Bureaucracy complicates students’ lives, making it more difficult to find information or accomplish tasks.
In any organization there is bound to be bureaucracy. With the intricacies of running a university, there are a lot of things that bureaucracy is supposed to help with, things that students do not realize are necessary for the university to continue on successfully. However, the problem with the complicated campus bureaucracy is it makes it difficult for students to find out information and accomplish things.
The problem with bureaucracy is it breaks everything up into small departments that only deal with small, specific things so that the people helping in one department only deal with one specific aspect of something and must refer to another department to fully accomplish a task.
A prime example of campus bureaucracy would be transfer credit. A student who is transferring credits from another college or university must first submit their official transcripts to the office of admissions. The office of admissions then sends the transcripts to an enrollment advisor in the student’s specific college. The student meets with the enrollment advisor and discusses which credits are transferable. After the discussion, the advisor must then send the transcripts and information about accepted credit hours to the registrar’s office. The registrar’s office enters the official information into the student’s TU academic record. Finally, the credit hours are counted to the student’s University of Tulsa academic record. All of these steps are necessary in the transfer process but there must be a way to simplify the process for the university and the student. This is just one example, but there are many others issues where multiple people in different departments must get involved in order to accomplish something.
One of the biggest issues with campus bureaucracy is figuring out who to talk to. A student may know they need to do something but not know who to talk to and there is not always a simple way to figure that out. The problem is not the people in the bureaucracy, it’s the system itself. Every person I have interacted with has been pleasant and willing to help. However, they may not be able to fix the problem, and a student can be sent through a maze of people just to get one thing accomplished.
Another problem with campus bureaucracy is the cost involved with having all of those paid positions. Every bureaucratic role increases the campus’s budget and as the university grows, the bureaucracy only gets bigger continuing to increase costs for the university. Simplifying the bureaucracy would not only reduce the steps to accomplishing task, but also allow the university to cut costs.
There are a lot of ways bureaucracy can be helpful but it can also unnecessarily complicate things. If TU could consolidate and eliminate some of the bureaucracy, then it would be easier to get things done. TU should also implement a help desk that deals with all of the departments for students to direct people to the right department. Reducing campus bureaucracy would lessen confusion and improve campus life by simplifying the process, making it easier for students.
