by James A. Bacon

I have frequently observed (1) that the University of Virginia, for all its many fine qualities is subject to mission creep and administrative bloat; and (2) payroll expansion is the major driver of higher tuition & fees.

Just how bad is administrative overhead? It’s difficult to say. Hard numbers are difficult to come by. Published statistics are slippery things. There are full-time employees and there are part-time employees. Some “employees” are interns or graduate students on fellowships. The criteria for classifying employees as faculty, administrative staff, or “other” are subject to change. Frankly, the size and scope of the administrative apparatus at UVA is a subject the Ryan administration studiously avoids.

But a revealing statistic surfaced in a document, an update to the UVA Health Plan, shared Friday with the Board of Visitors. Here’s the bottom line: “UVA had 20,084 benefits-eligible employees [in FY 2023], a 9% increase over the prior year; 90% of the benefits-eligible workforce were enrolled in the health plan.“

A 9% increase in benefits-eligible employees in a single year is more than “bloat” — it’s a dead whale carcass on the beach. Surely, one would think, someone on the Board of Visitors would have asked for an explanation. As we have become accustomed to observing, however, there was no opportunity for board members to ask the question even if they had been inclined to.

The 9% figure requires some context. Here are the numbers provided in the document:

There was a decline from 17,100 employees in 2021 to 16,400 in 2022 before the number spiked 9% to 18,047 in 2023. If we take a two-year perspective, the number of benefits-eligible employees at UVA still saw an increase of 920 — a 5.4% increase.

Inquiring minds want to know: how many of those 920 employees were faculty? How many were administrators? How many fell into the category of “other”? How much of the change was due to an increase in head count and how much to changes in how health-care benefits are administered?

Year after year, Team Ryan has insisted that increases in tuition & fees are called for because cost pressures are so intense. Yet somehow, we see continued growth in payroll. If UVA is doing more with less, there is no sign of it.

Indeed, in another document shared with the board, it appears that UVA is destined for more mission creep and payroll expansion in the intermediate future. That document, the 6-Year Institutional Plan, is filed with the state, updated periodically, and reviewed by the Secretaries of Finance and Education and other senior government officials. The document is aspirational, and can be adjusted as finances, circumstances, and evolving priorities dictate. But it tells us where UVA officials see their institution heading.

The document summarizes the administration’s aims thusly:

The update submitted in July for the Academic Division highlights expanded access to financial aid; increased enrollment by students from Virginia public schools with high rates of socioeconomic disadvantage; the launch of several new degree programs; and planning and progress toward various pan-University research and programmatic initiatives.

Here is the plan itself.

There is nothing in the plan about restraining cost increases, reining in payroll, or reducing tuition & fees.

The plan does acknowledge implicitly that UVA’s high tuition & fees, among the highest of any public university in the country, do impose a hardship upon students and their families. The solution, though, is not to curtail costs and tame tuition but to raise more money for financial aid under the AccessUVA plan, which is geared to helping lower-income and lower-middle-income families and offers only a pittance of relief to the middle-class.

Roughly 22% of tuition revenue already goes toward financial aid. The 6-year plan suggests that the percentage of tuition diverted to financial aid could continue to increase over the next few years.

Under “opportunities for improvement,” UVA lists as its No. 1 priority:

Increase enrollment of underserved populations (e.g., Pell-eligible, first-generation, low income) from the Commonwealth

a. Launch the All Virginia Pilot to (1) encourage and prepare more students from public schools in Virginia with high rates of socioeconomic disadvantage to apply to UVA and (2) champion public higher education across the Commonwealth.
b. Expand financial aid program to attract more low- and middle-income Virginians to UVA.

(I’ll have more to say about UVA’s high tuition/high aid financial model in a white paper that I’ll share shortly. The aid to middle-class families is a pittance for in-state students and a travesty for out-of-state students.)

Along with its efforts to attract “outstanding, diverse students, regardless of means,” UVA proposes to improve academic and career advising and to improve mental health services.

UVA also wants to funnel more resources into recruiting and retaining “critical talent,” noting that UVA faculty salaries rank 27th among AAU institutions. And it wants to increase its investment in “research infrastructure.” It’s not clear what is encompassed under the term “infrastructure.” New buildings and lab facilities, most likely, but also administrative support for grant applications.

The document should be mandatory reading for every Board of Visitors member. The questions posed by state officials are very good, and the responses far more substantive than anything seen or heard during a BoV meeting. State officials hold the purse strings, so they cannot be ducked, dodged, or blown off as board members can ne.