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

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.