Equity in College Admissions

TigerInWinter
Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:29:29 +0000

Happytimes2001:

Actually colleges have always had gyms, career advising and student support. But they did not have a lot of useless titles which they do now. And more people actually taught. Now colleges are filled with “thought leaders” and people who mainly do research. Not all but that is costly. There have been many articles written about the layer of people working at colleges who don’t educate. Anyone. Ever. This is expensive.

Even if one accepts your premise that universities are filled with “useless” administrators, I doubt the cost of these positions is the major driver of the increase in the cost of higher education.

As an exercise, consider that Harvard’s operating budget is more than $5 billion. If Harvard employs 400 “useless” administrators and the average costs of their salaries and benefits is $120,000 per person, the total cost of those administrators accounts for less than 1% of Harvard’s budget.

Obviously this is a hypothetical example. If someone has actual real-world data on this issue, I’m all ears.