Idiots, Damn Idiots, and Statistics

One problem with being a cynic, Lily Tomlin once opined, is that you just can’t keep up.  I work in the policy area where I am exposed to a lot of numbers, projections, estimates and guesstimates.  I’ve seen so many that my standard for what passes the “giggle test” is impossibly high. I can take almost any absurd numeric estimate and be willing to accept it at face value.

Or so I thought.  Then I came across this article by Anthony York, reposted from his blog the Grizzly Bear Project.  The article, about the astonishing increase in administration at the University of California, demonstrates an astonishing gullibility about data.  I looked at the numbers and started laughing; the author, alas, did not.

Let me focus on just one data point: Mr. York claims the number of managers in the administration of UC Davis in 1993 was (drum roll please) nine.  Really?  I find that amazing.

A quick peak at the UC Davis catalog that year indicates (on page 4) there is a chancellor, an agricultural school, an engineering school, a college of Letters and Sciences, a Division of Biological Sciences, Graduate Studies, a law school, a Graduate School of Management, a School of Medicine, and a veterinary school.  That’s nine different sub-schools, so I guess each had one person in administration to handle admissions, calculate financial aid, administer the faculty, arrange courses, keep track of student progress, and do all those things that need to be done to run an institution of higher education.

I was at UC Davis in 1986 and I can assure you that the idea that the campus had a grand total of nine people working in administration is laughable.  Farcical.  Ludicrous. Absurd. Ridiculous.  Please consult a thesaurus for more synonyms.  There were 17,900 undergraduate students, 5,400 graduate and professional students, and 1,700 teaching faculty.  The college of Letters and Sciences offered over 50 different majors.  And, according to Mr. York, all of this was administered by NINE PEOPLE. 

Mr. York is correctly citing the data provided by his source, The National Center for Education Statistics.  But let’s look a little deeper.  I ran the search for administrators at UC Davis for odd numbered years up to 2009 and got the following data:

Amazing how the number of administrators skyrocketed in 1996, going from 9 to 256.  Obviously there is something seriously wrong with their database going back to 1993 and 1995.

The data on the number of administrators at other UC Campuses is equally flawed.  17 at UC Irvine? There were probably 17 administrators in the dean of undergraduate admissions office alone.  Frankly, even the 439 at UCLA strikes me as significantly low.

Mr. York’s research is pure, unadulterated hogwash, and anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a moderate understanding of how large campuses are organized) should have looked at the 1993 data and laughed.  Davis probably had more than 9 administrators when it was the UC Berkeley Agricultural Extension Farm in 1913. 

But Mr. York’s nonsense is now published nonsense, which means it is irrefutable.  Except to people like me, who still know how to laugh at the absurd.