Bureaucracy in higher education isn’t just inefficient, it’s unfair

Amid Covid-related funding crises, it is no doubt tempting for university management to see the salaries of professional administration staff as low-hanging fruit in budget-cutting exercises.

However, fulfilling administrative requirements must fall to someone. Reducing administrative capacity risks exacerbating the longer-running problem of a deepening audit culture within universities, with academics increasingly being drawn away from research and teaching into administrivia.

While overly bureaucratic processes are time-consuming and frustrating, Pamela Herd and Donald Moyniham’s conceptualising of “administrative burden” illustrates how their design is also a fundamental matter of equity. Although the concept was created with governments in mind, it is apt for understanding the distribution of administrative burdens for both staff and students in the university context. For instance, in my research with working-class women engaged in postgraduate studies in Australia, I see the disenabling effects of administrative burdens for both students doing coursework and for self-directed higher degree researchers, including early career academics.

A central premise of the administration burden framework is that administrative matters are consequential. Administration functions are critical to whether a student experiences an institution as accessible, fair and welcoming, or as frustrating, confusing and inhospitable. Students frequently report that the latter set of descriptors applies to their very first interactions with university administration: enrolment. For instance, first-in-family students interpret their bewilderment at the forms as an indication that they are not “cut out” for university.

Administrative burdens affect some more than others. To borrow another of Herd and Moyniham’s terms, the learning costs involved in understanding the requirements of the application process may be higher for non-traditional students, such as those who aren’t from an English-speaking background.

There may also be greater compliance costs for some individuals. For example, one of my research participants, who lives in remote Australia, was told that she must have her ID checked to start a job at the same university where she completed her PhD, even though it would require a 200km round trip for her. The university eventually relented, but this took negotiation. Many early career academics – who are more likely to land roles with unreasonably high teaching loads, and less likely to have institutional knowledge about who can help them jump through bureaucratic hoops – are also disproportionately burdened. The resultant stress and loss of autonomy can be considered psychological costs of administrative burdens.

It is important to keep in mind that the systems that produce administrative burdens are not accidental but rather designed. Burdens can be alleviated or shifted. The voices of those carrying the greatest burdens must be actively sought out.

Students have very few meaningful ways to offer feedback about their burdens, while staff – on whom students rely to enact administration – also feel powerless. A common problem for students, which will also be familiar to academics, is that locating the right department or individual to deal with a query can be incredibly difficult. “One-stop shop”-style helplines can be very helpful but are less effective when an issue requires collaboration between multiple actors, such as academics, faculties and centralised services (such as enrolments or disability support services). Students are left feeling lost in the system.

Even equity policies come with an administrative burden. For instance, one of my research participants has a learning adjustment plan for a disability. Despite being a law student at a prestigious university, she struggles to decipher the extraordinarily complicated eligibility rules regarding when and how the adjustments apply. She has been warned by her overloaded equity support officer that they cannot help her make future adjustment applications. The stress associated with these interactions increases the health problems her adjustment plan is supposed to offset.

Another student, who is the recipient of a scholarship for her PhD studies, also finds that her health problems are incompatible with university policies. Only week-long blocks of leave from her scholarship can be agreed in advance. She cannot, therefore, be granted leave for a series of one-day treatments needed over a period of months.

A third student, a parent of five living in regional Australia, was awarded a scholarship for Indigenous Australians. But the scholarship, she was told, had to be taken up on a full-time basis, and on the main campus – a five-hour round trip from her home. A year into her PhD, she asked her supervisor about switching to part-time study; she was told to not bother with the application because it would be denied. She made it anyway – and it was granted.

Although it is positive that the student’s needs were taken into account, the supervisor’s scepticism illustrates the issue of different university stakeholders, with overlapping remits, providing conflicting information.

In another example illustrating the ways that “non-traditional students” may incur greater psychological costs, one participant told me, through tears, that dealing with university administration reminded her of traumatic dealings with social services.

As Herd and Moyniham point out, some administrative burdens are unavoidable, and this will certainly be the case in organisations as large and as complex as universities. However, in the wake of the pandemic, further restructures in university systems are inevitable, and we need to be very wary of the hidden costs they may entail.

Without greater understanding of how administrative practices affect all staff and students, universities risk undermining their goals for achieving equity.

Maree Martinussen is a McKenzie postdoctoral fellow in the Social Transformation and Education Research Group at the University of Melbourne.