Administrative Bloat Suffocates Higher Ed

As a father of five adult children who have all completed college degree programs at major universities over the past two decades, the upcoming semester is a special occasion because it will mark my final undergraduate tuition payment. Not having to write a check each month to cover a dizzying array of fees, costs, expenses and charges is perhaps the closest thing that I will ever feel to having been emancipated.

But any concern that I might have felt about being forgotten by the university has been alleviated by the Alumni Giving Association which has already reached out to me to discuss the ways in which I can transfer whatever is left of my worldly wealth to the betterment of higher education.

There is nothing like writing a lot of checks to make one wonder about whether the educational institutions themselves could be run more efficiently. This point was dramatized by a recent article in Quillette which showed that college tuition costs have increased 1,200% since 1980 as compared to a mere doubling of the consumer price index during that same period.

Even more depressing is the report by the National Association of Scholars that more than half of the payroll expenses at the average university are now consumed by non-teaching employees (e.g., administrators and staff).

The Heritage Foundation has warned that educational affordability has been imperiled by “administrative bloat,” the vast expansion of the nonteaching, nonresearch administrative personnel in the nation’s universities.

Many of these new hires have been brought aboard to help promote such concepts as diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice — not exactly anchors of the traditional core curriculum of most universities. It views these administrators as little more than “an army of staff who either distract from that mission (of free academic inquiry in pursuit of the truth) by providing therapeutic coddling to students or subvert truth-seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy.”

A different study by the Heritage Foundation estimated that the “average university has more than 45 people devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The concern is that such a preponderance of staffing devoid of any teaching or research orientation may become little more than a form of college thought police with no real constraints on their abilities to push all sorts of ideologies that do not foster the free exchange of ideas.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni offers some sobering statistics regarding the rise of the collegiate bureaucracy, highlighting a study by the Delta Cost Project which revealed that from 1998 to 2008, private colleges increased instructional spending by just 22% whereas administrative spending increased by 36%.

Professor Benjamin Ginsberg went back to 1975 and calculated that during the ensuing 30-year period the number of administrators had increased by 85% and the number of administrative staff had increased by 240%. Indeed, Quillette revealed that there is one administrator for every undergraduate student at Yale University — a tally which presumably excludes any butlers, valets, personal trainers and chefs working for the students themselves.

Emeritus Professor Richard Vedder has also concluded that there are often more administrators than faculty members in the typical university today. The University of Michigan is emblematic of this bureaucratization and, in 2019 was employing 76 diversity officers on a single campus at an annual cost of nearly $11 million — which has not resulted in any appreciable boost in graduation rates.

And lest one think that these are comparatively low-salaried positions, Ashlynn Warta has published the administrative salaries of the entire University of North Carolina system which showed that the average staff salary ranged from $165,466 at UNC-Chapel Hill to $91,448 at Elizabeth City State University. Equally telling was that only 6% of the UNC administrators identified themselves at conservative, whereas 71% identified themselves as liberal or very liberal — a result that does not bode well for the tolerance of all political views on campus.

This bureaucratization of higher education in America is draining precious dollars from the true teaching and research mission of the universities. Hence, the only solution — to borrow the prose of some commentators — is to starve the beast. In other words, cut back any and all state and federal funding until the universities themselves see the error of their ways and end their ill-conceived forays into the muddy morass of social justice, equity and diversity.

Not so clear is whether the bigshots at the universities will ever take the hatchet to their bureaucracies as opposed to the academic departments which have already been bled of tens of billions of dollars over the past four decades.