For the last several decades, American colleges and universities have been adding administrative personnel much faster than faculty. As the money has poured in (mainly due to our ridiculous system of federal student aid), school officials have chosen to spend it largely on brigades of administrators to oversee dubious functions such as “diversity.”
In today’s Martin Center article, Ashlynn Warta takes a look at the growth of administrative spending in the UNC system. It increased from $2,217 per student in 2006 to $4,069 per student in 2017.
Clearly, more resources are going into administration than teaching, contributing to the increasing cost of a college degree.
But it’s more than that. As Warta observes, “Costs and budgets aside, administrators often have the power to be the ‘neck’ of their institutions, meaning they can decide which way to turn the head. Administrators take part in deciding what is and is not acceptable on college campuses, and, unfortunately for students, this can mean limiting free speech, encouraging censorship, and generally promoting ideals (such as ideological one-sidedness) that limit intellectual growth.”
That’s right, and the ranks of administrators are overwhelmingly filled with people who are college grads who have been steeped in the leftist worldview. They tend to be hostile to our traditions, eager to use their schools to bring about the great transformation of the country that they fervently believe in.
We have to pay for them (and often, they’re better paid than faculty members) and suffer their bad influence on our colleges and universities. A double whammy.