I work in higher education, and it is true. We have as many administrators as we do full-time professors. Professors are treated like factory workers while the administrators enrich themselves. This system is not working.

What do those administrators do? Drive up tuition costs...

My friend is a professor at Northwestern University, and she said that it's criminal how much of the budget goes to toward do-nothing administrators.

I worked with a guy once who did nothing but go from meeting to meeting. He bragged about how busy he was all the time but never did any actual work. He wasn’t even a senior manager he just had nobody holding him accountable. Far too many of these ‘busy braggers’ these days who don’t do anything.

I spent over 10 years now at a university studying to get a doctorate, and in all that time, I've never had an application processed in a timely manner not to mention countless interactions I've had with rude , aging and lazy staff who could easily be replaced by a far more efficient calculator.

as someone who has worked in higher education for the past 17 yrs THANK YOU college has turned into a Karen factory

Finally! A discussion about the actual problems in universities as opposed to ‘wokeness’. Performative administration, ‘experience’ and customer satisfaction. Also, the incentives to cut staff and build recreational facilities, because the customer doesn’t want an education, they just want the piece of paper they paid for and a good time. Also, the senior administration that have brain waves and expect all staff to drop everything to work on the latest dumb idea they had.

I went to college thirty years ago. And if memory serves me right, my professors seemed far more concerned with helping me learn how to think, rather than what to think.

Thank you, government backed student loans, for creating 90% of this mess.

The moment college education becomes but a business transaction, a consumer product, an ‘experience’ that gets sold, the focus goes onto pleasing the customers who, by business definition ‘are always right’ and who feel increasingly entitled to get whatever they may want. By contrast, and perhaps unexpectedly, in countries where higher education is free most people feel that going to college is both a right and a privilege you’re fortunate to have, and treat it as an opportunity to better themselves and not as a five year spring break.

When I was in my PhD at a big name private university, I was required to attend the TA Orientation on main campus before I was allowed to be a Teaching Assistant for any class to fulfill my degree requirement. I left my usual 10 hr per day lab grind at the medical campus and went to main campus for this. The orientation was literally an army of bubbly administrators handing out orange slices, ice cream and leading us in games of heads up, seven up. Suddenly, I felt like I was 9 years old at Summer camp again. These administrators have the absolute cushiest jobs imaginable. They hang out all day socializing and virtue signaling on the beautiful campuses that the indebted teenage customers and their parents fund.

When I taught at university, we held students responsible for learning the material and graded accordingly. A shocking number of students showed up totally unprepared and failed. Then, administrators started insisting that the pass rate go up, so the bar was lowered.

I feel they really hit the nail on the head here.

It always seemed to me that college in America was seen by a lot of people as a rite of passage rather than a place you go to learn something useful so you can be employable.

So true. Universities have become like corporations.

When I went to College in the 90's, there were many older buildings ( which looked old inside & out), the "fitness center" was in the basement of the football stadium, and the dorms were like Eastern Bloc communist apartment towers. Now? Kids live in spaces that look like condos with their own bathrooms, the fitness center is a showplace of architectural modernity, and there is a multi-million dollar "Entertainment District" next to the school-- and now tuition is more than twice what it was when I finished in 2001. I'm sure that some of this was "organic" but most of it was planned- including the massive increase in tuition. THAT is why there are so many administrators, because it's a cash cow.

Remember the scandal of actress Lori Loughlin, star of the sitcom Full House, about a college admission scam for her bratty daughter? Her daughter did not want to go to College, but Lori convinced her, telling her:

LOVE Glenn Loury. Please have him back!

You don't need to go to college to appreciate insanity. I am an (immigrant) high school teacher, and after a few years, I can finally say that I formed an opinion: it looks like the core job of most admin is to complicate other people's work and make an otherwise awesome profession (teaching) as miserable and ineffective as possible. For some of the positions they hold, I wonder what they do all day, 8 hours, and for some others, I know what they do, and I would like them to stop doing it. On top of everything they are overpaid.

"These people," AKA the unnecessary admins are the reason that college tuition has exploded to heights that have priced everyone out. Make college affordable again and maybe we'd stop seeing these dramatic spikes in deaths of despair. Whats the point in getting a degree if it saddles you with so much debt you'll never get ahead. These things are apart of a much larger problem that has not only killed the American Dream, but skinned it and put it on display for every town to see.