The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired a consulting firm to find out where they could cut money in their budget. And guess what they found?
UNC-Chapel Hill has too many supervisors, bloated administrative costs and a bureaucracy that hamstrings everything from assigning courses to classrooms to purchasing supplies, a consultant has concluded.
.... The report found that the campus, with an annual operating budget of about $2 billion, spends more on administrative costs than it does on academics, a balance Thorp said he'd like to flip-flop.
The administrative costs likely grew over the last decade or so in large part for two reasons: the university's success in attracting private research funding -- which brings with it staffing demands -- and the construction boom fueled by the 2000 higher education bond program. UNC-CH has spent about $500 million on new buildings and renovations to existing facilities since 2000, a massive infrastructure expansion that brought with it new administrative costs as well, Thorp said.
Surprise, surprise. And when they look deeper into the administrative waste, they find layers upon layers of bureaucracy.
SUPERVISION: UNC-CH is 10 layers deep in some areas, meaning that a worker has nine people above him on the organizational ladder. And more than half of campus supervisors oversee three or fewer workers. UNC-CH should eliminate some supervisors and give more control to those who continue in those roles, the report said. Fewer management layers would lead to fewer meetings and less duplication, and could save up to $12 million annually, it said.
There are more findings like this in the report. Wouldn't you like to bet that every level of government could find similar waste in how many levels of bureaucracy they have? In fact, it shouldn't have taken a private consulting company to come in and find out what was wrong. That's why Americans never believe politicians when they say that they have cut spending to the bone. Whenever legislators talk about hard spending cuts, they always talk about cutting what people really care about - teachers in the classroom or firemen. From my little experience with the bureaucracy of our local school district, I never saw anything worthwhile coming out of the district bureaucracy that made the job easier at the classroom level. I shudder to think what the consulting firm would find at waste and bloat at the school district level. But instead we'll hear about all the classroom teachers whose positions will have to be cut.
5 comments:
Why on earth did they need to hire Bain & Co to tell them this? A competent executive should be able to draw these conclusions on his own.
(The Chancellor said) "The more we know about our research and teaching and how it's funded, the better we can protect it"...he doesn't know about the research/teaching/funding of his institution without hiring a consulting firm to tell him?
How about a cut on consulting s consulting firm for doing the job the chancellor(I never figure out what the heck a chancellor do), the business manager,... are hired to do. If they are not doing their job, shouldn't they all be fired for being incompetent?
Hiring a consultant gives leadership political cover. When the bureaucrats complain, they can say "It's not my fault!" Cowards.
Administrative costs? Did someone say administrative costs?
When I was a faculty member at NCSU I went on a trip to a conference to present a paper as part of a research project. When I got back I filed an expense report. Between airfare and big-city hotel and so forth the cost was not insubstantial.
My expense report was returned to me without reimbursement. I had made an error of $0.02. That's two cents folks. They had paid someone (who knows how much) to scrutinize my expense report and find that $0.02 error. Then they paid that same person again to verify that I had corrected that $0.02 error.
If you're going to try to track every last two cents it's going to get expensive.
I worked briefly at UNC and that was enough to get a taste of this. I remember when we were setting up my office, one of the supervisors tried to talk me into getting an electric hole-puncher! I chuckled and said it was fine, that I could manage my own "manual" hole-punching with the 3-hole device we already had, on the very few times I needed it done, but on at least a couple more occasions, she brought up that darn electric hole-puncher! I couldn't believe I was in a position of actually having to ARGUE a more fiscally responsible position with my own supervisor (and over something so dumbfoundingly ridiculous).
But, at least she was there--my other supervisor was "half time" and lived 3 weeks out of 4 (hmm, I thought half time was 2/4) in his home on the west coast. Of course, he was supposedly "always available to us", but I don't think I ever called him, 3 time zones away.
Post a Comment