Administrative Bloat at the University of Kentucky: A Case Study on Retention

The UK Case during the Top 20 Mandate

The strategic plan of the University of Kentucky approved in May 1998 by the Board of Trustees once again put forth a goal to improve the graduation rate of undergraduate students. This goal is reflected in the following Strategic Indicator: “Improve to 55% the percentage of full-time undergraduate students (first-time degree seeking freshmen) who earn a baccalaureate degree within six years of matriculation.” The University had included a similar strategic indicator in the 1993 Strategic plan and as a corresponding effort, had also committed to increasing the first- to second-year retention rate to 82%. Five years later, after time and resources were devoted to activities designed to increase retention and graduation rates, little improvement was evident. The first- to second-year retention rate of the entering freshmen range remained stubbornly in the 76 to 79% range; and while the graduation rates showed some signs of improvement with 1993 entering freshman cohort the goal was not achieved.7 (emphasis in original)

As this quote from Undergraduate Retention and Graduation Rates at the University of Kentucky: A Closer Look reveals, before 1998, the year in which I start the current analysis,8 UK had recognized that retention was a problem, but there was no scrutiny by external stakeholders, such as legislators and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, that existed after the Top 20 mandate took effect.

The Swift Report and the President’s Initiative on Undergraduate Education

Lou Swift was a much beloved humanist scholar who also served as dean of undergraduate studies prior to the Top 20 mandate at UK. He did not have budgetary authority, nor did the deans of the colleges report directly to him, but he did have moral authority and the ear of the UK’s top leadership. At roughly the same time as the Top 20 controversy was swirling in the state legislature, Dean Swift led a university-wide task force that developed a systemic action plan for addressing problems in undergraduate education that later became known as the Swift Report.9 It focused on such issues as the first-year experience, the context for success for students, teaching and learning innovations, and an academic recovery program. The subcommittees initiated by the report constituted smaller task forces, with temporary membership across multiple formal units of the university (table 4). In sum, the Swift Report detailed sweeping, systematic reforms of undergraduate programs at UK.

Although the Swift Report focused on the expansive goal of “advancing the quality of the undergraduate experience at the University of Kentucky,”10 in their response President Charles T. Wethington and Chancellor Elisabeth A. Zinser identified improvement of retention and graduation rates as one of its most important findings.11

In 2001, new initiatives targeting retention included vertical information systems, such as computerized tracking systems,12 and lateral relations, such as establishing an Enrollment Planning Group (see table 5) that primarily focused on student recruitment.

Provost Nietzel and More Targeted Plans

Michael Nietzel served as UK provost from 2002 to 2005. He had been promoted from his position as dean of the graduate school, which is where his primary interests lay. Unfortunately, probably the single most harmful act affecting undergraduate education occurred during his tenure, when Nietzel arbitrarily increased UK’s entering class by nearly 1000 students to 4000 (in part to bolster the university’s sagging budget fortunes), without dedicating a matching increase in resources.

The other initiative established during Nietzel’s tenure was the First-Year Task Force, which focused on the first-year experience as critical to retention (and the all-important indicator of first- to second-year retention for administrators’ personal advancement). The task force’s primary reforms included a formal first-year program, a student resource center, and a first-year coordinator.

Provost Subbaswamy’s War on Attrition

Despite all this increased bureaucracy, when Kumble R. Subbaswamy took over as provost after Nietzel (and 2005 interim provost M. Scott Smith) in 2006, there was evidence of frustration with UK’s seemingly unsuccessful efforts to improve student retention and graduation rates. Subbaswamy, who had returned to UK after stints as dean of arts and science at the University of Miami and Indiana University, thus announced a virtual “war on attrition.”

Provost Subbaswamy and his assistants employed tactics and implemented policies aimed at improving retention and graduation rates that revealed greater sustained attention and vigor (some might say micromanagement) than were displayed in past initiatives. UK deans were expected to submit monthly detailed reports on their efforts and, in one of the more interesting examples, individual students were targeted to receive assistance in their efforts to graduate as their sixth year approached.

A key feature of the Top 20 plan was striving to increase UK’s enrollment base to support its research and prestige infrastructure. As noted above, this increase was executed under Nietzel. Subbaswamy saw the effect that this was having on undergraduate education and called a halt to increases in undergraduate enrollment until available resources to teach students had caught up.

This curtailment of increases in undergraduate enrollment did not stop the proliferation of bureaucratic measures to lower attrition rates, however. In a University Senate meeting on May 14, 2007, Subbaswamy summed up the state of undergraduate education in his State of Academic Affairs address. He followed this by announcing the formation of task forces (see table 4) with the deans of undergraduate colleges holding regular meetings to discuss the allocation of resources related to his undergraduate education initiatives. In keeping with the war on attrition metaphor, an Undergraduate Student Success Summit task force was created. The heightened efforts made during this period are embodied in the formation of the Provost’s Retention Workgroup and other teams that were to become a permanent part of the university employment structure and that participated in decision-making regarding retention (see table 4).

And yet, these efforts and their accompanying expansion of university bureaucracy had only a marginal impact over time on retention: UK retention rates remained discouragingly stable and well below the benchmarks to which UK aspired (see tables 2 and 3).

Managerialism and Provost Riordan

In many ways Provost Christine M. Riordan’s brief tenure represented a bookend to the Top 20 aspiration and her administration concludes this case study analysis. In her January 2014 talk to the College of Communication and Information Assembly she said achieving the Top 20 was not a realistic goal. So a major driver for retention initiatives—prestige rankings—was diminishing in force. However, the university’s proposed new budget system introduced perhaps a more telling incentive for retaining students—a financial one. Pressures from the Commonwealth government to improve graduation rates reflected the perception that they were a critical indicator of return on investment. In short, we see a continuing and ever-growing bureaucracy within the university focusing on retention initiatives.

Despite only a modest increase in faculty, UK resumed efforts to increase the size of its undergraduate population, partly to provide the money needed to fund central administration: in fall 2014, for the first time, UK had over 30,000 students of all types enrolled—harkening back to the problems created by Provost Nietzel. (In 2000 UK’s student base was 23,852.) As Provost Timothy S. Tracy noted succinctly, “With more students, comes more revenue.”13 Inevitably, increased enrollment when coupled with a lack of attention paid to building new classrooms to house those additional students, and the concomitant growth of class sizes and deterioration of educational facilities, had a negative impact on retention in the years following the enrollment surge under Provost Nietzel that led to Provost Subbaswamy calling a halt to the growth of the student population. But evidently the belief still exists that all of the administrators’ enhanced retention efforts, as outlined in this article, together with the bureaucratic infrastructure that has grown to implement them, can still work to retain students even in the face of these negative factors.

Analysis

Returning to tables 4 and 5, one can see the steady progression from 1999 to 2015 of increasingly formal lateral relations and more and more sophisticated (and intrusive) vertical information systems. This was coupled with other new routines (e.g., incorporating penalties in a proposed new budget system for students who did not successfully complete courses). More formal offices and bureaucracies were created over time, e.g., the Office of Student Success, contributing to growth in the number of administrators. This is part of a general trend, with recent examples pointing to the University of Minnesota adding 1000 administrators over the past decade, with a ratio of one for every 3.5 students (one-fourth to one-fifth the typical faculty to student ratio of one to 14 or 17.5), Arizona State University nearly doubling the number of administrators in a recent fifteen-year period, and the University of Pennsylvania increasing nonteaching staff by 83 percent.14 Of course, the irony here is that administrators often make more money than lecturers and their growth in number is a major reason for escalating college costs, while financial concerns are a major reason that students do not stay in school.

This also had a domino effect for every college at UK since they all thought they should have an Office of Student Success and, in turn, individual departments did as well. Hard figures are difficult to untangle since retention efforts were often an added responsibility for some staff and a major if not exclusive responsibility of many new staff members. UK’s College of Communication and Information, for example, had major responsibilities for undergraduate education, and by 2015 had increased its college-level advising staff from two in 2010 to five in 2014. Moreover, it added an associate dean to oversee student success efforts, created new committees at the college and unit levels focused on retention, and added two technology support people who had major responsibilities (e.g., analytics, web page development) related to retention and recruitment.

Stakeholders increasingly decry bloat even though its development is in part attributable to a natural organizational reaction to outside pressure groups. Stakeholders should understand that the more pressure they apply, the more likely there is to be development of formal positions, which may make the problems they are concerned about even worse, since it further drains resources and distracts attention from teaching.

At the outset, many reforms the Swift Report touted as improving retention were really ways to enable the faculty to improve educational quality. As time went on, however, top managers increasingly saw retention as an end in itself and imposed this vision on the university. This was partly because the innovations that were developed relating to retention and undergraduate reforms made these administrators more highly marketable commodities. University leaders are often rewarded for doing the trendy and flashy. Innovations symbolically demonstrate many things to external stakeholders: you are on the cutting edge, you are the future, you are worthy of investment, you can respond to competitive pressures, you are attuned to a larger world, and so on.

Unfortunately, innovations are often manipulated by administrators to further their personal ambitions, while simultaneously wasting organizational resources and draining the energy and commitment of faculty (who are, admittedly, working to further their own interests as well). Administrators follow a logic of interest rather than one of appropriateness.15 For example, sagacious conformity is required of university leaders who must understand changing fashions and government programs.16 Administrators who move from institution to institution never have to live with the consequences of their actions, which encourages the cynical appropriation of innovations as symbols. In fact, the symbolic retention initiatives of two UK provosts eventually helped them to secure presidencies at universities elsewhere. This was also the case for a dean of education who also served as a vice chancellor of academic services at the turn of the century and who later became president of the University of Memphis. Similarly, the dean of the College of Communication and Information at UK who, for a time, simultaneously served as senior vice provost for Student Success, was interviewing as a finalist for provost positions around the country while he held these posts.

UK’s new strategic plan clearly rides the wave of big data and the increasing use of “predictive analytics” as a tool for improving retention by tracking the progress of students for early interventions with an ambitious goal of reaching a 70 percent six-year graduation rate by 2020.17 UK is clearly following broader national trends in organizational design with a strategic emphasis on big data and analytics that also entail complicated lateral relationships involving new job specialties. While we may not have yet reached the apex of bloat, we can begin to question when enough is enough.

Conclusion: The Right Match

One consequence of the focus on retention at UK was a growing emphasis on the advising responsibilities of faculty, which inevitably detracts from their specialized focus on their traditional teaching and research roles. The growing cynicism and lack of involvement of faculty made confronting problems and working through them increasingly unlikely. The constant churn of initiatives over time resulted in skepticism about whether or not they were being pursued for intrinsic benefits or for the symbolic value for the larger world outside of UK. This is also a general problem, one that many universities are concerned with, as ever newer innovations are often publicized within the broader academic community and viewed with much interest by other university leaders to see if they can be adapted to their own situations.

Perhaps even more troubling is that the match that works for one particular organizational structure may not work for a future one. Will universities grow more simple, more focused in the future, since their only dependable revenue stream is students? The decline in regular faculty members proportionately and the lack of long-term institutional loyalty among revolving door administrators and temporary faculty members mitigate against sustained attention to persistent organizational problems such as retention. The deleterious impact of a focus on body counts appears to result in diminishing quality and standards that increasingly concern parents and other stakeholders. The sustained focus on retention ultimately may result in an even more troubling problem, for what good does it do to graduate students who are ill-prepared to survive in our modern, globally competitive economy?