Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
I work in post secondary administration, so I think I have some perspective here. Part of the problem, at least in the US &amp; Canada (Where I live) is that post secondary institutions are positioning themselves less and less and places to get an education and more and more as places to go for an &quot;experience.&quot; Its no longer enough to provide a quality education, universities now are selling themselves on their facilities, their &quot;student life&quot; and all the other intangibles that are secondary to actual education. This leads to all the administrative bloat we&#x27;re seeing as now that many schools are functioning more like glorified 4 years spas they have to have departments filled with staff to plan events, throw parties, Snapchat sports games, provide &quot;save spaces,&quot; etc.<p>I haven&#x27;t been in the sector long enough to have a real handle on when or why this shift happened, but from my perspective its the primary driver of the increasing administrative bloat. Schools are competing more on the intangibles, and so they need to invest more into these areas, which means more staff and more overhead.<p>Personally I think the whole university model isn&#x27;t long for this world though as there are plenty of ways competency can be signaled apart from a fancy foil-stamped piece of paper and eventually when the costs of university education don&#x27;t provide a positive return over any reasonable time horizon students are going to start looking for alternatives en masse and the market will innovate to meet that demand.