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Expansion of the Syracuse University administration over the last several years could play a role in increasing student expenses, according to some experts. 

Between 1987 and 2011, SU’s full-time administrative staff grew by more than 400%, according to a 2016 study conducted by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Thomas Barkley, the chair of the University Senate’s budget and fiscal affairs committee, confirmed in an interview with The Daily Orange that SU’s administration has continued growing in recent years. 

“Administration has been growing, and perhaps even been growing a little bit faster, a little bit more than other aspects of campus, like faculty and staff,” Barkley said.  

Universities like SU have defended the growth of administrations as a necessary step toward improving the student experience. But some experts in higher education have criticized this growth as unnecessary spending that raises costs for students and makes higher education harder to afford. 

Teboho Moja, a clinical professor of higher education at New York University, said the issue of administrative growth is widespread not just in the U.S. but in higher education institutions across the world. 

“There is a trend of spending more on administrative employees,” said Moja. “It’s not just increasing salaries of administrative employees but increasing the number, too.”

Moja said the increase in administrators reflects a shift in ideology among higher education officials toward viewing universities as similar to companies. This shift is reflected in the universities’ language, with administrators assuming business titles and students being referred to as clients or customers. 

“Overall, universities are imitating what is happening in the business world, and there’s research that talks about the rise of managerialism, which has changed the character of the university,” Moja. “But they’re not businesses.”

Barkley, though, said SU’s increase in administrators is in response to the changing landscape of higher education. The rise of new challenges for colleges — like integrating technology or promoting diversity — has necessitated the hiring of new administrators to serve those purposes. 

To attract and retain students, SU has to keep pace with its peer institutions in these areas, and that includes hiring more administrators, he said.

“We live in an age where a lot of things that twenty years ago didn’t even exist or weren’t really a part of the landscape of managing a university have come into existence,“ Barkley said.

When asked for the exact number of non-academic salaried administrative employees on the university’s payroll, an SU spokesperson did not provide a specific total. In a statement sent on behalf of the university’s Office of Human Resources, the spokesperson said every SU employee is essential to the university’s mission.  

“Every member of the Syracuse University team — across all levels, all disciplines and all focus areas — provides a critical service to the University community,” said Sarah Scalese, senior associate vice president for university communications, in a statement. “We remain focused on attracting, recruiting and retaining faculty and professional staff — academic, non-academic and administrative — that allows us to advance and achieve our academic, research and student experience priorities and goals.”

While Barkley and SU have said that the hiring of new administrators serves as a means to improve the overall student experience, Moja contends that students often don’t recognize those benefits — even though they bear the cost.

As universities strive to outcompete one another in administrative spending, she said, they incur costs that must be offset by increases in tuition. This trend, combined with an overall decrease in public funding for higher education, has made college less affordable, she said.

“As the administration tries to be more effective, efficient, to look like businesses, they have to pay the cost of it,” she said. “And we see that cost coming out of student fees.”

SU will increase tuition by 3% for all full-time undergraduates for the 2021-22 academic year and expand its financial aid commitment by 7%. Tuition will total $52,240 for students admitted prior to fall 2018, and $55,920 for those admitted after that date. 

Barkley said that administrative growth is “not entirely” to blame for inflated tuition costs. Rather, an increase in services provided to students, the cost of living on campus and new building projects have driven the rise in student expenses.

“It’s easy to paint the picture that these higher tuition costs are associated with more expensive, big name titles. But I don’t think that’s entirely true,” he said. “There are things where there has been growth in the university that isn’t necessarily tied to more titles, more big names on campus.”

At SU, several top administrators — including Chancellor Kent Syverud — took pay cuts during the pandemic. The decision came as the university grappled with the pandemic’s financial fallout. How SU will handle administrative spending after the pandemic, though, remains yet to be seen. 

Moja said it is unclear whether universities will curtail administrative growth to balance budgets in the coming years.

“The jury is out on that,” she said.

Published on March 30, 2021 at 10:20 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu