Without such bold action, alumni, their families, and, apparently, taxpayers will all pay the price.
Without such bold action, alumni, their families, and, apparently, taxpayers will all pay the price.
A ccording to U.S. News and World Report, the average tuition and fees at ranked colleges for the 2021–22 academic year were $10,338 for in-state public schools, $22,698 for out-of-state public schools, and $38,185 for private schools. With no-questions-asked access to educational loans, it’s no surprise that U.S. student-loan debt topped $1.75 trillion last month.
The social ramifications are very real. Families are struggling with student-loan debt, while many young professionals are delaying marriage or opting not to have families at all because they feel their repayment obligations are too great.
Democrats in Washington, as is their wont, promulgate their perpetual policy panacea: throw money at the problem. They’ve made student-loan forgiveness a platform plank for their party and a primary imperative of the Biden administration, with POTUS fans celebrating his illegal student-loan bailout last week, which will transfer $10,000 to $20,000 in debt from some taxpayers to others, in addition to making other sweeping changes that ultimately reduce borrower responsibility. Never mind, of course, the legality, fairness, or economics of the matter.
Perhaps this is because treating the symptoms of the student-debt crisis is intellectually and politically easier than meaningfully addressing the cause. It takes no courage to willfully ignore the experts who have sounded the alarm for decades that government subsidy of higher education drives up its price. And while they’ve given themselves permission to turn a blind eye to the inflation pains Americans are feeling, it might be harder to ignore its effects on higher education, given that tuition already grew at twice the inflation rate over the past few decades.
Even as universities employ emerging technologies and produce groundbreaking new research, it’s hard to imagine that these innovations in education warrant the ever-increasing costs of sending a young adult to college. That’s because the increases aren’t connected to new learning at all.
In his 2017 paper “The Changing of the Guard: The Political Economy of Administrative Bloat in American Higher Education,” George Mason University law-school professor Todd Zywicki concludes that administrative hires at colleges and universities increased “50 percent faster than the number of classroom instructors.” Today, three in ten higher-education dollars go directly to what researchers have deemed “administrative blight” or “administrative bloat,” a phenomenon that has spurred record numbers of collegiate professional staff. This group does not include the professors or instructors responsible for educating young scholars.
During the 2014–15 school year, instructional costs in higher education were around $148 billion, while administrative expenses nearly caught up to them, at $122.3 billion. Seven years later and amid skyrocketed inflation, the costs of college administration are indubitably even higher. From a review of current job openings at higheredjobs.com, their priorities are even clearer: Today, there are approximately 38,000 faculty positions open nationwide, just half of the more than 75,600 administrative and executive jobs available.
At some elite institutions, administrators have begun to outnumber the students they’re meant to serve. By 2015, there were the same number of administrators at Harvard University as undergraduate students. In 2021, Yale earned a similar distinction, as the number of its non-instructor professional staff had ballooned 45 percent in less than two decades. As of 2018, Stanford University, which has recently come under fire for its micromanagement of adult students that includes racially segregated housing and draconian rules governing alcohol consumption, employed 14,448 nonteaching employees, more than double the nearly 6,679 instructional employees on the payroll, a rather remarkable feat considering that the university’s enrollment was approximately 17,000 students that academic year.
These bureaucrats are often hired for deliberately opaque positions, with titles such as “Senior Student Accountability Coordinator” and “LGBTQIA+ Equity, Success, and Wellness Coordinator.” At California State University, Sacramento, an administrator can make upwards of $13,750 monthly for serving as the “Associate Athletic Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” And at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Ky., a “Student Affairs Assistant III” position exists, whose holder is to “collaborate with faculty, staff, and community partners to promote a supportive environment where students thrive,” whatever that means.
“The interesting thing about the administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing,” Zywicki told Forbes in 2017.
And even with all their staffing largesse, universities continue to demand more money in tuition, student fees, and taxpayer dollars. My alma mater, Louisiana State University, periodically attempts to force lawmakers to raise taxes to funnel more money to it. In 2016, Democratic governor John Bel Edwards, on behalf of the school, insisted that if the legislature wouldn’t come up with the funds to close the budget gap (read: raise taxes), some students couldn’t attend classes, endangering their graduation tracks, and the school’s beloved school football program would be put on ice.
Because universities remain the primary beneficiaries of the federal government’s irresponsible student-loan policies, it is imperative that a full-scale audit is performed of the administrative state of America’s higher education. Lawmakers must weigh the educational benefit of instruction against administration, prioritizing the latter over the former, to bring down the costs of higher education. Without such bold action, alumni, their families, and, apparently, taxpayers will all pay the price.