Easy to find source of student debt crisis

Bureaucrats behind high cost of college

Attorney General

Maura Healey, as well as the army of other observers of the higher education scene, are correct in identifying a crisis caused by steeply escalating college tuition costs in recent years.

But they are missing the boat in their theories as to what factors are responsible for the outrageous cost of higher education and the unconscionable and unmanageable debt being heaped on the shoulders of kids who are trying to acquire higher education in order to ease their way into the once legendary, but now beleaguered and shrinking, great American middle class.

As a lawyer who has been representing college students since the Vietnam War era, I have been able to observe the half-century evolution of our colleges and universities. My conclusion, which I challenge any college to deny, is that the vast increase in campus bureaucracies has strained college finances at all but the wealthiest institutions.

Anyone familiar with college structure and life will, I think, agree that beginning in the mid-1980s, college offices of student life began to take on larger and larger numbers of administrators.

At first, the colleges feared that in an era when student bodies suddenly were being drawn from diverse economic, social, religious and racial groups, the presence of bureaucrats was needed in order to keep the peace. (They were wrong, of course: Left to their own devices, students have usually gotten along quite well.) But once in place, these bureaucracies took on more and more personnel: After all, it is the nature of the beast that every dean needs several deputy deans; every deputy dean needs a couple of assistant deans; every assistant dean needs one or two clerical aides.

And so, not surprisingly, just a few short years ago the number of administrators in higher education for the first time surpassed the number of professors. Unsurprisingly, tenured full professors became a relative rarity except at the wealthiest, more heavily endowed universities, resulting in a proliferation of underpaid contract, part-time and adjunct faculty. Check out any campus of the Massachusetts state university system and you’ll see the evidence.

And, of course, it has proven very difficult reversing the problems caused by over bureaucratization of academia, because such remedial initiatives would have to be led by the very bureaucracies that benefit from the problem.

And higher ed leadership, represented at the trustees’ level, remains ignorant of the problem, as they are kept in the dark by the administrators who know (and benefit from) the truth.

And so, instead of fulfilling their fiduciary duties, board members are left with the task of fundraising in order to feed the bureaucratic beast.

It is hard to know how, and where, a counter move might begin in order to save students from the growing catastrophe that we call “higher education.”