Administrative burden in higher education institutions: a conceptualisation and a research agenda

ABSTRACT

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is growing concern about increasing administrative burden within universities around the world. At the same time, the literature explicitly devoted to the issue of administrative burden within universities remains relatively scant. Drawing on various bodies of literature and reflections on the situation at Australian universities, this paper (a) presents a conceptualisation of what constitutes administrative burden, considering its organisational implications for universities, (b) interrogates a range of potential drivers of administrative burden, and (c) outlines avenues for both future research into and for practical responses to the issue. The specific contributions of this paper include, first, showing that administrative burden can impact universities’ core activities not only indirectly but also more directly, and second, illustrating that some of the key changes that were meant to make universities more efficient may have inadvertently increased levels of administrative burden.

KEYWORDS:

• Automation
• bureaucratisation
• formalisation
• university governance
• organisational change
• institutional management

Introduction

The issue of administrative burden – a concept basically referring to the burdens or costs associated with completing administrative tasks – is a complex one due to the various individual and organisational actors involved in administration and their respective intentions and perspectives (see Heinrich, 2016; Herd & Moynihan, 2019). This is particularly so when it comes to its manifestations within higher education institutions such as universities that are highly knowledge-intensive and professionalised organisations (see Bleiklie et al., 2015) and in which administrative tasks and demands can infringe on the time and energy that staff can devote to universities’ core activities of teaching and research (see Lorenz, 2012; Martin, 2016; Woelert et al., 2021). Yet despite these potential ramifications, the body of literature explicitly dedicated to exploring the issue of administrative burden in the university sector remains of a relatively recent and contained nature (e.g., Bozeman & Youtie, 2020; Bozeman et al., 2020; Woelert, 2021). In particular, there currently remains a lack of literature attempting an overarching conceptualisation of the issue of administrative burden within the university sector and which in doing so considers the manifold ways such burdens may practically impact universities’ core activities.

Addressing the resulting lacuna, this paper provides a systematic conceptualisation of the key manifestations and implications of administrative burden occurring within the university sector. More specifically, and drawing on various bodies of literature and reflections on the situation at Australian universities, this paper (a) presents a conceptualisation of what constitutes administrative burden, considering its organisational implications, (b) interrogates a range of potential drivers of administrative burden, and (c) outlines avenues for both future research into and for practical responses to the issue of administrative burden, thus preparing the ground for more targeted empirical studies and interventions.

The Australian university sector presents an interesting case for illustrating the issues associated with administrative burden in higher education institutions for two interrelated reasons. First, Australia is known internationally for having established a particularly stringent and persistent form of New Public Management-style governance for its university sector strongly emphasising performance-based accountability and institutional competition (see, e.g., Croucher & Woelert, 2022; Marginson, 1997). One key development associated with this form of governance has been a shift from direct bureaucratic regulation of university-internal affairs by the state to a modus operandi stressing universities’ managerial autonomy (Marginson, 1997; see also Enders et al., 2013). Importantly, it has been a deeply entrenched policy belief that such shift would make universities more efficient administratively, despite some studies suggesting a more complex reality (Christensen, 2011; Enders et al., 2013).

Second and reflecting this apparent tension, there is some evidence to suggest that despite the ensuing, sweeping changes to institutional governance and management that have occurred, levels of administrative burden at Australian universities remain comparatively high. One key indication for this is a large-scale international survey on changing work conditions at universities, conducted more than a decade ago, in which professors from Australian universities reported spending more time on administrative duties and less time on teaching than any of their international peers (Bentley & Kyvik, 2012). Additionally, some recent and targeted empirical studies have demonstrated that within the Australian university context, a considerable administrative burden is associated with, for example, research grant applications (Herbert et al., 2013) and academic recruitment (Woelert, 2021).

What is administrative burden?

The concept of administrative burden has its roots in the public administration literature (Burden et al., 2012; Herd & Moynihan, 2019). In this literature, the concept initially emerged to capture the various burdens or costs that individuals encounter in their interactions with government organisations. Following Moynihan et al., (2015, pp. 45–46), one can in the main distinguish three such costs: compliance costs reflecting the ‘burdens of following administrative rules and requirements’, learning costs referring to the time and costs individuals have to invest to learn about services provided and how to access them, and psychological costs including feelings like stress or a loss of autonomy arising from interactions with the state and its administrative processes.

To date, most of the empirical research on administrative burden has focused on the experiences of individuals interacting with public sector social and health services. However, more recent research has widened both the range of the concept and its application in at least two ways. First, the study of manifestations of administrative burden has been extended across a wider range of policy and organisational settings including the higher education sector (Bozeman et al., 2020; Woelert, 2021). Second, increasing attention has been devoted to the broader organisational implications of administrative burden, in addition to the consideration of individual costs. A range of recent studies, for example, has been devoted to employees’ experiences of administrative burden, including in universities (Bozeman et al., 2020, 2021). These studies illustrate that administrative burdens can also have repercussions for organisational effectiveness more broadly. It has been shown, for example, that experiences of administrative burden may result in employees continuously attempting to shift these burdens to other parts of the organisation (Burden et al., 2012). In addition to the resulting dysfunctionalities, such shifting can then also inflict considerable opportunity costs at the organisational level if, for example, it involves imposing significant administrative burdens on that part of the workforce primarily responsible for delivering organisations’ core products or services such as teaching and research in the case of universities (Bozeman et al., 2020, p. 13).

Having introduced the concept of administrative burden, initially in terms of individual costs but then also under consideration of the implications for organisational effectiveness, the meaning and scope of the concept can be delineated further through clarification of its relationships with neighbouring conceptions such as formalisation and ‘red tape’ (see Bozeman & Scott, 1996). Formalisation – referring to both the use of written rules and their proliferation in organisational contexts – has traditionally been understood as one of the defining features of the bureaucratic organisation (Weber, 1978), alongside elements such as hierarchical authority and the use of adequate administrative technologies for the ordering, storing, and retrieval of information (see Vismann, 2008). In potentially adding to compliance costs (associated with adhering to rules) and learning costs (associated with learning about new rules), among others, increases in formalisation are also likely to result in increases in administrative burden. However, it is important to note that the relationship between formalisation and administrative burden is not always straightforward. It has been well established, for example, that increased formalisation may also result in a proliferation of workaround behaviours that aim to effectively reduce administrative burden at the ‘street level’ (Bozeman et al., 2021; Luhmann, 1999). Moreover, not all increases in administrative burden can be directly linked to formalisation. One example of this is the progressive addition of content to administrative documents and forms associated with academic recruitment, in the absence of any formal rules demanding such change (see Woelert, 2021).

In the public administration literature, the concept of red tape has been used, in a more expressively normative and critical fashion, to refer to those rules, regulations, or procedures that impose administrative burdens but that also ‘serve no appreciable organisational or social function’ (Bozeman & Scott, 1996, p. 8). This sets red tape apart from those administrative burdens that, while imposing both individual and organisational costs, ultimately are tied to reasonable and legitimate organisational objectives. For example, in the university context, research ethics procedures unavoidably impose significant administrative burdens but, generally, do not constitute red tape due to providing important safeguards for protecting research participants as well as institutions. By comparison, asking everyone applying for an academic role in a business faculty to provide a written statement on their understanding of and commitment to a university’s occupational health and safety requirements can be deemed a case of red tape given both the dubious value of the information provided and the fact that this information hardly plays any role in the actual shortlisting of applicants (see Woelert, 2021, p. 33).

How does administrative burden manifest within higher education institutions and with what implications?

Investigating the issue of administrative burden presents some unique challenges when it comes to higher education institutions. Australian universities are no exception. To begin with, these universities exhibit the characteristics of hybrid organisations, featuring a strong managerial core with significant and hierarchical steering control while maintaining at the same time some of the traits associated with what has been termed ‘professional bureaucracies’. Professional bureaucracies are characterised by the coexistence of a bureaucratic administration relying upon hierarchical authority and formalisation, among others, and spheres of professional self-control and autonomy (e.g., Blau, 1973; Bleiklie et al., 2015; Mintzberg, 1979). One implication of this hybridity is that views of what constitutes administrative burden may vary significantly within universities – what can look like an efficient and legitimate administrative process from a managerial point of view may do so less if considering the priorities and values of, for example, those staff who are members of the academic profession.

Further complicating the picture, universities’ knowledge-intensive and key revenue-generating activities – teaching and research – are also notorious for the highly complex and uncertain relationships existing between inputs, outputs, and, perhaps most importantly, outcomes (see Whitley, 2008). It has been suggested that this implies that universities’ efforts to comprehensively organise and direct these activities on an organisational level and anticipate their outcomes are likely to remain ineffective or, potentially, counterproductive (Krücken, 2014; see also Dahler-Larsen, 2014). It can be argued that the growth in administrative bureaucracies (Gornitzka et al., 1998) and the proliferation in administrative burdens at universities are examples of such counterproductive steering effects (see Maassen & Stensaker, 2019; see also section ‘What drives administrative burden in higher education institutions?’).

Generally, administrative burden can shape and constrain universities’ core activities in several ways. First, and on a basic level, it is important to remember that all administrative burden, necessary or unnecessary, carries an opportunity cost for universities as organisations. This means that the time and energy required to, for example, learn about and comply with administrative rules and the associated procedures will take away from the time and energy that can be invested into other activities, notably including those directly associated with universities’ teaching and research missions. It can thus be argued that professors at Australian universities reportedly spending a disproportionate time on completing administrative tasks imposes a significant opportunity cost and one that may also partially explain their, by international standards, low engagement with the teaching of students (see Bentley & Kyvik, 2012).

Second, and additionally, administrative burden may exert an influence on universities’ research and teaching in a more direct manner, through complicating, disincentivising, or preventing specific tasks and actions that are core to conducting these activities effectively and in the appropriate manner. This can be illustrated by a range of key examples and which are discussed below specifying some of the ways in which administrative burden can concretely bear upon the conduct of teaching and research at Australian universities.

The specific examples provided were derived in two stages. In the first step, a range of anecdotal evidence was considered to select a limited number of key examples of administrative burden manifesting within the sector. This evidence includes the author’s own personal experiences and the content of informal conversations with colleagues working across the university sector in Australia. In the second step, these experiences and observations were validated against publicly available information on relevant university policies or procedures to ensure the selected anecdotal evidence reflects organisational realities.

Taken together, the various sources of evidence considered suggest that the selected examples broadly capture some of the typical ways in which administrative burden manifests at universities in Australia and the associated implications. This does not mean, however, that these examples can be universally encountered in one and the same form across all Australian universities, and future research may well reveal key differences in how administrative burden manifests at different types of universities.

Examples of administrative burden in teaching

Over recent decades, many Australian universities have moved to a more centralised and bureaucratic mode of control over faculty-level curricula and any changes pertaining to these (see Woelert et al., 2022). While this organisational change has enabled universities to more effectively comply with and report against standards set by national quality assurance bodies (Vidovich, 2012), it has also considerably increased, at the university level, the administrative burden associated with making a range of modifications and adjustments to any subjects offered. For example, making even relatively minor changes to assessment requirements of core subjects these days requires completing extensive paperwork and gaining multiple levels of approval across the entire university. The same bureaucratic arrangement also means that relevant change proposals need to be submitted a considerable period of time – commonly around a year or so – before any changes to subjects can come into effect. Overall, the considerable administrative burdens associated with proposing any substantial changes to subjects, as well as the accompanying delays, present a considerable disincentive to modifying subjects even where this may be called for pedagogically. By extension, it can be argued that in the scenario presented, administrative burden is likely to have a direct, and negative, impact on the quality of universities’ teaching offerings.

Administrative burden also is a considerable and underacknowledged issue when it comes to the staffing of universities’ teaching activities. In their teaching of students, Australian universities rely heavily upon a group of contingent academic staff who are referred to as casuals (Brown et al., 2010). While such reliance is commonly justified by universities on the grounds of improved organisational flexibility, it also comes with significant administrative burdens. First and foremost, this applies to the casual staff themselves who, despite them being offered little job security or even guaranteed hours of work, tend to be burdened with often considerable learning, compliance, and psychological costs. For example, it is now a common requirement that all casual staff undertake a range of online training programmes on issues such as compliance when commencing their roles, and the completion of which can take a considerable amount of time. This can be particularly burdensome if these staff are on multiple casual contracts at a time and are working across different institutions, which is not uncommon. Related to this, someone who delivers a guest lecture of one hour may thus be asked to complete several hours of compliance training as part of the job, and it is not always clear whether the time it takes to complete such training will be adequately compensated for or not.

Examples of administrative burden in research

The administrative burden associated with the procurement of equipment and services that directly support research activities appears to be a common source of frustration at Australian universities. In parallel to strengthening central oversight and control over their teaching, Australian universities generally have moved to adopt university-wide purchasing systems, the use of which is mandatory across the entire organisation. While these systems were meant to streamline purchasing activities and contribute to the realisation of economies of scale, they also can be a source of considerable administrative burden. Adding a new supplier to a university’s purchasing system, for example, tends to be an administratively complex and onerous task that can take considerable time until approval. This not only places a substantial burden on researchers who often have to navigate the required paperwork themselves with only little direct administrative support, but also puts smaller and highly specialised suppliers at a structural disadvantage due to the paperwork and delays involved. Furthermore, any resulting delays also can have a direct and negative impact on research activities. For example, such delays can result in additional purchasing costs that need to be compensated elsewhere, and they also can significantly reduce the scope of enquiry due to research timelines that need to be met.

Another area in which administrative burden can be considerable is research-related travel such as for visiting conferences. It is common practice at Australian universities that researchers apply for and organise their own trips rather than this being done by dedicated professional staff. At the same time, and even if using their own research funds for travelling, there are considerable restrictions on how researchers can go about booking their travels. Many universities have preferred travel agents, for example, and the option of resorting to another provider that offers cheaper fares can be either restricted or require the completion of additional paperwork. Additionally, gaining approval for research-related travel can be an onerous process, imposing not only necessary but also considerable unnecessary administrative burden and thus, ultimately, red tape. For example, some universities ask researchers to provide a rationale for alignment of the proposed travel with the university’s broader strategic priorities or objectives (which often tend to be quite vacuous) when lodging their travel requests, while others require a detailed risk assessment even if only visiting an academic conference in Australia.

Summary

In each of these four specific examples, the associated compliance, learning, and psychological costs are evident. In each instance, compliance costs in the main reflect increases in the range and complexity of relevant rules to comply with. Learning costs reflect the efforts required to learn about and apply these new systems of rules and handle the associated procedures. In the examples presented, these costs are perhaps particularly contentious, either because they appear to be inflicted on staff working under more precarious circumstances and, potentially, without clarity around appropriate compensation or because they are imposed on staff for whom the completion of the required paperwork is an important but not routine part of their work. Both the compliance and learning costs occurred, finally, result in additional psychological costs, either manifesting in the form of increased stress arising from the time and energy required to complete administrative tasks or from experiences of reduced autonomy over core aspects of professional work.

Naturally, the examples provided capture only a small, yet significant, part of the administrative burdens arising within the domains of teaching and research activities at Australian universities. Further key examples could include, for instance, the domain of research ethics, which has been repeatedly identified in the literature as a source of growing administrative burden (Barnett et al., 2016; Rush et al., 2018). A particular concern in this regard has been a growing scope of the paperwork required for approval of research projects that are of low or negligible risk, leading to levels of administrative burden that seem unreasonable (Rush et al., 2018). Similarly, and anecdotally, the lack of integration of various online platforms used by universities for managing their teaching activities seems to be commonly seen as a key source of unnecessary administrative burden, complicating administrative tasks that should either be automated or relatively straightforward, such as the entering of student grades.

What drives administrative burden in higher education institutions?

The previous discussion of the ways administrative burden manifests in higher education institutions raises the important question concerning the key underlying drivers. Identification of such drivers is no straightforward task. One immediate challenge arising is that, in the case of the Australian university sector, the universities in scope comprise institutions with generally high levels of complexity and which vary significantly in terms of size and local contextual conditions (see Croucher & Woelert, 2022). Such sort of complex and diverse institutional setting is evidently ill suited to the use of experimental research designs, including control groups, that are widely considered key to making sound inferences regarding causes or drivers.

At the same time, it has been convincingly argued that in nonexperimental settings, causal inferences can still be arrived at if, for example, carefully considering disparate sources of evidence and applying extensive contextual knowledge (see Freedman, 2005). The following exploratory discussions present a first and preliminary step towards such undertaking, reflecting the lack of systematic research into the drivers of administrative burden in higher education institutions more generally and in the Australian university system more specifically. They are informed by previous research into the governance and organisation of Australian universities and focus on illuminating the role of a range of potential drivers of administrative burden. The drivers considered are analytically grouped into three broader categories, ranging from broader contextual factors associated with either system-level or organisational governance settings and dynamics to, as it were, more immediate and material drivers, such as specific changes in university staffing makeup or technologies.

New Public Management system-level governance and regulatory burden

Reflecting pressures on governments and publicly funded organisations to demonstrate ‘value for money’, over recent decades system-level governance settings in Australia have come to enduringly approximate the New Public Management ideal type in key respects (Croucher & Woelert, 2022; Marginson, 1997). This, inter alia, manifests in high levels of state-organised competition – for example, when it comes to the allocation of research funding – and high levels of managerial autonomy and performance-based accountability for universities, yet also lower levels of overt state regulation of university-internal affairs (see de Boer et al., 2007). While such increase in institutional autonomy and accountability was meant to make universities more efficient administratively compared to a more direct bureaucratic mode of state steering, there appears to be some consensus now that the desired reduction in regulatory burden has not fully materialised (Christensen, 2011; Enders et al., 2013). On the contrary, there is much to suggest that as a result of the ongoing commitment to New Public Management-style governance settings, regulatory burden for universities has in fact increased.

The key areas where this increase in regulatory burden is particularly apparent are the domains of performance-based governance and quality assurance. In Australia, national performance-based governance has become particularly extensive when it comes to the steering of university-based research, comprising national policy instruments such as performance-based funding mechanisms (Hicks, 2012; Woelert & McKenzie, 2018), the national research evaluation scheme, and the regular national research grant scheme, each of which having their own comprehensive set of rules and reporting requirements. The national performance-based research funding system, for example, was introduced with the ambition of rewarding universities’ productivity and doing so in a relatively efficient manner, through tying funding allocations to specified results or ‘outputs’. Yet, it has been observed, such systems can also incur considerable costs as research outputs have to be classified and reported against a set of complex rules, often involving working with big sets of data that need to be cleaned and validated (Hicks, 2012, p. 257). At the institutional level, this can translate into extensive administrative burden manifesting, for example, at the level of faculties and departments that must compile and report the relevant performance data (see Woelert & McKenzie, 2018).

Similarly, recent decades generally have seen an intensification of quality assurance in Australian higher education, culminating in the introduction of national standards for teaching but also research against which universities are held accountable (Jungblut & Woelert, 2018; Vidovich, 2012). Related trends include a transition from internal to external forms of accountability and from qualitative to quantitative measures (Vidovich, 2012). It has been argued that these changes also imply increased regulatory burden as universities must collect a range of relevant data and report these to government agencies on a regular basis (see Rowlands, 2017; Vidovich, 2012). At the institutional level, it has been observed, this tends to directly translate to increased administrative burdens, as compliance-related administrative tasks proliferate and take up an increasing amount of time of various groups of staff, ultimately constituting what has been referred to as a new form of bureaucracy (Travers, 2007).

Changes to organisational governance

Related to these changes in terms of macro-level governance settings, recent decades have seen extensive transformation of the internal governance and organisation of Australian universities. There is some evidence that some of the associated key changes also have been conducive to increasing administrative burdens within universities.

One such key change has been the centralisation of steering power and strategic control within Australian universities and the associated establishment of comprehensive systems of top-down management control to monitor performances and ensure compliance with centrally established targets and objectives. Among the key implications of this change are the creation of a stronger central executive, possessing enlarged decision-making powers within universities, and the adoption of standardising systems, procedures, or practices that have their roots in the private sector (see Rowlands, 2017).

Transforming the university into a more centrally controlled and tightly managed organisation has been widely seen as unavoidable given increased demands for efficiency and accountability and also given the fact that many universities, and those in Australia in particular, have become rather large organisations in terms of staff and student numbers. However, some have argued that such increase in central steering and management control also runs the risk of reducing organisational flexibility and intensifying administrative burdens within universities (see Maassen & Stensaker, 2019). For example, research suggests that the same performance management systems that were introduced to increase efficiency and accountability within universities can also act as a source of considerable administrative burden for the concerned staff due to the amounts of reporting and documentation involved (Woelert et al., 2021). Importantly, these burdens persist even if performance reviews are completed primarily for ‘ceremonial’ reasons and have little actual ramifications on the ground (see Yates et al., 2016).

Adding to this, it has been frequently observed that the attempt to transform universities into more tightly managed organisations has resulted in increased formalisation of institutional processes (see Bleiklie et al., 2015; Ramirez & Christensen, 2012) extending to domains such as university teaching and research previously governed by the academic profession in a more informal manner. As previously noted, increases in formalisation have the propensity to result in increases in administrative burdens. For the Australian case, there are at least two likely explanations for this increase in formalisation. First, it has been shown that university leadership in Australia can be prone to internally applying the complex rules associated with system-level, performance-based governance instruments, often down to the level of managing individual staff – the national performance-based research funding system in Australia being a particularly well-documented case in point (Woelert & McKenzie, 2018). Second, there is much to suggest that mirroring developments elsewhere (Ramirez & Christensen, 2012), universities’ increased engagement in diverse outreach and entrepreneurial activities has also resulted in increased formalisation due to the need to manage the associated complexities and risks. However, more in-depth research is needed to establish the extent to which this has occurred in various domains of university activity and the associated implications for administrative burden.

Changes to university workforce and technologies

In addition to and associated with these broader changes to governance and organisation, there finally is a range of more immediate drivers of administrative burden within universities that deserves consideration, such as changes to university personnel and administrative technologies.

Of these two, changes to the composition of universities’ workforce are the best documented. A recent detailed longitudinal study revealed that, over the twenty years or so, there has been extensive change to the makeup of Australian universities’ professional workforce, with ensuing implications for levels of administrative burden (Croucher & Woelert, 2022). The key trends identified include a substantial decrease in those lower level roles dedicated to administrative and technical support functions alongside a steady increase in senior and middle management roles. This suggests that many of the administrative tasks that were initially performed by dedicated support staff possessing the necessary skillsets and routines to do so efficiently and effectively are now directly handled by more highly qualified and remunerated academic and professional staff, mostly on an ad-hoc basis. One key implication arising from this is that the learning costs associated with completing administrative tasks at Australian universities have increased considerably over time, resulting in the imposition of considerable opportunity costs also.

Across the Australian university sector, this decline in support staff has been accompanied, and indeed fuelled, by a progressive automation of administrative processes and tasks through the use of information technology. There appears to be a widespread conviction that such use of automation is key to creating administrative efficiencies, in effect reducing administrative burdens within universities. While there remains a lack of in-depth research into the implications of administrative automation at Australian universities, some international studies suggest that automation has the potential to not only decrease but also increase administrative burdens within higher education institutions.

One striking example of this is what Bozeman et al. (2020) refer to as the domain of ‘robotic bureaucracy’, comprising the various ‘administrative communications and compliance requests being conducted on the basis of automated, highly structured, computer-based interactions’ (p. 1), such as via automated emails. Focusing on the case of research grants management at two U.S. universities, these authors found that the use of robotic bureaucracy may entail the shifting of administrative burdens from research administrators directly to researchers. This is also an issue since the former staff usually have high levels of domain knowledge of administrative processes and requirements, whereas the latter do not, thus resulting in increased learning and compliance costs across the organisation (Bozeman et al., 2020). Furthermore, robotic bureaucracy can add to email overload, which previous research has identified as a key source of administrative burden at Australian universities (Pignata et al., 2015).

At Australian universities and elsewhere, the effects of robotic bureaucracy on administrative burden can be exacerbated further by system integration issues requiring users to enter the same information into several different platforms to complete an administrative task. The same can also be said about the high levels of standardisation that are a core feature of robotic bureaucracy – and which can cause particular issues if it comes to the completion of those more complex tasks that do not fit easily into preconceived categories or templates.

What to do about administrative burden?

Having explored the role of some of the potential drivers of administrative burden within universities, this final section serves to identify a range of key avenues for future research as well as a few selected tactics potentially enabling higher education institutions to effectively address the issue of administrative burden on the ground.

Reflecting the contained research published on the topic of administrative burden in higher education settings, and the dearth of detailed empirical studies in particular, there are at least three promising avenues for future research. First, there is a need for comprehensive surveys of how different groups of staff at higher education institutions experience the administrative burdens they encounter in their work and what they regard as the key dynamics, drivers, and effects. Inclusion of professional staff is paramount in this context, not only because these may have a particular and in-depth understanding of underlying drivers, but also since existing research tends to focus on views of academic staff primarily. Initially, surveys of this kind could be more focused on specific institutions, but ultimately, there is much to be gained from data and analyses enabling broader comparisons, first, nationally, across different types of institutions, and ultimately extending across different national systems. Such surveys could, second, be usefully complemented by systematic time-use studies, again ideally enabling both within-country and cross-national comparison and, where historical data are available, identification of long-term shifts and developments (see Barham et al., 2014).

Third, there is an urgent need for targeted studies into the ways in which specific administrative devices and procedures used within higher education institutions can create new or amplify existing administrative burdens. Perhaps of particular interest here are those administrative tools that have been introduced with the intention to create efficiencies but that, anecdotal evidence suggests, themselves can impose significant administrative burdens. In the Australian context, these could include, for example, the various quantifying workload models and formulae that are used within universities for the allocation of academic work responsibilities (see, e.g., Kenny & Fluck, 2022).

In partial alignment with this research agenda, it can be argued that much of higher education institutions’ capacity to effectively respond to the issue of administrative burden hinges on them first of all attaining a better understanding of how such burden is concretely experienced by their staff on the ground. In particular, there is much to suggest that higher education institutions could greatly profit from regularly capturing and systematically analysing bottom-up staff feedback on processes and procedures that are seen to be burdensome and invite suggestions for improvements. Such feedback could also be a key component of in-house initiatives explicitly dedicated to identifying and reducing unnecessary administrative burden.

Much could also be gained potentially from systematically making the costs associated with administrative burdens within higher education institutions more visible. In the Australian university context, this could involve, for example, establishing ways of capturing the various costs associated with administrative processes and procedures and using these to guide institutional decision-making. Doing so would also address the imbalance currently built into some of Australian universities’ costing models. For example, Australian universities these days commonly use costing tools to calculate the costs (salary and otherwise) associated with their teaching operations. Following the logic of such tools, a small class taught by a professor, for example, is often deemed a financial liability given the high hourly salary rate and low levels of ‘output’ involved. Yet across the sector, the same cost–benefit logic is hardly ever applied if, for instance, the same academic spends an inordinate amount of time compiling the paperwork for approval of the purchase of some basic lab equipment. This, ultimately, means that such inefficient administrative work is rendered invisible institutionally.

Finally, there is much to suggest that higher education institutions would be well placed to adopt a more cautious and circumspect approach to the use of automation, incorporating wide consultation of staff and extensive user-experience testing before rolling out new systems. This caution is called for all the more since the automation of administrative processes is often painted and approached as a panacea for addressing inefficiencies and reducing administrative burdens. As shown, however, existing research indicates that the automation of administrative processes can have a range of unintended and ultimately problematic consequences for high education institutions and their staff, and which include the infliction of considerable opportunity costs and the intensification of already existing administrative burdens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).