Apropos the post the other day on the need to constrain bloated academic bureaucracies, the WSJ today offered up a front page story analyzing the impact on tuition costs of the rapid growth of the administrative ranks:
A Wall Street Journal analysis of University of Minnesota salary and employment records from 2001 through last spring shows that the system added more than 1,000 administrators over that period. Their ranks grew 37%, more than twice as fast as the teaching corps and nearly twice as fast as the student body.
Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It's part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.
Interestingly, UCLA only spends about 5% of its per-student budget on administrative costs, which is a lot lower than most schools.
