1. Harcourt Paul Frijters – UQ\ ANU Research help from Ben Hancock Who wants to be an intermediary?

2. Main Issue Initial Budget To Univer- sities via DEEWR Teaching and research activities Inter- mediary activity 100 ??

3. Or is it…. Initial Budget Teaching and research activities Inter- mediary activity 100 ??

4. First Intermediary: DEEWR 2009-2010 Initial Budget To Univer- sities ?? Total budget of DEEWR Total going to University Official administrative overhead 12.03 bn 7.01 bn 1.8% Is there really only 1.8% overhead?

5. How many people work there? Total # working for DEEWR? We count over 6,000 directly employed (Aus Pub Serv Stat Bulletin 2010) Which would cost at least 720 million (Commonwealth average is 68,165 wage. Add superannuation and on-costs (buildings, etc.) and you get around 120,000 per civil servant). Add to this the consultants and semi-independents also paid, and DEEWR overhead would be at least a billion. Our best guess is thus 10% overhead. I do not know where in the budget they go but 10% tallies better with the # individuals working for DEEWR and state education deps than 1.8%

6. Second Intermediary % going to Univer- sities 90 further Uni admin ??

7. Uni Admin Ch VC DVCs pVCs Deans Assoc Deans Heads of Sc Dep H Asso Dep H Managers Project leaders Senior Admins academics administrators

8. Uni Budgets Official % spent on acad salaries As % of all salaries But this appears to include the academic hierarchy 30.9% 53%

9. What do we do? We take 5 representative unis (3 GO8’s, a ‘T’, and one other). We draw 50 individuals at random from their phone lists. We count only those paid. We count the number of academics

10. What do we find? zAt the ‘T’, 60-70% of the employees are admin. At best guess this is also 60-70% of the salaries. zAt the 3 GO8s, 50-55% are admin. zAt the other, 55-65% are admin. zAs an average, we thus take 56% of all wages paid out to be admin, and 44% to be academic. zThis means of the 90 units sent via DEEWR 90*0.44 go into academic expenses

11. So the Second Intermediary... % going to Univer- sities 90 further Uni admin 50.4 39.6

12. Third Intermediary Acade- mic salaries 40% Research and teaching Admin and dealing with prior intermedi aries ??

13. What are these activities? z1. Writing reports for the previous stages and having meetings with them. z2. Writing grant applications, managing grant applications, hiring and organising admin, hiring and organising staff. z3. Spending time on committees for DEEWR, DEST, etc. zEssentially we want to count all activities that are not directly related to teaching and research. zWhat is for instance included in teaching? yTeaching, preparing lectures, marking, feedback on students, writing textbooks, attending conferences on learning, etc. yGuiding PhD students, masters, honours, etc. zWhat is included in research? yGoing to conferences, interacting with co-authors, field visits, etc.

14. How to measure this? zOne wants to have the results from time-use surveys. zTime-use surveys are going to be compulsory in future, but are easy to game and hard to objectify. zSeveral universities have run surveys, but their results could not be obtained. zBut we can have a look at what academics who have done surveys have found.

15. What do existing studies say? zMcInnis (1999), surveying 2609 academics, says academics spend 17% of their time on ‘admin’. This does not include writing grants or many other intermediary activities. If you include some of these, its closer to 25%. zRoss Guest and Alan Duhs (2000) say about 20% is spent on admin. zForgasz and Leder (2003) say 30% is spent on admin and writing grants, with higher-paid academics spending more time on this (the senior academics write the grant proposals and manage more than the juniors). zGiven the large degree to which intermediary activities can easily be mis- counted as teaching and research, we take 30% as conservative. zSide-note: one study that randomly contacted people found them doing something completely unrelated 35% of the time (toilet, daydreaming, cooking, eating, etc.). This is usually not even an item in most surveys....

16. Third Intermediary Acade- mic salaries 40% Research and teaching Admin and dealing with prior intermediaries 28%12%

17. So it is…. Initial Budget Teaching and research activities Inter- mediary activity 100 72% 28% So 1 dollar sent into the system from central funds buys 28 cents of teaching and research activities. Give or take 10 cents.....

18. Further thoughts zWe have left out some further intermediaries: visitation committees, accreditation boards, website maintenance, international agencies funded from money implicitly tied to budgets, etc. 28 cts out of 100 is probably an upper limit. zEvolution of reports on the time it takes to write grants and do admin suggest an increase over time in this for those classified as academics. zEvolutions on salary suggest reductions in academic salaries over time, so intermediary activities over time….. zWe did not look at absolutes but % lost along the way to avoid the complicated issue of multiple funding sources. Yet, intermediaries also exist with other sources of funding (ARC, NHMRC, foreign students, patents, etc).