The University of California-Berkeley is playing down its drop in international rankings (No. 2 public university) behind UCLA (No. 1) as a matter outside its control, but a computer science professor at UC-Berkeley is calling BS on that.
Satish Rao writes in The Daily Californian that UC-Berkeley’s administration has continued expanding relative to academics, while “UCLA’s administration appears to consume a significantly smaller slice of their pie, according to federal data.”
While its revenue jumped $400 million in just five years, UC-Berkeley spending has outpaced even the revenue jump, Rao writes:
A large fraction of that increased spending went to central campus administration. This continues a decades-long trend where faculty numbers have remained flat all while administrative expenses have grown extravagantly. The bucket leaks while we struggle to keep it filled.
Admissions, registrar’s office and mental health services consumed $10 million total, which is less than 30 percent of that spent by “the combined chancellor’s and vice chancellor’s offices,” he says:
If UC Berkeley were as efficient as UCLA, we could easily add 100 faculty to campus today … several times over.
Read the letter to the editor.
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