Thread by @foggyanabasis

Gather round and hear the

Tale of Two Universities
or
The Master-Slave dynamic in Higher Education

Our first university is the University of Heidelberg, one of the most storied Universities in the world, founded in 1386, and home to 28,563 students. It is the oldest university in Germany.

It has 2,608 Academic staff and 1775 non-academic staff

The budget of Heidelberg (excl medical school) is 401 M euro (exl med), or 14039 e/student

budget per staff: 91,500 euros or $100,650/staff.

This budget of about $15K per student comes from roughly $10,000/student by the state, the rest by donations and grants (e.g. some EU grants, corporate grants), and a negligible amount from small fees. In all of this, we are excluding the medical school.

Our other University is another state university, but this time in the US. Penn State. Penn State is a good school. A top decile research institute. Penn State (excluding medical school) has 76,219 FTE students and a budget of 2.47 Billion. That's $32,406 per FTE student.

Penn State has 5946 full time academic faculty, for a student/teacher ratio of 12.8, compared to Heidelberg's ratio of 11. But Penn State has a colossal non-academic faculty of 24422. That's right. 1 full time non-academic staff member for every 3 fuck*ng students.

These 24,400 non-academic faculty include an astonishing 48 executives, earning salaries from over a million dollars for Eric Barron, President to a mere $522,180 earned by Nicholas Jones, executive vice president and provost.

Interestingly, Penn State's budget (again, excluding med school) per full time staff is roughly the same as Heidelberg's. It's student-teacher ratio is roughly the same. The difference is in those 22,000 more non-academic staff that Penn State has, which Heidelberg doesn't.

What do all these staff members do? They oversee a dizzying number of departments, from Student Disability Resources to the Educational Opportunity Resource Center. Whereas the staff at Heidelberg are mostly focused on running the library and making sure the classrooms are clean

These staff, the 24,000, weren't always there. Originally academics did a lot of administrative duties themselves, and the staff were there as secretaries, admins, etc. Over time, the faculty played a smaller role in administration and left that for dedicated personnel.

And over more time, as that happened, the administrators began to run the show and the faculty became employees under them, dependent on the staff so they could be free to focus on teaching and research. Thus fulfilling Nietzsche's Master-Slave dynamic.

And now the Staff are cracking the whip hard, hiring fixed term non-research staff to teach 8 courses a semester on single year non-tenured contracts, even as they continue to expand, hiring more assistants to the vice provosts of Equity.

And the amount of money required to employ so many parasitic people is enormous. It's not just tuition, but the "indirect cost recovery fees", which universities charge to steal a big chunk of all research grants earned by their researchers.

science.sciencemag.org/content/252/50…

But then there is catastrophic increases in tuition and loans. And when students balk at repaying these loans, we have political candidates promising to socialize the costs, thus shielding the 24,000 from any market forces. About the socialization of costs..

Germany can pay for an entire undergrad education for about $33,000, or $10,000 per student per year (students in Germany must finish in 3 years). They spend 1% of their GDP on tertiary education.

In the U.S., ignoring pell grants and all the federal subsidies such as indirect cost recovery, and just focusing on state subsidies directly to universities, these amount to about 1.5% of GDP. Just at the state level, we are paying 50% more than Germany does for higher ed.

But unlike Germany, we do not get free education for that money. We get those 24,000 staff doing BS jobs.

/fin