Robert Martin in the Chronicle:
Higher education is, of course, a labor-intensive service industry. An institution's labor cost per student is the sum of wages and benefits divided by the number of students. The cost per student goes up as wages and benefits go up, or as the ratio of staff to students rises. When that ratio goes down, productivity increases, and the cost can go down, even if wages and benefits go up. Staff-to-student ratios, then, are the key to understanding higher-education costs.
A study of those ratios from 1987 to 2008 for research universities, colleges, and public master's-level institutions reveals that the number of faculty and administrators per student actually grew over those years. But we can't lump faculty ratios and administrative ratios together, because they are significantly different. On the academic side, the tenure-track ratio increased modestly at public research universities and to a greater extent at private research universities and colleges. But in both cases, the institutions significantly increased their use of non-tenure-track full-time and part-time faculty. So although faculty-to-student ratios went up, most of the increase was based on the use of contract and part-time faculty.
On the administrative side, the ratios of executives to student and professional staff to student increased—the latter by 50 percent. In 1987, except at private research universities, where administrators outnumbered tenure-track faculty, colleges had approximately as many tenure-track faculty as full-time administrators. By 2008 there were more than twice as many administrators as tenure-track faculty at all types of institutions.
Martin's thesis is that reduced faculty power in the shared governance scheme of things is to blame for rising college costs. If faculty were able to make more decisions then costs would be controlled. That may be true, but I'm not convinced. After all, most college administrators are former faculty members (i.e., faculty with power) with at least some memory of teaching, research and service. As a faculty member (note that I'm also a part-time administrator but my response would be the same if I was back in my old office), if I was given more power the first thing I would do is double the economics department budget and increase salaries. My guess is the majority of faculty would vote for the same.
One thing I've noticed is that the increase in administrators is due to the increased amount of student services that is demanded by students. Advising, campus recreation, athletics, entertainment, housing, dining and other services (not to mention the increase in research administration that is required to [a] jump through government funding hoops and [b] avoid spending misdeeds by .01% of faculty) are very different from the mostly bare bones approach to college life that I enjoyed (library, student cafeteria with no menu, beer keg and busted speaker parties and a weight room and track for exercise). All of these student services require additional staff and administration. If the first universities that offered these services, at a higher fee, were met with a big yawn from students and parents the student services arms race would have never begun.
Of course, my 10 minute analysis is based only on my experience on campus. If I carefully looked at the numbers, campus administration may in fact be a virus with little to do other than reproduce.
