If universities want to lower the cost of attending college, instead of getting rid of staff who help students or professors who teach classes they ought to do away with administrator jobs.
At NJCU the president created a job of "provost." Probably did so to make herself feel important. Having a lot of assistants must be a status symbol of some sort.The first provost said "This is an important day" when the university opened their "confucius center" to much pomp and circumstance. Yet no one really knew what the center was for, or why any students in Jersey City would care about what it did. It unceremoniously closed down several years later after the federal government accused the centers as being propaganda for the Chinese communist party. The provost left the job four years later. I'm still not sure what he actually did, or what he accomplished.
The second provost didn't seem to do much of anything either. The job is supposed to be like a senior vice president, overseeing academics, services, and other operations. Yet, how important can the job be when she left the campus after three years to take a job in private industry? Of course, this was after the campus declared a financial emergency, so I guess she had a moral epiphany after the fact. Or maybe just didn't want to get caught up in the state's investigation.
The third provost got rid of the only staff position in career services, yet a few months later signed off on a document stating that helping students find internships, explore careers, and land "good jobs" after they graduated was a top priority. But who exactly was supposed to help these students, if you don't have any staff? If anyone knows the answer to this question, let me know.
Universities functioned fine years ago when there were maybe half the number of administrators employed as today. A lot of them have titles with words like "associate," "vice," and other prefixes, but it’s not clear what they actually do in the jobs. The reality is a lot of what these people do is useless.
