(Support) Staffing Up, Productivity Down?

Doug Lederman reports, in Inside Higher Ed, on a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Click here to read his brief report. Click here (PDF) to read the entire report, which is titled "Trends in the Higher Education Labor Force: Identifying Changes in Worker Composition and Productivity." A longer report from The Chronicle of Higher Education is available here, but is likely password protected.

Colleges' enrollments have risen dramatically in the past 20 years, so it's not surprising -- and arguably is even appropriate -- that the size of their staffs has grown, too. But the rate of growth has come among support staff employees rather than instructors and has outstripped the enrollment growth, resulting in a decline in productivity over that time, a new report asserts.
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The center's report acknowledges what critics are likely to cite as a bias in its report -- the fact that many support stuff employees do play important roles in the educational experience for students, in many student service areas. But the report's overall finding, writes Daniel Bennett, its author and administrative director at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is that the way that the higher ed work force has grown has "increasingly resulted in unproductive use of labor resources."