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While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: By contrast, a major factor driving increasing co

While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...

Chaebixi 10y ago
> While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
ashark 10y ago
How much of this is because there's more personal risk involved in cutting a budget than spending too much? Like, who in their right mind would cut any sort of counseling? One suicide and you're in trouble, whether or not it makes sense. Diversity-promoting staff? You know the second you look at that budget sideways your school will be in the news for some asshole senior wearing blackface at a party, and your name will be in the resulting national stories as the guy who cut that budget. Better increase it just to be safe. Predatory lending hits the news again and your school's on a Bottom 10 list for financial counselors per capita that's published in USA Today? Yikes. And so on, and so on, for many far more mundane things. You cut anything and any performance or enrollment metric takes a hit (and gets press)? Or sports, and The Team does poorly the next season? Oh man. Hope you have a good severance package. Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue. [EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
losteric 10y ago
College enrollment has been growing as our nation absurdly stigmatizes not going. Lecturing scales well and doesn't mandate growing tenured faculty, but poor technology leads schools to hire more paper pushers.
rahimnathwani 10y ago
You're talking about a colleges' costs, whereas the original article is talking about students' costs. You have the causality backwards. An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.
- ende 10y ago
  If tuitions were increased for the purpose of increasing administrators, then yes, the later caused the former.
- T-hawk 10y ago
  This is correct. People arguing otherwise are misunderstanding capitalism. Tuition doesn't go up because administrators need to be paid. Tuition goes up because the market will pay it. The administrators are the result of the profit margin of tuition, not the cause. It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.

Chaebixi 10y ago

> While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators: Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.

ashark 10y ago

How much of this is because there's more personal risk involved in cutting a budget than spending too much? Like, who in their right mind would cut any sort of counseling? One suicide and you're in trouble, whether or not it makes sense. Diversity-promoting staff? You know the second you look at that budget sideways your school will be in the news for some asshole senior wearing blackface at a party, and your name will be in the resulting national stories as the guy who cut that budget. Better increase it just to be safe. Predatory lending hits the news again and your school's on a Bottom 10 list for financial counselors per capita that's published in USA Today? Yikes. And so on, and so on, for many far more mundane things. You cut anything and any performance or enrollment metric takes a hit (and gets press)? Or sports, and The Team does poorly the next season? Oh man. Hope you have a good severance package. Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue. [EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.

losteric 10y ago

College enrollment has been growing as our nation absurdly stigmatizes not going. Lecturing scales well and doesn't mandate growing tenured faculty, but poor technology leads schools to hire more paper pushers.

rahimnathwani 10y ago

You're talking about a colleges' costs, whereas the original article is talking about students' costs. You have the causality backwards. An increase in # administrators isn't responsible for the increase in students' costs (primarily through tuition fees). An increase in administrators is enabled by an increase in tuition fees received by schools.

ende 10y ago
If tuitions were increased for the purpose of increasing administrators, then yes, the later caused the former.
T-hawk 10y ago
This is correct. People arguing otherwise are misunderstanding capitalism. Tuition doesn't go up because administrators need to be paid. Tuition goes up because the market will pay it. The administrators are the result of the profit margin of tuition, not the cause. It's the same argument that sports tickets cost so much because the players get paid so much. That is backwards. Ticket price rises to the level that the audience will pay, and then that determines how much money is available to pay players.