Sydney University spends more on administrative staff than academic staff: IPA

More pen-pushing administrative staff are now employed at universities than actual lecturers, new research reveals.

Australia’s universities are spending billions hiring bureaucrats and fat cats instead of professors - with a massive blow out in administrative staff by 72 per cent over several decades - new research from the Institute of Public Affairs shows.

More pen-pushing administrative staff are now employed at universities than actual lecturers and researchers - 57 per cent compared with 43 per cent.

Sydney University spent $603 million on an army of 4909 administrative staff, compared with $577 million on 3574 academic staff, the latest publicly available figures reveal.

All up, Australia’s top eight universities managed to spend $3.2 billion a year on non-academic staff salaries.

IPA Western Civilisation Program director Dr Bella d’Abrera, author of the research paper The Growth of the University Bureaucracy, says it’s “astonishing” that vice-chancellors are continually “crying poor” yet spend billions on administrators and not fixing educational quality.

Sydney University spends more on administrative staff than academic staff. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

“It is no coincidence that a bloated bureaucracy has resulted in an explosion of rules and regulations, which actively seek to curtail both academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus,” Dr d’Abrera said.

“When you have more administrators than academics in universities, it clearly demonstrates a culture that is more interested in growing and sustaining a bureaucracy for its own benefit, rather than educating students and advancing research

IPA Western Civilisation Program director Dr Bella d’Abrera is concerned about the rapid growth in administrative staff in Australian universities.

“It is no surprise that the teaching quality of Australia’s top ranked universities is in decline when resources are disproportionately poured into administration over teaching and research.”

She says governments should structurally reform the sector to improve standards - putting the students and research at the centre of it.

The paper found non-academic staff outnumbered academic staff in six of the Group of Eight universities, with the University of Melbourne employing only 81 more academics than non-academics.

Academic and author of Universities and Innovation Economies Professor Peter Murphy argues for a smaller, leaner and hence more effective university model.

Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson says universities now have an increased burden of compliance and reporting.

“Any organisation in which fifty percent of staff are administrators is a failed organisation,” he says.

“What happens in admin-heavy organisations? Either they lurch from one crisis to another or else they are overrun by lethargy and banality. Both are true of Australian universities.

“Until the 1970s, and for eight hundred years prior, universities spent no more than twenty percent of budgets on administration. That worked well. Anything more is waste.”

“The more administrators on staff, the more universities spout banal messages or activist mantras, and engage in elaborate forms of moral posturing. Such puffed-up public moralising invariably suffocates freedom of thought—the very point of a university.”

The University of Queensland topped the list of bureaucrats, employing 4,515 non-academic staff versus 2,989 academic staff in 2023.

Group of Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson said a large part of the increase was a direct response to the “over regulation of our universities and increased burden of government reporting and compliance we now have to respond to”.

“That comes at a cost and requires additional staffing and resourcing that we would much prefer to invest in to education and research,” she said.

A Sydney University spokeswoman said modern Australian universities were global powerhouses and professional university staff play a crucial role by providing essential services including student support, research assistance, HR and administration, security, community outreach, IT and infrastructure management and governance.

“Our world-class education and research would not be able to function without the significant support of our professional staff who are a vital part of our community,” she said.

A University of NSW spokeswoman said it employed more than 3500 academic staff and more than 4110 professional staff for their 66,540 students.

“Given the changing landscape of the higher education sector, professional staff support necessary developments in educational delivery, compliance, and technology, providing an enhanced teaching and learning experience for our students,” she said.

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