In his “Stories I’d like to see” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. Is higher ed the capital of featherbedding?
This sentence in an LA Times editorial two weeks ago about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano becoming the president of the University of California caught my eye: “Half of the regents haven’t even had a chance to talk to her about how she would approach the job — a job that involves 10 campuses, 170,000 faculty and staff members, and more than 220,000 students.”
Does it really take 170,000 faculty and staff to serve 220,000 students? Actually, not quite. According to the university’s website, there are 121,000 faculty and staff, not 170,000. But that still means 1.8 faculty and staff members for every student — which doesn’t seem like much of a workload.
So I checked three other universities at random. New York University’s website says it has about 51,000 students and 16,000 employees, or about one employee for every three students. Harvard lists 16,500 faculty and staff for about 21,000 students, or 1.27 students for every employee. Florida State University says it has a faculty and staff of about 8,200 serving 41,000 students, or five students for every staff member.
Leaving out the staff and just counting faculty, California has 3.7 students for every faculty member; NYU has 6.3 per student; FSU has 17.8; and Harvard has 8.75.
All these staffing ratios suggest pretty light workloads and low productivity, especially given the size of so many of the classes faculty members typically teach. And, at least in terms of reputation, the ratios don’t seem to correlate to quality, given the Harvard comparison to California or NYU.
So, with President Obama and other political leaders lately making the escalating cost of higher education a big issue, there’s got to be a great story, locally and nationally, in examining what’s behind those numbers. Have university campuses become our cushiest workplaces?
2. Surveillance 2.0?
Thanks to this report in the trade publication Government Security News, I noticed this procurement announcement last week from the Secret Service:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with Canon USA, Inc., One Canon Park, Melville, NY, 11747, for color video camera systems that are solely available to the Government. The cameras being procured are not commercially available and are strictly limited for the Government’s official use.
With high-resolution surveillance cameras, including those operated by private venue-owners, on so many street corners and deployed inside and outside millions of homes, buildings and stores around the world, what could be so special about these surveillance cameras that only the government can have them?
For a long time I’ve thought that surveillance cameras that could both see and hear — in other words catch and record what people were saying privately in public or semi-public places — would be the ultimate, and ultimately scary, Big Brother tool. Is that what this camera does?
3. $200 million to tear it down?
We all know how expensive building an office tower in a city like New York can be. But $200 million to tear one down? An article (now behind a pay wall) from Thomson Reuters News and Insight about litigation surrounding the takedown of the Deutsche Bank Building — a 41-story office tower near the World Trade Center that was damaged beyond repair in the September 11 attacks — puts the cost of demolishing the building at $200 million.
It took nearly 10 years for the building to vanish because of delays caused by multiple lawsuits over who should pay, how the demolition should be carried out, and whether there was corruption in the award of the contracts. There was also a fire in 2007 that killed two demolition workers, which resulted in manslaughter indictments and acquittals of three construction supervisors. And the litigation — involving issues from criminal liability, to environmental impact, to zoning that could almost complete a law school curriculum — is still not completely over.
The "cushy university" argument is a little weak. First, UC has just under 19,000 faculty and over 230,000 students, a 12:1 ratio. Second, raw numbers mean very little, without looking at details: medical faculty do (and should) teach smaller numbers of students than those teaching, say, Econ 101. It's also vital to look at how much teaching is done by non-tenure track lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students.
As for staff, the numbers tell you nothing unless you look at what work is done by university employees vs outside companies. Groundskeeping, building maintenance, cleaning, food service, etc. can all be contracted out or done in-house. Assuming (for the sake of argument) that it cost roughly the same to perform this work either way and that both were equally effective, it would boost the size of the staff to have it all done internally without there being any meaningful difference in how "cushy" the university is. It also matters, of course, what services a university provides: a commuter school in a dense urban area doesn't need to provide as much in the way of housing or food services, but a geographically isolated one has to have staff to feed and house its students.
#1 Posted by Bruce Rusk, CJR on Tue 30 Jul 2013 at 11:36 AM
For a long time I’ve thought that surveillance cameras that could both see and hear — in other words catch and record what people were saying privately in public or semi-public places — would be the ultimate, and ultimately scary, Big Brother tool. Is that what this camera does?
Cleaners London
#2 Posted by John Ford, CJR on Tue 30 Jul 2013 at 01:38 PM