Where Does an Administrator's Working Time Go at a University?
Analysis of how scattered knowledge and manual email handling affect the institution's overall operations. Daskalos Consulting, 2025–2026
According to our own research covering 37 Hungarian higher education institutions, handling an average student or admissions inquiry takes approximately 9 minutes, and according to 71.9% of respondents, a significant share of this is manual searching through PDFs and Excel files, because knowledge lives scattered. In addition, 80–90% of incoming questions are repetitive and routine in nature, meaning the majority of staff time goes toward questions that are typically the same from month to month. Below, we show exactly where this time goes, and why the answer affects more than just the administrative department.
Where does the time go?
When an administrator sits down to answer a question, respondents most frequently search in the following document types:
| Document type | Share |
|---|---|
| 75.7% | |
| Word | 59.5% |
| Web pages | 45.9% |
| Excel | 40.5% |
| Images/scanned documents | 24.3% |
Among the systems used daily, Neptun is nearly universal (100%), email client use is also nearly complete (91.9%), while SharePoint/OneDrive (45.9%) and Google Drive (27.0%) show a more mixed picture. Virtually no one uses a dedicated helpdesk or ticketing system (2.7%). In most institutions, then, there is no central place where a question could be tracked from start to finish. Every single answer is the result of individual, manual searching across multiple, disconnected systems.
This is reinforced by the question of whether a well-usable, central knowledge base even exists for administrative processes (on a 1–5 scale, where 5 means fully exists): responses were widely scattered, with a clear peak in the middle. Most (32.4%) chose the midpoint of the scale, while the two extreme values each received only 16.2%. There is no uniform industry practice: the level of knowledge-base development varies widely from institution to institution.
How much time is this in total?
According to our own demand model, this time requirement scales directly in proportion to student headcount.
| Student headcount | Daily administrative time |
|---|---|
| < 3,000 | ~4.1 hours |
| 3,000–10,000 | ~15.1 hours |
| 10,000–25,000 | ~41.5 hours |
| > 25,000 | ~79.4 hours |
At a larger institution, this represents multiple full working days on a daily basis. Not an isolated, negligible item, but a continuously recurring, systemic burden.
What does a well-designed staff assistant solve?
Emily's staff assistant role deals not with students, but directly with administrators themselves. It generates automatic reply drafts for incoming emails, with source citations, so the administrator only reviews and sends, rather than writing from scratch. It automatically categorizes and routes emails to the appropriate colleague, with status and deadline tracking. It searches across the institution's entire knowledge base, with instant results, removing the need to individually browse through PDFs and Excel files. And it provides a single, central support email address, meaning single-inbox email administration, instead of questions landing scattered across multiple inboxes.
These four elements are, in our view, not optional conveniences but a baseline requirement for a system to genuinely be called a staff assistant. Without reply drafts, the system only surfaces information but doesn't actually speed up administration. Without categorization and routing, the scattering remains exactly where it was. Without search, the administrator still opens documents one by one. Without single-inbox intake, the parallel, isolated correspondence, and the unpredictable response times that result from it, does not go away. What is built without these is, at best, a search function, not a staff assistant.
Why isn't this just the administrative department's concern?
Based on our own internal performance benchmark, a well-configured system can independently and without escalation answer approximately 85% of incoming digital inquiries. The remaining 15% reaches a human administrator, typically for complex, individual cases. A large share of the working time described above, currently spent on routine questions and manual searching, can therefore be freed up.
This freed-up capacity doesn't disappear, it reappears elsewhere. An administrator who spends less time manually answering repetitive questions can devote more time to complex, individually assessed cases, such as equity requests or unique academic situations, to preparing admissions and scholarship decisions, or to genuine, personal contact with students. The improvement in staff efficiency doesn't stop at the boundaries of the administrative department. It ripples through every institutional process that relies on the same human capacity.
What does this mean for the institution?
If a significant share of administrators' time today goes toward scattered searching and repetitive questions, as our research shows, then a well-designed staff assistant makes its impact felt not only in the administrative department, but across the institution's overall operational capacity.
If you would like to assess where your institution stands in this regard, how much time currently goes toward scattered searching and repetitive questions, feel free to reach out to us.
About the research: Daskalos Consulting's national survey, based on responses from staff at 37 Hungarian higher education institutions, conducted over 2025–2026, over a period of nearly eight months, supplemented with our own demand model. The 85% resolution rate is our own internal performance benchmark, not directly measured survey data. The full methodology is available upon request.