Politics

Here is a perspective from within the belly of the beast in case it is interesting to someone: state legislatures starving higher ed for funding is a story that goes back over 30 years. It is responsible to a significant degree for the tuition hikes that have made a college education too costly for many students. In effect, this funding cut and resulting tuition hike has shifted costs of an educated workforce from wealthy taxpayers to young people. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging

Administrative bloat is also a problem, and falls into a couple of categories. You have the university presidents and coaches, on one hand, where the appointments are themselves a political plum in some states and game day is an excuse for rich alumni to drive $300,000 RVs to sit in corporate skyboxes. (State legislatures don’t seem to have issues with that spending, for some reason).

Then there is the multiplication of various vice-provosts, directors, department heads, etc. Some of that is legitimate administrative bloat, but it tends to gets pared back fairly regularly when a recession hits or enrollment drops. In many institutions a lot of the remaining bloat is administrative infrastructure built up around competition for students, compliance with Federal mandates, and research efforts to make up for that lost state funding. You have student life. Dining services. Residence life. Disability services. Equal opportunity offices. Financial aid offices. Faculty affairs offices. Institutional research. Institutional support. HR operations. State mandated procurement and budgeting units. Huge staffing structures around the research enterprise. Units dedicated to service and outreach. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

The point is not that all of these these activities are good and have to be preserved, or that they are bad and have to be axed. The point is that a lot of university activity that at first blush looks like cancerous growth is a response to the need to compete for tuition paying students, to keep the feds and state legislatures happy, and to land that the next big grant. A good bit of THAT can in turn be traced back to the aforesaid budget cuts and rising expectations about the sort of support that institutions of higher education are expected to supply.

Wow, that ended up longer than I intended, but I’ll leave it for the 1 or 2 of you who care about this stuff.