If you think I like to poke the bear, check in with Senator Ryan Maher (R-28/Isabel), who plans to propose a bill to consolidate administration of the School of Mines in Rapid City and his alma mater, Black Hills State, in Spearfish:
Maher… added up the salaries of the top eight or nine administrators at each campus. The schools are Black Hills State University in Spearfish, and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.
The salaries total $1.2 million at Black Hills State, and $1.5 million at the School of Mines, according to Maher.
He’s drafting a bill requiring the Board of Regents to consolidate the administration of the schools. He said the savings from eliminating one set of administrative jobs could help reduce tuition.
“Put that all under one administration,” Maher said. “They’re 50 miles apart. It’s 2020. With technology the way it is, there’s no reason that you could not save the state some money by just combining administrations.”
If Senator Maher counted fairly and accurately, he’s uncovered an interesting difference in expenditures. Black Hills State, with an enrollment of 3,858, is spending less on those top administrative positions than Mines, which enrolls only 2,529. Black Hills State is spending $310 per student on top administration, while Mines is spending $590 per student on top administration.
Maher is dodging the ugly business of total campus consolidation, which local political interests have effectively scared even rock-ribbed conservatives from whispering. The last consolidation bill I can recall, Mark Kirkeby’s 2009 proposal that the Regents simply draw up a plan to close one campus of their choosing, died a swift and unanimous death in its first committee hearing. Maher would let each town keep its campus and students and football games; it would just deprive Rapid City and Spearfish of a handful of six-figure earners. Maher admits his plan won’t pass this year, but a plan that targets only a few well-dressed objects of prairie paycheck-envy has more chance than other Regental consolidation mandates of winning a few votes.
But if Maher’s admin-sharing radius is 50 miles, he may be looking at the wrong campi. Google Maps tells me Black Hills State and Mines are 50.3 miles away. Far across the river, Dakota State and SDSU are only 40 miles apart (39.8, if you can take the Sinai Swamp route!). It would seem to be easier for SDSU’s administration to add supervision of a Madison campus less than 30% SDSU’s size to its plate than it would be for either Mines or Black Hills State to plug their more comparably sized student bodies into either campus’s operations. Simply running DSU out of a couple spare cubicles in Brookings would also avoid Madison’s great anti-consolidation bulwark, the legendary 1881 Kennedy deed, in which Madison pioneer Charles B. Kennedy granted the state 20 acres for a new higher education campus, on the condition that if the state ever used the land for anything other than a teacher-prep school, the state would have to surrender the land back to the Kennedy estate. I don’t think Kennedy stipulated how many administrators had to have offices on the land he granted.
Meanwhile, USD and Northern (116 and 150 miles, respectively, from SDSU) can relax and sit out this brief fracas… until LRC lets someone testify by Zoom in committee and legislators realize how much administrating can be done over the Internet….
Senator Maher thinks the savings from eliminating one set of administrative jobs could help reduce tuition, does he? Doesn’t Senator Maher know doubling the workload of one set of administrative workers will cause that set of administrative workers to begin looking for a better job?
As lobbyist observer grudznick says, “He’s just pretending to do something meaningful in the legislatures.”
“a plan that targets only a few well-dressed objects of prairie paycheck-envy”
I enjoy well phrased and culturally accurate writing. Kudos, Cory.
Unifying admins at BH and Mines, as well as DSU and SDSU is good policy. I imagine the remaining admins would hire more help, but probably at lower pay.
Does Klueless Kristi have any relatives working at any of those schools? That’s probably the critical question.
Kristi’s relatives at a school of higher learning? Doing what?
There would likely be a cost to consolidating the leadership of those schools. Mines and DSU have carved out important niches for themselves with focuses on engineering and technology. I’m not sure you would have had that if they were integrated with larger campuses, and taking away their autonomy might lead to less educational innovation in the future. Having diverse in state educational opportunities might be one tool to help battle the great brain drain and keep kids with varied interests in state after high school. Otherwise, why not consolidate all state schools and turn them into satellite campuses run by a single administration? USDSUBHSNUDSU?
Minnesota has actually done something similar to that mass unification, as has Wisconsin. The University of Minnesota, with main campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul is one entity. MNSCU is the other. That’s Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. I’m not sure how many schools are in MNSCU. It includes Crookston, Winona, etc. I think Mankato has slightly different status. Community colleges are included. The arrangement has it’s pluses and minuses. There’s one overall president, and leaders at each campus. The idea was saving $ by consolidating some costs, including admin. I don’t really follow it.
I don’t know much about how they feel about it in Wisconsin, but maybe Don will fill us in.
It seems like consolidation would just result in some new job titles for current and new employees and would require adding another layer of bureaucracy tasked to manage the management and employees of both schools.
For example, the existing President of one school currently fulfills certain functions necessary for a school to stay healthy. These needs will continue to exist with or without consolidation. So the current name “President” might be changed to VP or vice chancellor or whatever, but the existing employee or a replacement will be tasked to do essentially the same job as the former “President” had been doing.
This analysis assumes that the functions of the current President and other existing employees are necessary for the school’s continued viability. If this assumption is incorrect then any unnecessary positions could be eliminated without the need for consolidation.
But eliminating necessary positions through consolidation would simply shift the responsibilities and duties of each position eliminated to a new employee, perhaps with a different job title. After all, the school’s need for individual employees to accomplish particular tasks doesn’t go away simply through consolidation.
Finally, the argument that consolidation would save the schools money by paying needed new or retained employees a lower salary is fundamentally flawed. Failing to pay appropriate salaries certainly cannot help any school recruit and maintain competent employees in the long run. Moreover, reducing salaries if and where appropriate simply requires careful analysis and management, which can be accomplished without consolidation.
Remington, there may be something to be said for a unified administration of every campus, like Minnesota’s. How many other states manage their university systems more centrally? What savings do they accrue?
Bearcreekbat and Debbo reasonably predict how a consolidation would actually work. We wouldn’t see full reduction of every redundant position. Each campus would keep some of its admins, and, as Porter notes, there would might be some increases in support staff… although I’m able to imagine not as many as one might think.
Consider: I manage a registrar’s office at the moment, so I have some perspective on the staffing demands of this particular branch of college administration. Merge two institutions with properly staffed registrar’s offices, and some of the additional workload will be made trivial via automation: what takes computers 30 seconds on each campus will take a shared computer one minute. The heavy and unconsolidatable demands on human labor are data entry and customer service, which call for more lower-paid staff; the decision-making and process-improvement can be handled by one person with far less regard for size of campus.
Maher can find some cost savings, but they won’t be 50%.
I am intrigued by Remington’s innovation point. The separateness of DSU and Mines promote a different learning ecosystem, as surely as the separateness of the Galapagos and Australia have provided great evolutionist laboratories. But that separateness also creates limitations. Surely we enhance the student experience by making it easier for the Mines engineer or the DSU analyst to take more business and humanities classes from sister institutions.
But that’s not the kind of consolidation Maher or Remington is talking about. We’re talking just about upper-level management and how a single president might not be as protective of separate spheres, separate approaches to higher learning.
SDSU and USD may allay that concern. They each have a single administration, yet they offer diverse programs. Are the ag, nursing, and theater programs at SDSU somehow held back in their innovation by answering to the same president? Does sharing a campus prevent the USD law school and the medical school from carving their own paths?
“It’s 2020. With technology the way it is, there’s no reason that you could not save the state some money by just combining administrations.” Good point by Sen. Maher. Let’s combine the state legislative bodies (House + Senate) into a single body. Sen. Maher can participate by Skype and vote via a clicker from his comfy chair in Isabel rather than taking his state stipend and bunking in Pierre for the session.
What Sen. Maher doesn’t realize is that what he proposes has be investigated several times in recent memory (ask Tad Perry). In each case it was found to be a bad idea, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the modern role that University Presidents play with securing external resources, and in the case of SD Mines, its role in tech-based economic development.
https://www.sdsmt.edu/News/Largest-Estate-Gift-in-University-History/#.XibwNchKg2w
https://www.sdsmt.edu/News/2019-CEO-Business-Contest/#.XibxNshKg2w
I’m sure BHSU has created their own valuable role in advancing the economy and well being of the northern Hills.
Maher’s idea is a stale one, penny wise and pound foolish. Next.
Been there. Tried that. DSU was “attached” to USD in the mid to late seventies.
Yes, Wisconsin unified it’s colleges and universities into one system back in the late 60s-early 70s. This was a time of explosive growth in student populations, campus building programs, etc. Unification was seen as a better or fairer way to prioritize and manage that growth. The schools seem to have maintained their own personalities and areas of concentration. There is still a lot of bureaucracy, though.
When we know the long-term strategies and focus of the BOR in the face of changing higher education realities, proper management structure becomes clear. This is putting the horse in front of the cart.