Paul Frijters – UQ\ ANU Research help from Ben Hancock

Who wants to be an intermediary? Paul Frijters – UQ\ ANU Research help from Ben Hancock Harcourt

Main Issue 100 ?? ?? Initial Budget To Univer- sities via DEEWR Teaching and research activities Inter-mediary activity

Or is it…. 100 ?? Initial Budget Inter-mediary activity ?? Teaching and research activities

First Intermediary: DEEWR 2009-2010 ?? Initial Budget To Univer- sities Total budget of DEEWR Total going to University Official administrative overhead 12.03 bn 7.01 bn 1.8% Is there really only 1.8% overhead?

How many people work there? Total # working for DEEWR? We count over 6,000 directly employed (Aus Pub Serv Stat Bulletin 2010) Which would cost at least 720 million (Commonwealth average is 68,165 wage. Add superannuation and on-costs (buildings, etc.) and you get around 120,000 per civil servant). Add to this the consultants and semi-independents also paid, and DEEWR overhead would be at least a billion. Our best guess is thus 10% overhead. I do not know where in the budget they go but 10% tallies better with the # individuals working for DEEWR and state education deps than 1.8%

Second Intermediary 90 ?? % going to Univer- sities Uni admin ?? further

Uni Admin Ch VC Dep H pVCs Asso Dep H DVCs Managers Deans Project leaders Assoc Deans Senior Admins Heads of Sc administrators academics

Uni Budgets Official % spent on acad salaries As % of all salaries But this appears to include the academic hierarchy 30.9% 53%

What do we do? We take 5 representative unis (3 GO8’s, a ‘T’, and one other). We draw 50 individuals at random from their phone lists. We count only those paid. We count the number of academics

What do we find? • At the ‘T’, 60-70% of the employees are admin. At best guess this is also 60-70% of the salaries. • At the 3 GO8s, 50-55% are admin. • At the other, 55-65% are admin. • As an average, we thus take 56% of all wages paid out to be admin, and 44% to be academic. • This means of the 90 units sent via DEEWR 90*0.44 go into academic expenses

So the Second Intermediary... 90 50.4 % going to Univer- sities Uni admin 39.6 further

Third Intermediary 40% ?? Acade-mic salaries Admin and dealing with prior intermediaries ?? Research and teaching

What are these activities? • 1. Writing reports for the previous stages and having meetings with them. • 2. Writing grant applications, managing grant applications, hiring and organising admin, hiring and organising staff. • 3. Spending time on committees for DEEWR, DEST, etc. • Essentially we want to count all activities that are not directly related to teaching and research. • What is for instance included in teaching? • Teaching, preparing lectures, marking, feedback on students, writing textbooks, attending conferences on learning, etc. • Guiding PhD students, masters, honours, etc. • What is included in research? • Going to conferences, interacting with co-authors, field visits, etc.

How to measure this? • One wants to have the results from time-use surveys. • Time-use surveys are going to be compulsory in future, but are easy to game and hard to objectify. • Several universities have run surveys, but their results could not be obtained. • But we can have a look at what academics who have done surveys have found.

What do existing studies say? • McInnis (1999), surveying 2609 academics, says academics spend 17% of their time on ‘admin’. This does not include writing grants or many other intermediary activities. If you include some of these, its closer to 25%. • Ross Guest and Alan Duhs (2000) say about 20% is spent on admin. • Forgasz and Leder (2003) say 30% is spent on admin and writing grants, with higher-paid academics spending more time on this (the senior academics write the grant proposals and manage more than the juniors). • Given the large degree to which intermediary activities can easily be mis-counted as teaching and research, we take 30% as conservative. • Side-note: one study that randomly contacted people found them doing something completely unrelated 35% of the time (toilet, daydreaming, cooking, eating, etc.). This is usually not even an item in most surveys....

Third Intermediary 40% Acade-mic salaries 12% 28% Research and teaching Admin and dealing with prior intermediaries

So it is…. 100 72% Initial Budget Inter-mediary activity 28% Teaching and research activities So 1 dollar sent into the system from central funds buys 28 cents of teaching and research activities. Give or take 10 cents.....

Further thoughts • We have left out some further intermediaries: visitation committees, accreditation boards, website maintenance, international agencies funded from money implicitly tied to budgets, etc. 28 cts out of 100 is probably an upper limit. • Evolution of reports on the time it takes to write grants and do admin suggest an increase over time in this for those classified as academics. • Evolutions on salary suggest reductions in academic salaries over time, so intermediary activities over time….. • We did not look at absolutes but % lost along the way to avoid the complicated issue of multiple funding sources. Yet, intermediaries also exist with other sources of funding (ARC, NHMRC, foreign students, patents, etc).

Paul Frijters – UQ\ ANU Research help from Ben Hancock