We are SHOCKED that UNC is top-heavy

The News & Observer this morning has a less-than-startling report on the bloated bureaucracy at the University of North Carolina. Administrative positions are multiplying as fast as numbers on a TI-34 scientific calculator. Administrative salaries and budgets are growing like cultures in a petri dish. Grades aren't the only things that are inflating on campus.

Administrative jobs have increased 28 percent while instructional jobs have grown 24 percent (a graphic accompanying the N&O article apparently reversed these two numbers) while enrollment rose 13 percent. These administrative jobs with long and impressive titles (under-assistant vice chancellor for social networking and prevention of binge drinking) carry huge salaries, usually more than $100,000. As a result, the general fund budget grew by 43 percent from 2004 to 2008. A chart accompanying the article indicates just how top-heavy the university administration has become. UNC-Greensboro, for example, went from five to 21 assistant vice chancellors in four years. UNC-Chapel Hill grew its staff from zero assistant vice chancellors to 14 in the same period.

All of these positions are presumably held by able and hard-working folks, but the proliferation of titles and the increases in salaries are taking the university's focus away from its primary mission of educating the young people of North Carolina. The trend is all too common. General Motors didn't raise its per-vehicle cost only by paying high wages to its assembly-line workers; it also built a bureaucracy of highly paid white-collar workers. The trend is especially pernicious in government, where there is little or no budgetary restraint from price competition or revenue limits. Public schools across North Carolina face a similar trend. Teacher salaries have stagnated, but principals, assistant superintendents and superintendents earn salaries four or five or even more times the average teacher's pay. These central office bureaucrats are, of course, "essential" to good education (and to some extent, it's true that schools have to have a large staff to keep up all the state and federal reports they are required to file), but they provide little if any "return on investment" for the student in the classroom.

A friend of mine who regularly rants about the high pay of educational bureaucrats likes to compare a school superintendent's responsibilities and pay to a U.S. Navy captain's. A superintendent might earn $250,000 in state pay, local supplements, car allowances and other perquisites and be responsible for 2,000 employees and a $20 million budget. The captain of an aircraft carrier (pay grade 0-6) with 25 years of service makes less than $112,000 and is responsible for a $1 billion (or more) ship plus a couple of dozen aircraft at $5 million apiece and the lives of a crew of 5,000. He also has the responsibility for safeguarding, and launching if necessary, nuclear weapons that can obliterate large chunks of this planet. (A Navy captain with dependents would also receive about $21,000 a year in housing allowance and subsistence, plus another $5,000 or so for an assignment afloat. But that still doesn't add up to what a county school superintendent or a university provost can make.)

Anyone who looks at what society pays movie stars and other entertainers compared to what we pay teachers, nursing aides, day-care workers or stay-at-home moms would conclude that our priorities are all wrong. Universities that grow assistant chancellors faster than they grow classroom professors and that pay these administrators far more than those doing the teaching have their priorities all wrong, too.