Paul Campos tells a story that starts just fine:
In fiscal year 2013, the [University of Florida law] school was pulling in about $36.6 in tuition revenue (2022 dollars). Other revenue, almost all of which consisted of endowment income, pushed the school’s total self-generated revenue to around $39 million in constant dollars.
At the time, the law school had 62 full time faculty members, which meant it was generating around $645,000 per full-time faculty member. The school’s total payroll, including benefits, totaled about 64% of its self-generated income. This was, from a budgetary perspective, a pretty healthy situation. . . .
And then it turns ugly:
Shortly afterwards, a proactive synergistic visionary named Laura Rosenbury became dean, and things started to change . . . a lot.
Rosenbury was obsessed with improving the law school’s ranking in the idiotic US News tables. Central to this vision was raising the LSAT and GPA scores of the law school’s entering students. In recent years, prospective law students have learned they can drive a hard bargain with schools like Florida, which were desperate to buy high LSAT scores in particular, because of the weight these numbers are given in the US News rankings formula. In order to improve these metrics Rosenbury had to convince the central administration to radically slash the effective tuition UF’s law students were paying . . .
The result was that, by fiscal year 2022, tuition revenue at the law school had fallen from $36.6 million to $8.3 million, in constant dollars — an astonishing 77% decline.
Rosenbury also increased the size of the full time faculty from 62 to 84, while slashing the size of the student body, with the result being that revenue per full time faculty member fell from around $645,000 to about $178,000. This meant that the school’s revenue was now not much more than half of its payroll, let alone the rest of its expenses.
Although Rosenbury managed to raise some money from donors while shilling her “vision” of a highly ranked law school. the net result was that, by the end of her deanship, the law school’s total self-generated revenue was covering just 40% of its operating costs, approximately.
By gaming the rankings in countless and in some instances ethically dubious ways — for example, she claimed that the school’s part time faculty expanded from 30 to 259 — the latter figure should be completely impossible under the ABA’s definitions of who can be counted as part time faculty — she did manage to raise the law school’s ranking quite a bit. This has not resulted in better job outcomes for Florida’s graduates relative to its local competitor schools, whose rankings didn’t improve, but it has allowed central administrators to advertise to their regents and legislators that UF now has a “top 25” law school . . .
And, now, the kicker. Campos quotes the New York Times:
Barnard College of Columbia University, one of the most prominent women’s colleges in the United States, announced on Thursday that it had chosen Laura A. Rosenbury, the dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, to serve as its next president.
Ms. Rosenbury became the first woman to serve as dean of Levin College of Law, in Gainesville, Fla., in 2015. She also taught classes in feminist legal theory, employment discrimination and family law. . . .
Columbia University hiring an administrator who supplied dubious data to raise a college’s U.S. News rankings . . . there’s some precedent for that!
Campos is only supplying one perspective, though. To learn more I took a look at the above-linked NYT article, which supplies the following information about the recent administrative accouplishments of Prof. Rosenbury, the new president of Barnard:
Ms. Rosenbury oversaw a period of growth at the University of Florida, raising more than $100 million in donations, hiring 39 new faculty members and increasing the number of applicants by roughly 200 percent, Barnard said. . . .
“I have been able to continue to do my work while also moving the law school forward in really exciting ways with the support of the state,” [Rosenbury] said. “The state has really invested in higher education in Florida including in the law school, and that is how we have been able to raise our national profile.”
What’s interesting here is that these paragraphs, while phrased in a positive way, are completely consistent with Campos’s points:
1. “More than $100 million in donations”: A ton of money, but not enough to make up for the huge drop in revenue.
2. “Hiring 39 new faculty members”: An odd thing to do if you’re gonna reduce the number of students.
3. “Increasing the number of applicants by roughly 200 percent”: Not really a plus to have more applicants for fewer slots. I mean, sure, if more prospective students want to apply, go for it, but if the way you get there is by offering huge discounts, it’s not an amazing accomplishment.
4. “The state has really invested in higher education in Florida including in the law school”: If you go from a profit center to a money pit, and then the state needs to bail you out, then, yeah, the state is “investing” . . . kind of.
On the plus side, if Columbia has really been ejected from U.S. News, the new Barnard president won’t have any particular motivation to game the rankings. I do worry, though, that she’ll find a way to raise costs while reducing revenues.
Also, to be fair, budgets aren’t the only thing that a university president does. Perhaps Prof. Rosenbury’s intellectual contributions are important enough to be worth the financial hit. I have no idea and make no claim on this, one way or the other.
Its so sad. According to BLS there were 30,780 employed in the US in May 2022. Of course that is probably missing a lot of workers such as professors that are classified separately. Even so, by the same methodology BLS shows that there were 707,160 lawyers at the same time. No offense to my many friends in the law profession, but this is way too many. According to worldpopulationreview.com, the US has more lawyers per capita than any other country. Obviously, lawyers can do a lot of good. But how much more good could we do if we had 700K more statisticians?
Oops. Typo. That should be “According to BLS there were 30,780 statisticians employed …”
“…she claimed that the school’s part time faculty expanded from 30 to 259 — the latter figure should be completely impossible under the ABA’s definitions of who can be counted as part time faculty…”
I don’t know the truth of this matter but assuming the above statement can be taken at face value, then this is essentially fraud, right? I really hate that people don’t get more punished for stuff like this.
I don’t get it.
It sounds like the students got smaller class sizes for less tuition. Then this resulted in similar career outcomes. So they got the same results for cheaper, weren’t they winners here? Is this school supposed to be maximizing profit? Who actually lost money?
It reminded me of reading stories about the “risk” of gas prices going down (and making things cheaper for everyone). But to oil companies and some commodity traders that was a “risk”.
Who actually lost money? “the law school’s total self-generated revenue was covering just 40% of its operating costs, approximately.” I would guess that the rest now comes from the University of Florida’s general budget, i.e. undergraduates whose ever-increasing tuition is now propping up the law school. This is the case here at the University of Oregon as well, last I checked.
Sounds like they made up for it with $100M in donations.
$100 million in donations over what times span? And were they one offs?
Definitely the world benefitted by extracting money from rich donors and transferring it to poorer students. The only problem is how these particular students are lawyers… Widely acknowledged to be first against the wall when the revolution comes, Along with the marketing department of Sirius cybernetics.
Colleges and universities should try to break even.
Ok, but the author seems to really have a problem with this woman. It sounds like some executive made a decision that benefited some people and harmed others, and the author is in the latter group. Or is somehow aligned with them. Otherwise what is the motivation to write it?
Does he write something like that about every department that starts running a deficit? Maybe just law schools? I don’t know.
The combined tone and lack of details on who exactly was harmed (along with his relationship to them), made it come off as a “two minutes hate” type thing to me.
Anon:
I don’t think the author has any particular problem with this dean of the University of Florida law school. He’s written a ton about various forms corruption in legal academia. In 2014 he published an article, The Law-School Scam and he’s continued to write about it ever since. He has forcefully expressed an opinion that many law schools are ripping off students, taxpayers, and other university units, and this is just one more example. He’s given many other examples over the years.
Thanks for the context.
One of the many sad things about US university administration is that awful administrators keep moving to new, and never lower, positions, regardless of performance or competence. It’s a club of grifters, enabled by inept boards and voracious headhunting firms.
By the way, here at the University of Oregon, we’re on President #9 since I arrived in 2006. (#5 if you don’t count interims.) Our current interim provost replaced our previous interim provost, who inspired no one as is moving to another university as provost. But don’t worry, we have no shortage of “strategic visions.”
should be “and is moving”
It what about the hookers and blow?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Puliafito
Daniel:
Why is it that if you do “hookers and blow,” everyone gets on your case, but if you have a problem with “opioids,” you have everyone’s sympathy. That USC dean should’ve just said he had sex addition and an opioids problem, and then he’d probably be president of the university by now.
Ahem!
Regarding your comment-comment, whilst I find the thought of “sex addition” quite intrigueing, I wonder if you’re trying to imply that he wasn’t really up to C-suite standard (I wouldn’t put it past you), or if this was merely a typo.
Olaf:
Yes, it was just a typo!
I suspect I’m not the only one who lives in the Venn-diagram overlap of “reads Andrew Gelman’s blog” and “is a friend of Laura Rosenbury” … but I’ll be the first to put my neck out and predict that she does a good job at Barnard.
Anyhow, I often like reading Campos, but a lot of the language in his post strikes me as problematic: “Rosenbury was obsessed with …”; “… shilling her ‘vision’ of …” How does Campos know what her obsessions were, or whether the ‘vision’ came from elsewhere (e.g. the university administrators who hired her)? Did she, personally, decide to exaggerate faculty size or did the exaggeration come from someone else?
Don’t get me wrong: the system sucks, the rankings suck, gaming the rankings sucks, the whole thing is rotten. But there are good, clear-eyed people who decide to participate in the system and are trying to make it better. I think Campos could make his case without personalizing it in the way he does. In other contexts that is one of Andrew’s standard points: it’s not that the p-hackers are bad people, it’s that they’ve been brought up in a misguided statistical culture …
On one hand, I appreciate this comment since I don’t have any personal knowledge of Rosenbury and attribution of motives should always be viewed with suspicion. On the other hand, this comment seems to absolve Rosenbury of the responsibility that comes with being Dean. Suppose the “vision” did come from elsewhere – why would that make any difference? She acted on that vision and should be held responsible for it. Motives are one thing, responsibility is another. Just as you (correctly) point out the analogy with statistical practice, even if NHST practitioners are “merely” following their training, they are still responsible for their choices.
Totally agree!
But take another look at Campos’s post and ask which of the actions it describes are clearly wrong. Is it clearly wrong if the president of UFlorida decides to give out more law-school scholarships, in the hopes of attracting better test takers? Or that they want to increase faculty size? It might not be what I would do, but I don’t think it makes LR complicit in wrongdoing.
The only thing I could see, and I read the post a few times, including when it came out, is the seeming exaggeration of the size of the full-time faculty. But that could easily have come from, and in my view likely did come from, some lower-level person.