The College Fix

College tuitions were never cheap, but they used to be much more affordable, particularly at mainstream state-funded institutions. But as tuition costs nationwide have soared, student loan debt has ballooned, and the Great Recession’s end is nowhere in sight, a new critical eye on the country’s broken higher education system has revealed plenty of room for improvement.

A recent series of articles in The Wall Street Journal highlighted many problems university systems across America grapple with, among them – bloated administration costs that jack up tuition prices.

Scott Thurm’s Dec. 14 article “Who Can Still Afford State U?” notes that “administrative costs have soared nationwide, and many administrators have secured big pay increases.”

“Teaching loads have declined for tenured faculty at many schools, adding to costs,” Thurm continues. “Between 2001 and 2011, the Department of Education says, the number of managers at … universities grew 50 percent faster than the number of instructors. What’s more, schools have spent liberally on fancier dorms, dining halls and gyms to compete for students.

Meanwhile, times couldn’t be worse for adding new administration costs.

“Now, cash-strapped states across the country are cutting funding for colleges and directing scarce resources to primary and secondary schooling, Medicaid and prisons,” Thurm states. “That is shifting more of the cost of higher education to students and their families.”

The Wall Street Journal continued the series with the article “Hiring Spree Fattens College Bureaucracy—And Tuition.” It used the University of Minnesota as anecdotal evidence of a larger problematic trend facing the nation, noting the college’s “salary and employment records from 2001 through last spring shows that the system added more than 1,000 administrators over that period. Their ranks grew 37 percent, more than twice as fast as the teaching corps and nearly twice as fast as the student body.”

Nationwide, “nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example,” the Journal notes:

The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50 percent faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It’s part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs. … The Journal, using payroll data provided by the university, calculated that across all of the system’s campuses, administrators consume 24 percent of the payroll, up from 20 percent in 2001. Employees who teach, such as professors, lecturers and instructors, account for 37 percent of the payroll, down from 39 percent in 2001, the Journal calculated.

A graphic the newspaper ran with its series, “How Administrative Spending Boosts College Costs,” noted that “nonclassroom costs at colleges are growing faster than instructional costs, contributing to rising tuition.” The illustration, based on data provided by the U.S. Department of Education, found that about $1,000 to $5,000 is spent per student, per year on administration costs, roughly 6 percent to 14 percent of a pupil’s annual tuition bill. Administrative spending was defined as including university management, human resources, legal, financial, purchasing and marketing operations. Also among the recently hired administrators are so-called diversity and inclusion deans.

Although The Wall Street Journal series came out in December, several reports over the last few years have highlighted the same disturbing trend.

An Aug. 2010 Baltimore Sun article reported on a Goldwater Institute survey which found that:

In 2007, nearly 39 percent of all full-time employees at (surveyed) ‎universities were engaged in administration, an increase of 39 percent from the number of ‎administrators per 100 students in 1993. Only 29 percent of full-time employees were ‎engaged in instruction, research and service, an increase of 18 percent since 1993.

One might think that as enrollments increase, universities would need relatively fewer ‎administrators per student since they could spread those fixed costs over a larger base. ‎Instead, the opposite is occurring. As universities increase their enrollment and ‎receive more money, they expand the ranks of administrators even more rapidly.

Sounds like college officials take their cues from the federal government.

In 2009, Forbes published “Bureaucratic U,” and the write up cited a report from the Delta Cost Project that used U.S. Department of Education data.

“Between 1995 and 2006 spending growth on student services and administration outpaced growth in expenditure on instruction by a multiple of 2 at the private research colleges, 1.75 at public research colleges and 3.2 at public master’s degree granting colleges,” Daniel Bennett, writing for Forbes Magazine, noted.

“Perusing the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, I noticed that Georgia Southern University has an opening for a recreation therapist, the University of Florida an opening for a director of multicultural and diversity affairs, and the University of Maryland, College Park openings for a coordinator of off-campus student involvement and a director of fraternity and sorority life. Will educational outcomes improve with the addition of positions such as these? I fervently doubt it,” Bennett stated. He added:

“Did you know that an academic dean at a doctoral institution receives a median salary of $190,000 (plus generous fringe benefits) or that the median salary of an assistant dean is above $116,000? The College & University Professional Association for Human Resources found that last year senior administrators recorded a third consecutive year of 4 percent pay increases and a twelfth consecutive year of pay increases above inflation. Nearly 10 percent of the 425,000 administrative and support staff employees at 272 research institutions earned a salary above $100,000 last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.”

“Trends in spending make it clear that institutional priorities have shifted, as resources have been reallocated from classroom instruction to paper pushing,” he concludes.

Hear, hear.

Click here to read The Wall Street Journal series.

Click here to read more about the Goldwater Institute report.

Click here to read the Forbes Magazine article.

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IMAGE: Dania Do Svidaniya/Flickr