<p>Some of the increase in administrative costs is consumer driven. Back in my day there were no writing centers, tutoring services, IT departments and technology help desks, or psychological counseling services. Career counseling and academic counseling were minimal. There were no high-tech classrooms, no campus-wide wireless internet. Athletic facilities consisted of a musty old gym and some fields, not a state-of-the-art fitness center. You ate in a cafeteria with a bland and unimaginative menu put together by a nutritionist whose highest ambitious was to get you three square meals a day—not catered dining halls and a suite of snazzy eateries to appeal to every taste. Colleges now provide these extra bells and whistles because students (and their families) demand them, and in many cases will decide where to apply based in part on which schools have the best frills and amenities.</p>
<p>Another part of the increase is due to a changing competitive and financial environment. Back in the day colleges didn’t have big marketing and p.r. departments; they now feel they need them to remain competitive. Public university budgets were once a fairly simple affair: the legislature made annual appropriations, and most of the rest came from tuition. Public universities didn’t have multi-billion dollar endowments to manage, or big development offices to raise the funds. Faculty did some externally funded research but it wasn’t the billion dollar enterprise it is today, with centers and institutes on every imaginable topic, each with a director and staff as well as affiliated faculty, aimed at maximizing the university’s haul of research dollars. They didn’t have big bureaucracies to supervise and audit all the externally funded research, either; truth is, supervision was minimal, and some got in trouble for it. </p>
<p>That said, some of the growth is just plain bloat. I’ve never been convinced our public flagship here in Minnesota needs 8 vice-presidents, each commanding a small army of underlings to justify the VP’s existence. Seems to me 4 or 5 would suffice. But then, no one ever asked me.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal survey found that at most public flagships, administrative costs amount to something less than 10% of educational costs, so maybe this isn’t quite the massive crisis some make it out to be.</p>
<p>[The</a> Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/NONCLASS1212/]The”>http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/NONCLASS1212/)</p>