“administrative bloat, cost inflation and toxic credentialism”
For years now, colleges and universities in the US, both public and private, have been spending more on bureaucracy and less on actual teaching. Since the 1970s, the ratio of faculty to administrators has flipped, in large part because they have become not just places of education but lifestyle centres. College campuses now offer mental health services, intramural sports, entertainment, luxury dorms and gourmet food. Until recently, DEI initiatives proliferated (the latter are now under legal threat following the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in 2023).
You need more people to run all these things. And while college administrators used to be promoted from inside the academy itself, they are now largely drawn from business schools and professional management programmes. These people are often disconnected from the core mission of teaching and yet their ubiquity and high salaries (often into six-figures) force schools to push up the cost of tuition.
Between 1979 and 2021, the price of a four-year degree tripled, even after accounting for normal inflation. That translates into more teaching being done by lower-paid adjuncts rather than full-time faculty.
