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Last weekend I attended a reunion for the college tabloid I co-founded many moons ago. Rumpus is notorious for staging elaborate pranks, most notably the annual 50 Most Beautiful People issue which, for decades, has raised eyebrows on campus by photographing and fawning over the pulchritude of select faculty and students, including future public figures on both sides of the aisle like Jack Schlossberg and Usha Vance. It’s also gotten into hot water for reporting on Secret Service lapses in protecting presidential daughter Barbara Bush and survived a libel suit for calling a local property owner a slumlord.
The reunion began with an unorthodox campus tour, advertised as a walk down memory lane of locations associated with infamous articles. The editor handed out red party hats and told us to follow the student tour guide, but confusion reigned at the first stop when the blonde sophomore guide began shouting at us in Mandarin. The first two stops were narrated entirely in Chinese with a smattering of campus building names in English, each followed by a Mandarin-inflected “ha ha ha.” As she concluded her spiel at the second stop, another student tour guide sidled up next to us, speaking English to a group of Chinese students. What do you know? The tour guides had mixed up their groups. With a nod, the Chinese guide headed off with the Chinese students and we continued with the English guide. After a few stops, there was actual tour confusion. A diminutive South Asian mother of a prospective student asked one of us if this was the 11:45 a.m. campus tour, to which the obvious response was: yes. The mom happily strapped on a red party hat and followed the group into a dark room in the library basement and a small bathroom that the publication had recently ranked Best Bathroom on Campus before deciding she was on the wrong tour.
But my favorite part was the joke a few of us played on our fellow alumni. We hired Zoey, a local actress and improv comedian, to impersonate an alum from a year no other attendee had graduated. In addition to behaving off-kilter throughout the day, including oversharing health problems and a bizarre speech at the awards ceremony – profusely thanking an older alum for a passing remark a decade ago that changed her life by convincing her to dump her “stupid boyfriend” – Zoey was constantly grabbing at supplements from her purse and popping pills. Then at the gala dinner, with a half-dozen bottles of supplements lined up in front of her, she rose to make the following toast:
I can’t drink because of my health problems, but these [gesturing to bottles] have really helped me. I want to make sure anyone else in the room who might be experiencing health issues or wants to be healthier has access to these supplements. So I’m circulating a list for you to write your name, email, and phone # and I’ll reach out to you next week to get you samples. I promise you’ll love them as much as I do. Plus, I depend on selling these to make a living so I can pay for my medications. So I NEED ALL OF YOU to buy some.
Then she said she wasn’t feeling well, asked another alum to collect the list, and walked out. After her identity was revealed, it was clear this was a group of alumni who could take a joke. And everyone agreed that multi-level marketing jokes work on multiple levels.
Although Rumpus has – along with everything else -- trended cruder in recent years, the original intent was to pair humor with investigative journalism. One of my early missives was headlined “The Bloating of the University,” stemming from the fact that a lot of deputy deans and associate vice presidents seemed to be flitting around. So how much was the university spending on bureaucracy? From annual reports, I was able to discern that the percentage of spending on administration had more than doubled in a generation, although ferreting out non-teaching-and-learning spend was becoming harder due to changes in financial reporting. So I began calling some deputy deans and associate vice presidents to ask and landed a money quote from the university’s associate vice president of finance, who said “I’d have to look into it, and I don’t have time to do it. I don’t think there’s anyone who’d be able to help you,” and then hung up. Perhaps less a money quote than a non-money quote, but nonetheless a fitting conclusion to the article.
If she didn’t have time to look into it then, she might now, because universities have many more AVPs. In my first book, I wrote about the acceleration of administrator hiring and the emergence of “deanlets,” a term coined by Johns Hopkins’ Benjamin Ginsberg. Last month, in an op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education, former Vanderbilt University Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos pointed out that administrative spend grew 88% between 2010 and 2024, eclipsing the growth of both spending on teaching and learning (+54%) and revenue (+57%). It was worse at 146 large, research-intensive universities: +121% admin vs. +78% teaching and learning and +76% revenue. Zeppos and his co-author found 81 research universities where admin spend doubled from 2010 to 2024 and 13 where it tripled. Another Chronicle piece last week ( Has Administrative Bloat Reached a Breaking Point?) cited an MIT report showing that “since the mid-1980s, the student body grew 8 percent, the faculty grew about 9 percent, and the number of administrators increased by 189 percent.”
Why so much spending? Academic support grew fastest followed by general management and finance. According to Zeppos, the “trend is consistent with longstanding faculty frustration over proliferating layers of middle managers — layers that add not only payroll but reviews, approvals, handoffs, and steps to routine processes.” In other words, more deanlets, which Zeppos had kvetched about back in February: “Review an organizational chart, particularly at a research university, and you will see a vast number of vice presidents overseeing finance, facilities, human resources, technology, legal affairs, and communications and marketing.” The pertinent point is that even if it’s hard to increase the productivity of effective teaching and learning ( Baumol’s cost disease), it’s lazy to believe that limitation extends to education administration; beyond the classroom, colleges should be achieving private-sector-like efficiencies.
The fact that they’re not isn’t only creating budget problems, but also reputation and trust issues. Zeppos cites a June poll finding that 37% of American adults blame administrative bloat for making college unaffordable – more than the next two popular options (faculty salaries, college sports) combined – and concludes “the public wants to know if colleges are exercising discipline and sound stewardship over the resources entrusted to them, or whether they are failing in their responsibility to manage their overhead.”
What’s going on? What are we doing? It’s true there’s been mission creep: from teaching, learning, and credentialing to mental health, policing student behavior, adjudicating sexual assault claims, accommodating disabilities, managing sports businesses, and keeping campus tabloids in check. To this, institutions should be prepared to add work-based learning and a reinvention of career services, both of which require higher budgets in coming years. It’s also reasonable to point to compliance; every accredited institution has to manage Federal Student Aid and most are on the receiving end of other government dollars that come with a myriad of rules and compliance requirements. And some blame for the rapid increase in academic support can be apportioned to an underperforming K-12 system, graduating students unprepared for college-level work. But none of these explain doubling or tripling in 14 years.
The real reason, argue Ginsberg and Zeppos, is that that administration begets administration. It’s natural for managers to want to expand their scope of responsibility and invent new work and business processes. That’s how a person becomes a department. Or how the University of California system develops arcane rules about departmental pizza parties (must have a certified food handler, must have training so every department has a certified food handler). Or how, at Harvard, some "Department Administrators use more than 60 administrative systems and processes with multiple layers of review, such as [one with] 67 steps.” Extravagant, even by Harvard standards.
Higher education administrators appear to prosper by recruiting people beneath them to recruit still more people. It’s a multi-level marketing joke that’s not nearly as funny as Zoey’s.
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Even at Harvard, each of these 67 steps made sense when implemented. Like snacking, a single potato chip isn’t a problem, but if you’re not paying attention you might eat 67. That’s why universities not as wealthy as Harvard – or Princeton, which can afford to employ “a person… in the dean’s office whose job it was to invent administrative positions for spouses they didn’t want to put on faculty” – need a GLP. While a GLP was one of the few medications Zoey was not allegedly on, millions of Americans have begun relying on them to regulate their appetite, physically reminding them long before they get to 67.
A GLP for universities begins with boards. Most boards include businesspeople with relevant expertise, although as Jeff Selingo points out – when a principal purpose of board membership is fundraising – not enough. While board members who know better might prefer to focus on exotic higher ed topics, there’s no excuse for failing to demand the same KPIs and dashboards they see in their own businesses. Boards should insist on metrics for administrative spend. They should also establish incentives for every non-teaching-and-learning function to increase efficiency by serving more students and producing mission-serving outputs with fewer resources. Instead of attempting to reduce or minimize increases, bloat has reached a point where the paradigm needs to shift to annual reductions in admin spend. If trustees wait until they see a giant hole in the budget, that’s governance failure. College and university boards need to hold cabinets accountable for running the business side like a business, not a departmental pizza party.
Taking down administrative spending likely involves new technology – e.g., real-time financial planning and forecasting software like OneStream, new procurement platforms and partners – as well as consolidating onto fewer commercial platforms (vs. homegrown, or so customized the software company barely recognizes it). But even essential software alone isn’t the answer, or you’ll hear complaints like “my job is sitting in front of the computer and managing this thing that used to take me 10 minutes but now takes me an hour. [And now] there’s a team of people to train faculty to use the software. Then another team of people to make videos to troubleshoot the software.” That’s how the University of California system decided to invest in a new $170M PeopleSoft platform that was projected to yield $753M in savings, but ended up costing $942M and achieving no savings. The answer is commercial software + business process redesign: transforming processes to what works best on the software, not configuring (let alone customizing) the software to accommodate business practices whose origins and purposes are shrouded in the mists of institutional time.
None of this hard work gets done without better management and execution, which means attracting managers who’ve demonstrated best practices in HR, purchasing, facilities management, or IT – likely outside higher education. Rather than handing key positions to the next lifer-in-line, target recruitment of experienced alumni or professionals with an affinity for the institution. After all, universities are attractive places to work and many talented managers with relevant experience will gladly trade higher compensation for the opportunity to give back.
Suresh Garimella took over as President of University of Arizona in 2024 as the institution was facing a $177M budget shortfall. In a Hechinger Report op-ed last month, he claimed credit for eliminating the deficit by cutting administrative spending by 22% (and academic spending only 3.5%): “[we] dissolved inefficient, multimillion-dollar administrative units; and challenged ourselves to operate leaner, including a comprehensive evaluation of all leadership positions that reduced the number of vice president positions to three.” On a smaller scale, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville faced an $18M deficit and responded by redesigning business processes, tracking financial performance vs. budget in real time, and inverting hiring: rather than allowing departments to backfill departures and retirements, all vacant positions went to a central pool where a handful of senior leaders would decide – and were incentivized – to leave positions vacant. University of Chicago is reportedly using AI to streamline processes, reduce administrative spend, and cut its deficit.
If deficits (or the threat thereof) don’t motivate change, there’s an even nobler purpose. As U of A’s Garimella recognizes: “Every unnecessary dollar a university spends is a dollar that a family must earn, save or borrow. Those choices carry a human cost. They mean more debt, more financial pressure and greater sacrifice for the families who place their trust in us.”
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Reversing the bloating of the university is ultimately about affordability. But whether due to lack of expertise, motivation, or imagination, most institutions aren’t looking at business process redesign to achieve deep cuts in administrative spend. Instead, once institutions stumble into deficit, they’re enacting across-the-board cuts and eliminating academic programs. In the GLP era, that’s bariatric surgery, or yesterday’s news. While reorganizing and rationalizing programs of study may prove necessary at many institutions – probably for enabling work-based learning and improving employment outcomes – it shouldn’t be the first place anyone looks for cost savings when academic spending has been outpaced by administrative bloat for decades.
Once university leaders focus on achieving administrative efficiencies, scale comes to the fore. I can think of no more delicious demonstration of this than last week’s New York Times profile of the Maharaja of Houston takeout: Aga’s, a 16,000 sq. ft. Indian strip mall restaurant where 200 employees serve nearly 6,000 meals per day. When Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub orders swelled during Covid, Aga’s redesigned extraculinary processes via automation, a call center, more parking and a waiting area for drivers, and new delivery commission structures. As scale begat savings, Aga’s ensured more and more of the customer dollar was reflected in food quality and delivery experience. This is why business process redesign is often the mother of mergers. As administrative efficiencies are achieved, it makes competitive sense to add scale (i.e., students) to press one's advantage. So early combatants in college’s coming war on admin spend are more likely to be acquirers than acquired – yet one more reason we’ll see greater separation of higher ed haves and have nots in the coming years. Just don’t expect Zoey to order from Aga’s; its famously spicy food doesn’t go with her supplements.
While Zoey was preoccupied with supplements for the day of our reunion, colleges and universities have mindlessly supplemented administrative spend for decades. But now, facing crises of affordability, trust, and international enrollment, supplementing makes no sense. Higher education’s health can only be restored by doing more teaching, learning, and work-based learning with a lot less.