A Modest, But Significant Start

What do you call the elimination of three vice presidential positions? Answer: A modest start. Washington State University president Elson Floyd certainly deserves congratulations for taking on the irresistible force of higher education administrative bloat. The good news is that WSU will have three fewer vice presidents shortly resulting in a total savings of $700,000 - $900,000. The frustrating news is that such streamlining comes after so many years of administrative bloating that there is probably layer after layer of bloat that still could be liposuctioned away without harming the university’s function.

While much political hay is made using statistics showing that medical expenses rise faster than inflation (an economic distortion for another time), far less is made of the fact that education expenses also outpace inflation, as any parent writing tuition checks could tell you.

One of the forces driving this inflation is the fact that, as with most medical expenses, the consumer has a layer of insulation between himself and the true costs. With medical expenses, most of the bills are paid indirectly through insurance companies. The consumer has essentially prepaid and has little incentive to reduce costs. The same was once true for publicly supported universities. Taxes provide direct support and subsidized financial aid provides much of the rest. Until recently, the share that parents had to come up with themselves could be managed relatively painlessly. This layer of insulation has permitted colleges and universities to grow quite recklessly.

No more. Today, writing a tuition check hurts. And so it’s worth examining what those checks are paying for.

Economic studies have shown that, unlike the real world, universities do not realize economies of scale as they grow. In fact, quite the opposite occurs as the growth in the number of administrators outpaces the growth in student populations and instructors. Per student expenses actually rise as more students are admitted. And the primary cause of this is administrative bloat.

Honestly, I don’t have the specific numbers for Washington State University, although I do know that administrative positions have proliferated during my time here. However the Goldwater Institute has collected the data nationwide and their results will surprise no one who has worked in higher education or who has been putting children through college. Between 1993 and 2007, enrollment at America’s publicly funded colleges and universities rose by 15%. During that same time, the number of full time administrators rose by 60%. This translates into an additional 39% more administrators per 100 students in 2007 than were employed fifteen years earlier.

The good news is that Washington State University is nowhere near the worst offender. According to the Goldwater Institute, nearly half of all full time employees at Arizona State University are administrators and the number of administrators per 100 students has risen 94%. Simultaneously, the number of teacher and researchers these administrators supervise has actually declined by 2%.

But, “We’re not as bad as ASU” is hardly the sort of slogan that anyone’s likely to rally around. “We’re making real progress,” is more like it. And even though Dr. Floyd’s initiative might look like baby steps to an outsider, from the perspective of someone who has seen the seemingly inexorable growth of administrators, it has the appearance of lowering a shoulder into a glacier and driving it backwards a couple of inches. Arresting plate tectonics looks easy in comparison.

Hopefully this represents an embryonic change in higher education culture. For far too long education at all levels has served first as a full employment program for adults rather than as an incubator to nurture and educate our youth. Trimming away this tiny bit of excess has probably rattled quite a few nerves in the university’s administrative offices as previously there was no safer job.

Of course, the real answer to arresting and reversing administrative bloat is to examine closely the tasks needed to run a university and ask if jobs are really necessary or are duplicated. I once saw an analysis of the federal government’s bureaucracy that found that the feds employed more than thirty layers of administrative bureaucracy where private enterprise would require only five. I suspect that similar bloat exists everywhere in higher education.

This was no doubt a painful experience for Dr. Floyd and he might not receive quite as many Christmas cards this year as a result. But he deserves congratulations for showing the courage to do what desperately needed to be done.