Non-instructional activities are 67% of the cost structure of universities

Everyone knows it is true but no one is willing to tackle the problem.  From Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities by John Londregan, Sergiu Klainerman, and Bernard Haykel.  The subheading is A parasitic class of self-righteous bureaucrats has taken over campus life.

While the antics of a relatively small cohort of post-modernist professors have distracted public attention, especially on the right, a new cohort of administrators zealous to reshape life on campus and off has fastened itself on institutions of higher learning—promoting their own welfare and power as a class through bureaucratic fads and mindsets that are far removed from the values of critical thinking and free inquiry. The speed of this hostile takeover is astounding. To take just one prominent example, the number of administrators employed by Yale University has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body since 2003, while new managerial jobs have risen by 150% compared with a 10.6% increase in tenure-track jobs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that “noninstructional activities such as admissions, student activities, libraries, and administrative and executive activities” now make up 67% of the expenses of private for-profit four-year institutions.

[snip]

Indeed, much of what looks to outsiders like student-led protests and campaigns is in fact the product of the determination of the new administrative class to shape campus norms and priorities according to their own beliefs and preferences—which not coincidentally make the case for the importance of their own jobs. The power of this class, which is parasitic on the mission of the university, is quite considerable: first, they select who gets onto campus, with students who at least pretend to hold the “correct” social attitudes at an advantage for admission. Once students arrive on campus, they are pressured to think in approved ways, with those who dissent in particularly visible or annoying ways being subject to star chamber-like proceedings overseen by the administrators themselves.