A Very Mixed Bag - Anonymous employee NYU (New York University) Employee Review

1) Calcified culture 2) Very difficult to let go of underperforming talent 3) Very difficult to accomplish tasks in a timely fashion 4) If you are someone who wants to "get lost" inside a machine that doesn't hold people accountable, join NYU or any other higher education institution. 5) NYU fails to attract and retain quality talent because of the general culture present in higher education. That culture rewards political favors, unnecessary and counterproductive "consensus building" which can stretch what should be a 6 month project to several years, and does not pay prevailing wages. Example: In a corporate environment, what should take a day or two in terms of an email response to a query could take a week or more at NYU. That is, unfortunately, the de facto response and the culture of sluggishness that exists in NYU and almost all higher education institutions. 6) On the latter point, NYU does offer very generous Tuition Remission and Retirement matching benefits (though they have been skimping on the tuition remission component in recent years). However, if you are not interested in attaining more education or are not in need of turbo-charging your retirement accounts, NYU will likely drive you batty. Unfortunately these elements in combination lead to "older" employees who are looking to hold on as long as possible to get themselves to retirement, or get their children through school, and very "young" employees who are merely trying to get through school and get out as quickly as possible. Many of the remaining people in between fall into a category of being "unhireable" anywhere outside of the higher education environment. 7) Another NYU failing, and likely higher education in general, falls to the apportionment of funds for various departments. Ex: NYU will spend millions on its faculty on such frivolous items as underwriting mortgages with *very* generous benefits for deans, loans for cars and other non-education related expenses for professors, etc. In the meantime, they will cut headcount for critical services such as IT, Security, etc. Or cut services that help offset recruitment issue woes such as Tuition Remission. Another example of this failure is the use of high-priced consultants instead of hiring competent employees at prevailing wages. Rather than hire an extra 2-3 employees to support critical systems, an expenditure which might cost NYU $200,000-$300,000/yr at prevailing wages and benefits, NYU will pay consultants $1,000,000 for the same work, year after year. This is because those consultants are part of a different budget than is counted for full time headcount. This ensures that the ultimate bearers of those costs, the parents and students, will continue to see their tuition rise unnecessarily. These and many other issues make NYU, and many higher education institutions, highly inefficient and ineffective, yet obscenely expensive, places to work and finance. NYU could do much, much, better.