U.S. News

I’d add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.

That's fair, and I don't want to see faculty cut either - you all do a shit-ton of work that I can't even imagine trying to do. Fortunately our institution has class size limits and has stood firm on that for at least 30 years, but the rest is definitely still applicable here.

In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Dean’s duties, we were told there’s a reorganization and one of us has to “volunteer” to take on slew of new admin duties.

Ew, asking faculty to take on admin duties is really wrong - I'm sorry that happened.

How many staff could be hired if the “extra fat” from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?

None, because we already had to promote internally because we couldn't get someone externally due to pay / benefit reasons. We already can't get anyone to take the positions we have, even at the current pay rate. I don't know if that's because our pay rates are already low, but decreasing them further would probably make it literally impossible to hire. We gave up on getting an Advancement VP, we're 3 months with no bites on a VP of admissions and 3 months with no fin. aid director.

Maybe we're smaller than average, but we only really have three levels of staff, and they all have different responsibilities that can't really be put together. You have regular workers who do front lines jobs, department managers / associate VPs who manage the budget, staffing, and day-to-day management of each department, and then you have the VP level, which represents a collection of offices to the Board of Trustees and works on large scale initiatives across multi-departments. Do you all have more layers?