Bureaucracy

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Does Stanford Have More Administrators Than Undergrads? By  Megan Zahneis April 3, 2023 Illustration by The Chronicle; iStock

In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized administrative bloat at Stanford University, writing that the institution “employs more administrators than it enrolls undergrads.” DeVos’ column, which takes aim at Stanford’s handling of false sexual-assault accusations made by a student, repeats a line that’s circulated in multiple publications in recent months. The Free Press, for instance, noted that Stanford has nearly enough administrators “for each student to have their own personal butler.”

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In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized administrative bloat at Stanford University, writing that the institution “employs more administrators than it enrolls undergrads.” DeVos’s commentary, which takes aim at Stanford’s handling of false sexual-assault accusations made by a student, repeats a sentiment that’s circulated in many publications in recent months. The Free Press, for instance, noted that Stanford has nearly enough administrators “for each student to have their own personal butler.”

That eye-popping claim capitalizes on a frequent criticism of higher ed: that it relies on an ever-increasing tally of administrative staff whose duties are of dubious value, whose often heavy-handed decisions tend to lead to controversy, and whose presence on the nation’s campuses is driving up the cost of college.

DeVos’s numbers are correct: Stanford enrolled 7,645 undergraduates in the fall of 2021 and employed 8,800 full-time staff members outside of its medical school who didn’t have teaching as a primary duty according to data it reported to the Department of Education. But the numbers also ignore several layers of nuance, one expert says. (While Stanford offered the data, university officials did not respond to a request for comment; the Department of Education referred The Chronicle to a 2022 statement about proposed changes in Title IX guidance.)

Undergraduate education is only a part of what they do.

For one thing, Stanford, like many highly selective research institutions, isn’t focused on only the undergraduate experience. “A lot of people don’t understand how a large research university functions, and especially these super-elite ones that have small undergraduate populations,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But even in your big public flagships, undergraduate education is only a part of what they do. There’s a lot of graduate education and a lot of research, and that’s where a lot of the staff and administrators are.”

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That’s true of Stanford, which in the fall of 2022 had 10,035 graduate students and devoted $1.82 billion to externally funded research projects, including its Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which employed 1,700 people in 2021-22.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, doesn’t account for those differences, making it difficult to discern which administrators are working directly with undergraduates or with graduate students or on external research projects. In the fall of 2021 — the most recent data available through Ipeds — Stanford’s payroll included 9,201 full-time staff members outside of the medical school, 8,800 of whom didn’t have teaching as a primary duty. That number has increased by 35 percent in the past decade.

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