Why is college so expensive? One answer is ‘administrative bloat.’
Like many college students, I graduated with tuition debt. Mine was $500. That was 60 years ago. Today’s graduates owe an average of $28,400. Tuition debt has ballooned because college costs are so much higher today. My tuition as a Johns Hopkins undergraduate was $1,200. Today a year at Hopkins is just under $63,000 for tuition. When adjusted to take account of inflation, that’s a fivefold increase.
Hopkins’ tuition is not an outlier. Tuitions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Duke and Cornell all hover around $63,000. Financial aid, of course, reduces the burden borne by graduates. But the growth in student debt has far outpaced undergraduate financial aid. The College Board reports that the total cost of attendance may have diminished slightly during the past few years, but today the cost of going to a four-year college is about double what it was 30 years ago, even after taking account of inflation and financial aid.
Student borrowing now accounts for the largest block of household indebtedness after home mortgage loans. Since the end of the 1980s, it has been growing at eight times the rate of American wages, and now amounts to $1.74 trillion — enough to win a prominent place on President Joe Biden’s agenda. His first attempt to cancel up to $20,000 of borrowers’ indebtedness was checked by the Supreme Court. The president just announced a narrower cancellation for borrowers owing less than $12,000.
Largely overlooked in recent discussions of loan forgiveness is the question why going to college has become so expensive. The handful of bystanders who address this issue seem to be approaching a consensus. Their explanation is “administrative bloat.” One survey finds that between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 92%, not far above the 78% increase in the student population, according to a 2021 study published in Review of Social
Economy. During the same time, the ranks of full-time administrators grew by 162%, and full-time professionals (lawyers, accountants, etc.), 452%. Among the top 50 institutions ranked by U.S. News, the student/faculty ratio is about 11 to 1; the student/staff ratio is 4 to 1.
Of course, the burgeoning bureaucracy may meet real institutional needs. Someone has to send all that data to U.S. News. And then there are all the regulatory burdens imposed by state and federal governments and the record-keeping requirements of accrediting organizations. They are routinely cited by academic administrators as a justification for their jobs and budgets. A Vanderbilt University study, however, finds that regulatory compliance accounts for only 3% to 11% of college operating costs, far short of the tuition bloat.
The growth of “student services” has contributed more substantially to the spread of the bureaucratic domain. By providing opportunities for “personal growth” outside the classroom, support staff can stake out a territorial claim independent of faculty expertise. They can defend their role in the maturation of undergraduates on the reasonable premise that the development of a wellrounded person requires more than exposure to lectures and seminars. At Hopkins, the administration offers to assign “life coaches” to undergraduates and provides them with exercises in “life design” to prepare them for life after commencement. Alumni contributions are solicited so that students can be sent to Wall Street to learn about life in high finance. If students are to meet their loan payments, after all, they ought to explore careers that generate substantial incomes.
In times long past, undergraduates used to arrange for their own life design and personality-rounding experiences through extracurricular activities, social functions, and summer and part-time jobs. Granted, our amateur efforts at personal development produced some questionable ventures. One of my more artistic undergraduate colleagues scaled the campus clock tower to paint a Mickey Mouse face on the clock. It was his commentary on the university’s “mickey-mouse” administrative intrusions into our lives. It is not difficult to imagine his response to “life design.”
Important avenues of personal development open most fully to personal and independent initiative, not counseling and life coaches. The proliferation of student services and supports may encourage undergraduate passivity, not adult autonomy. They unquestionably add to undergraduate costs, and programs of loan cancellation may only encourage students to take out larger loans, or enable institutions to charge higher tuitions. Perhaps the government should require universities to cover the delinquent federal tuition loans of their former students.