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Kunal Patel: Reducing administrative pay will not effectively cut UC costs

(Madeleine Isaacs/Daily Bruin)

By Kunal Patel

Jan. 23, 2015 12:05 a.m.

For the last few months leading up to Wednesday’s University of California Board of Regents meeting, the state has persistently asked that the UC open up its books and listen to state suggestions as a way to reduce its cost structure.

And as an olive branch of good faith to Gov. Jerry Brown, the Board of Regents approved the formation of an advisory committee to review University finances in areas such as enrollment, online education and most notably in administrative costs.

The general public perception has been that the UC is grossly overpaying a large and unnecessary staff of administrators; however, that perception is based on skewed numbers, and ultimately distracts from larger issues around UC funding, which include – but are not limited to – a lack of state funding.

If we want to alleviate the UC’s funding problems, we should not place undue focus on cutting costs through administrative salaries, but instead gear our efforts toward securing appropriate state funding and trimming costs in ways that do not compromise education quality.

And reducing the pay of UC administration will have an effect on education quality; many UC administrator salaries are below market value, and lowering them further will likely drive administrators to another university system. For instance, our chancellors are actually underpaid in comparison to chancellors at other public universities such as those at the University of Texas.

Furthermore, the numbers supposedly highlighting administrative bloat are skewed and therefore, improperly perceived. One of the most wrongly perceived and highly cited statistics published by the UC Berkeley Faculty Association regarding UC administrative bloat shows a 252 percent increase in senior management, while total employees have only increased by 51 percent, from 1991 to 2012.

However, the classification of “senior management” in studies creates a misconception about the total increase in senior management at the UC. The study artificially inflates the senior management count by combining two very different groups, the Senior Management Group and Managers and Senior Professionals.

The Senior Management Group is what we think of when we think of highly compensated executive administrators. It includes a variety of assistant and associate chancellors who help develop policy and direction and report directly to the for the UC. However, Managers and Senior Professionals is a broad category that consists of both managers and professionals that serve more as mid-level management and consultants to nearly all departments at the UC.

The fact of the matter is that not all UC administrators make exorbitant amounts of money. Of the three percent of UC employees that make over $200,000, 81 percent are educational faculty, 3 percent are of the Senior Management Group, 3 percent are deans and 6 percent are physicians, doctors and nurses, according to a December 2014 UCOP Report.

In reality, the majority of administrative growth has been the result of a 10 percent increase in staff at UC teaching hospitals since 2006, according to the UCOP report. In comparison, UC non-academic staff has only increased by one percent since 2006.

Undoubtedly both the Managers and Senior Professionals and the Senior Management Group have grown at the UC, and Brown’s input on trimming excess administrative bloat may prove to be beneficial for students and the UC as a whole. But it does not deserve the kind of attention and derision it often gets from students and the general taxpaying public alike.

So far the state has been winning the public perception battle against the UC administration by portraying it as greedy and overpaid. But let’s not pretend that reducing administrative pay will solve critical issues such as continued state divestment from the UC and rising tuition at the university.

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