122ACTA then calculates ratios of administrative bloat and outcomes including administrative cost per student, instructional cost per student, administrative/instructional cost ratio, inflation-adjusted tuition, tuition as a percentage of state median household income, and graduate rates for students pursuing bachelor’s degrees.

123Reducing Higher Education Bureaucracy and Reclaiming the Entrepreneurial. . .

Toward Best Practices in Higher Education

There are many solutions to radically de-bureaucratize higher education. Faculty and staff can aspire to work in post-bureaucratic higher education institutions characterized by best practices including compensation tied to pay and profitability; support services offered to operating units at cost (or are optional); a culture of competition, collaboration, and mutual responsibility; aversion to formal titles and job descriptions; significant and ongoing investment in front-line employee skills; high levels of transparency; multiple channels for lateral communication; and radically simplified planning and budgeting.

4.1

Calculate Bureaucratic Mass

As Thomas Paine (1776) wrote in Common Sense, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” The first battle against indifference involves challenging accepted but cumbersome internal bureaucratic practices by gathering data—often a catalyst as bureaucrats focus on activities that can be measured. An emerging literature explores bureaucracies in for-profit organizations (e.g., Hamel & Zanini, 2020) with an increased focus on public administration (e.g., Battaglio Jr et al., 2019), but thus far limited attention to higher education. Recently, management scholars Hamel and Zanini (2020) proposed a “Bureaucracy Mass Index” (BMI) by which to measure the bureaucratic nature of organizations’ overhead, friction, insularity, disempowerment, conservatism, and mistrust, with suggested ways to measure these systematically across organizations: • Overhead: Number of management layers, Average span of control, Management

compensation as a percentage of total compensation. • Friction: Percentage of time non-managerial employees spend on internal com-

pliance, Number of functional staff as a percentage of total headcount, Average

review time for budget requests.