might make on average $140,000 a year.
Of the 19 senior administrators listed on the College’s 2014 990 tax form, the average compensation was just under $500,000 annually. Chief investment officer Pamela Peedin had the highest compensation at the College at $1.1 million. This includes substantial bonuses totaling $600,000, more than Hanlon’s base salary of $530,092.
Hanlon also received a bonus of $100,000 and both he and Peedin received further compensation through deferred compensation, nontaxable benefits and “other” compensation, the purpose of which was not listed on the 990 forms.
Within the College’s administration, individual divisions have experienced dramatic shifts over time. The division of the president has expanded from 57 employees in 2005 to 224 employees in 2015. Lawrence attributed the change primarily to the athletics department’s move from the Dean of the College’s division to the president’s. Over the same period, the Dean of the College’s division also increased from 262 in 2005 to 298 in 2015, with a dip to 229 staff members in 2010.
Lawrence emphasized that the headcount statistics are a snapshot from a given time and do not represent full-time equivalent staff, a figure that she said the College does not make publicly available. Still, the vast majority of the College’s staff are full-time. In 2015, 3,114 of the College’s staff were full-time while 383 were part-time. The bulk of the College’s part-time employees — 110 — were employed in the provost’s division.
The president’s division is one of just two majority male divisions at the College, along with the division of the executive vice president which has similarly grown over the past decade, from 592 employees in 2005 to 771 in 2015. Lawrence attributed the male majority in the president’s division staff to the inclusion of the athletic department, which is itself majority male.
According to Lawrence, most of the changes in the staff lists available by division through the OIR result from “structur[al] changes through time to meet the needs of each administration. That’s to be expected.”
Overall, the executive vice president’s division, the president’s division and Tuck have experienced relatively substantial staff growth over the past decade while the provost’s division has experienced a decline, from 1,105 employees in 2005 to 858 in 2015. Other divisions have remained essentially steady in staffing levels overall, with some year-over-year fluctuation.
For some colleges, it is already too late, and “all is lost,” Ginsberg said. For the remaining colleges and universities, like Dartmouth, Ginsberg said the only hope is that students, parents and alumni demand accountability and responsible hiring practices.
