Harcourt

Paul Frijters – UQ\ ANU

Research help from Ben Hancock

Who wants to be an intermediary?

Main Issue

InitialBudget

ToUniver-sities via DEEWR

Teaching and

research activities

Inter-mediary activity

100?? ??

Or is it….

InitialBudget

Teaching and research

activities

Inter-mediary activity

100 ??

??

First Intermediary: DEEWR 2009-2010

InitialBudget

ToUniver-

sities

??

Total budget of DEEWR

Total going to University

Official administrative overhead

12.03 bn

7.01 bn

1.8%

Is there really only 1.8% overhead?

How many people work there?

Total # working for DEEWR?

We count over 6,000 directly employed (Aus Pub Serv Stat Bulletin 2010)

Which would cost at least 720 million (Commonwealth average is 68,165 wage. Add superannuation and on-costs (buildings, etc.) and you get around 120,000 per civil servant). Add to this the consultants and semi-independents also paid, and DEEWR overhead would be at least a billion.

Our best guess is thus 10% overhead. I do not know where in the budget they go but 10% tallies better with the # individuals working for DEEWR and state education deps than 1.8%

Second Intermediary

% goingto

Univer-sities

90

furtherUni

admin

??

??

Uni Admin

Ch

VC

DVCspVCs

Deans

Assoc Deans

Heads of Sc

Dep H

Asso Dep H

Managers

Project leaders

Senior Admins

academics administrators

Uni Budgets

Official % spent on acad salaries

As % of all salaries

But this appears to include the academic hierarchy

30.9%

53%

What do we do?

We take 5 representative unis (3 GO8’s, a ‘T’, and one other).

We draw 50 individuals at random from their phone lists.

We count only those paid.

We count the number of academics

What do we find?

At the ‘T’, 60-70% of the employees are admin. At best guess this is also 60-70% of the salaries.

At the 3 GO8s, 50-55% are admin.

At the other, 55-65% are admin.

As an average, we thus take 56% of all wages paid out to be admin, and 44% to be academic.

This means of the 90 units sent via DEEWR 90*0.44 go into academic expenses

So the Second Intermediary...

% goingto

Univer-sities

90

furtherUni

admin

50.4

39.6

Third Intermediary

Acade-mic

salaries

40%

Research and

teaching

Admin and

dealing with prior

intermediaries

??

??

What are these activities?

1. Writing reports for the previous stages and having meetings with them.

2. Writing grant applications, managing grant applications, hiring and organising admin, hiring and organising staff.

3. Spending time on committees for DEEWR, DEST, etc.

Essentially we want to count all activities that are not directly related to teaching and research.

What is for instance included in teaching? Teaching, preparing lectures, marking, feedback on students, writing

textbooks, attending conferences on learning, etc. Guiding PhD students, masters, honours, etc.

What is included in research? Going to conferences, interacting with co-authors, field visits, etc.

How to measure this?

One wants to have the results from time-use surveys.

Time-use surveys are going to be compulsory in future, but are easy to game and hard to objectify.

Several universities have run surveys, but their results could not be obtained.

But we can have a look at what academics who have done surveys have found.

What do existing studies say? McInnis (1999), surveying 2609 academics, says academics spend 17%

of their time on ‘admin’. This does not include writing grants or many other intermediary activities. If you include some of these, its closer to 25%.

Ross Guest and Alan Duhs (2000) say about 20% is spent on admin.

Forgasz and Leder (2003) say 30% is spent on admin and writing grants, with higher-paid academics spending more time on this (the senior academics write the grant proposals and manage more than the juniors).

Given the large degree to which intermediary activities can easily be mis-counted as teaching and research, we take 30% as conservative.

Side-note: one study that randomly contacted people found them doing something completely unrelated 35% of the time (toilet, daydreaming, cooking, eating, etc.). This is usually not even an item in most surveys....

Third Intermediary

Acade-mic

salaries

40%

Research and

teaching

Admin and dealing with

prior intermediaries

28%12%

So it is….

InitialBudget

Teaching and research

activities

Inter-mediary activity

100 72%

28%

So 1 dollar sent into the system from central funds buys 28 cents of teaching and research activities. Give or take 10 cents.....

Further thoughts We have left out some further intermediaries: visitation

committees, accreditation boards, website maintenance, international agencies funded from money implicitly tied to budgets, etc. 28 cts out of 100 is probably an upper limit.

Evolution of reports on the time it takes to write grants and do admin suggest an increase over time in this for those classified as academics.

Evolutions on salary suggest reductions in academic salaries over time, so intermediary activities over time…..

We did not look at absolutes but % lost along the way to avoid the complicated issue of multiple funding sources. Yet, intermediaries also exist with other sources of funding (ARC, NHMRC, foreign students, patents, etc).