College Administrative Bloat & Soaring Tuitions

Many young grads are shackled with exorbitant student debt today, and a lot of that debt paid administrators rather than instructors.

"Administrative bloat at American colleges and universities is out of hand, and it's probably the biggest cause of the skyrocketing tuitions that afflict students and parents today," writes law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds @ USAToday.

Everyone knows that tuitions have skyrocketed, though many may not appreciate the full extent of the problem. As University of Michigan economics and finance professor Mark Perry has calculated, college tuition increased from 1978 to 2011 at an annual rate of 7.45%. That far outpaced health-care costs, which increased by 5.8%, and housing, which, notwithstanding the bubble, increased at 4.3%. Family incomes, on the other hand, barely kept up with the Consumer Price Index, which grew at an annual rate of 3.8%.

In another article on the same subject, Benjamin Ginsberg asks "can we curtail administrative bloat on campus?" and argues that "legions of administrators" are wasting time and taking money from instruction.

[Richard] Vedder, one of America's most distinguished educational economists, shows that in 2010-11, less than 30 percent of the $449 billion spent by American colleges and universities was spent on actual instruction. Indeed, for every $1 spent on instruction, $1.82 was spent on non-instructional matters including "institutional support," i.e. the care and feeding of deanlets. [emphasis added]

In yet another article, Walter Russell Mead describes the administrative glut at public and private colleges over the past 25 years this way:

Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors. [emphasis added]