By Ellen Carmichael
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
According 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.
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