alt Hacker NewsCorrect.
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
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Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.
That is more money for the baseball team
Yeah, the bit where there are 10x as many administrators in higher education, but professors now all have to do their own admin, always drove me up the wall