Axel Brennicke and Björn Brembs, posted the following about university administrations in Germany.
Noam Chomsky, writing about the Death of American Universities, recently reminded us that reforming universities using a corporate business model leads to several easy to understand consequences. The increase of the precariat of faculty without benefits or tenure, a growing layer of administration and bureaucracy, or the increase in student debt. In part, this well-known corporate strategy serves to increase labor servility. The student debt problem is particularly obvious in countries with tuition fees, especially in the US where a convincing argument has been made that the tuition system is nearing its breaking point. The decrease in tenured positions is also quite well documented (see e.g., an old post). So far, and perhaps as may have been expected, Chomsky was dead on with his assessment. But how about the administrations?
To my knowledge, nobody has so far checked if there really is any growth in university administration and bureaucracy, apart from everybody complaining about it. So Axel Brennicke and I decided to have a look at the numbers. In Germany, employment statistics can be obtained from the federal statistics registry, Destatis. We sampled data from 2005 (the year before the Excellence Initiative and the Higher Education Pact) and the latest year we were able to obtain, 2012.
I’m sympathetic to the authors and their position, but that doesn’t equal verification of their claims about the data.
They have offered the data to anyone who want to check: Raw Data for Axel Brennicke and Björn Brembs.
Granting the article doesn’t detail their analysis, after downloading the data, what’s next? How would you go about verifying statements made in the article?
If people get in the habit of offering data for verification and no one looks, what guarantee of correctness will that bring?
The data passes the first test, it is actually present at the download site. Don’t laugh, the NSA has trouble making that commitment.
Do note that the files have underscores in their names which makes them appear to have spaces in their names. HINT: Don’t use underscores in file name. Ever.
The files are old style .xls files so just about anything recent should read them. Do be aware the column headers are in German.
The only description reads:
Employment data from DESTATIS about German university employment in 2005 and 2012
My first curiosity is the data being from two years only, 2005 and 2012. Just note that for now. What steps would you take with the data sets as they are?
I first saw this in a tweet by David Colquhoun.
Please do check the data! One never knows. But it requires a solid grip of German, as both Axel and I discussed what the different terms actually meant. So I think there is some room for interpretation in which numbers to add up, even though we of course think we made the most obvious and compelling calculations.
The data files were exactly as we received them from the government agency, filenames and all, not a single bit was changed.
If nobody checks our data, our transparency is worthless.
The two years were chosen as the two federal initiatives started in 2006, so 2005 is the last year before the money started flowing. 2012 was the latest year that was available when we asked the agency for the data. So 2005 and 2012 were the logical dates to compare.
P.S.: Please, could you install a different captcha? The ones here are so difficult to decipher, I always needed 3+ attempts before anything was accepted!
Comment by brembs — January 8, 2015 @ 3:07 am
Thanks! I check with friend who are native German speakers.
Any ambiguity in the terminology is a good point. Often overlooked in the rush to process big data. What if we guess wrong as to what the column headers mean?
I have trouble with the captcha as well and still get spam comments. Do you have one that has been successful for you?
Comment by Patrick Durusau — January 9, 2015 @ 11:02 am
Another commenter has alerted me to rows of data I hadn’t seen before (which annoys the hell out of me, because they were right there in front of me and I didn’t see them because I just assumed the admin data looked like the scientist files!), and taking these data makes the situation look less dramatic, but the same trends apply. I’ve placed an update on the post.
WRT captcha, I use AKISMET, Wirdfence and iThemes Security plugins and have no problems at all with spam.
Comment by brembs — January 13, 2015 @ 9:07 am
Thanks! Can you post the link to the updated article? I was quoting from an English summary and not the original.
I’m using AKSIMET and Blue Captcha, I will check WirdFence and iThemes Security plugins.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — January 13, 2015 @ 2:46 pm
Sorry, typo: Wordfence…
I cannot update the original German update as it is published in one of the largest German newspapers (think ‘Times’). There, I only commented:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/verbesserung-der-arbeitsbedingungen-an-unis-13354907.html
The update is on the summary I wrote on my blog from which you quote:
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/01/booming-university-administrations/
If you comment on the post, you can see how the security combo works that I use. Once I have approved one of your comments, all your subsequent comments are also approved automatically.
Comment by brembs — January 14, 2015 @ 4:54 am