You may have heard that Texas leads the US in new employment. Well, here’s one reason. The University of Texas at Austin is the state’s flagship institution of higher learning. It takes a lot of administrative support to keep such a big university turning out scholars in  Architecture to Writing and  everything in between. There are about 7 administrators of one type or another for every faculty member. I don’t know what most of them do, but I’m sure the top levels of administrators at UT would offer excellent reasons why reducing its support staff by even 1% would result in educational Armageddon as if that were any longer possible. If this plethora of administration prevails in Texas imagine what it must be in California. But UC Berkeley is too cagey to make their administrative:faculty ratio easily accessible, so I gave up trying to find it. Texans being less guileful and/or naive let the administrative cat out of the administrative suite.

Given the current state of higher education, my only criticism is why does UT (or any university) need any faculty at all? I think the students would be best served by moving all 3,000 of the faculty into administration allowing the students do what they do best full-time without any adult supervision – you know what that is.

UT administrators