(Editor’s Note: This story has been revised from an earlier version to correctly reflect that the University of Louisiana System office has reduced its administrative overhead from 27 to 17 employees. A previous version indicated the cuts had only been made to the UL Lafayette campus. Daily Report regrets the error.)
While administrative payrolls in the central offices of public university systems across the country have been creeping up—despite a recession and tighter state budgets nationwide—the LSU System office is bucking the national trend and has downsized considerably in recent years.
Between 2007 and 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the number of employees in the LSU System office fell from 45 to 29, a 35.5% decline, according to The Hechinger Report, which covers higher education.
The University of Louisiana System also reduced the size of its central office from 27 to 17 employees, while Southern University cut its administrative staff from 61 to 52.
By comparison, the number of administrative and managerial employees at universities overall increased some 15% during the same period, The Hechinger Report says.
LSU is highlighted in The Hechinger Report for its administrative efficiencies. In part, those can be attributed to consolidations in the central office that occurred in 2013, when the position of the university system president and the Baton Rouge campus chancellor were merged.
But LSU President F. King Alexander, the first to hold the dual positions, says it’s not just the changes to his position that are saving money. Several key positions have been eliminated and several top administrators are doubling up on their workload in order to streamline bureaucracy.
“A lot of people are doing more than one job, and we’ve consolidated many key roles,” he says. “We’re flat out doing more with less.”
Alexander says the challenge has been to cut administrative positions without sacrificing the quality of instruction. Has he been successful? It’s hard to say for sure, given the drastic reductions to higher ed funding in the state over the last nine years. But he says given the university’s recent graduation rates—its highest ever—he feels confident that the quality of education isn’t suffering.
“I think the end result is the Legislature wanted us to do this and we did it, so why are we still being cut?” he says. “Consolidation has worked. My question is, when will we start getting funds because we have done a good job?”
—Stephanie Riegel
