The growth in the higher-education bureaucracy demonstrates that education is no longer the focus of America’s colleges and universities.
In the last year alone, the university added nearly three times as many bureaucrats as undergraduates and twice as many bureaucrats as educators.
A merican higher education has lost its way. While the number of students has decreased in recent years, America’s elite educational institutions have expanded dramatically the number of administrative positions unconnected to any actual teaching. Those university bureaucrats use free-speech principles to protect progressive ideas, then undermine the educational mission by punishing faculty and students who deviate from the campus orthodoxy. It is no wonder that confidence in higher education is plummeting.
Yale is a case in point. A few years ago, Yale held the embarrassing distinction of employing more than one bureaucrat for every undergraduate. The development attracted criticism from within the university and in the national press.
Yale didn’t learn its lesson, doubling down on bureaucracy over education. In the last year alone, the university added nearly three times as many bureaucrats as undergraduates and twice as many bureaucrats as educators.
Looking at the numbers is truly staggering. Between the 2022-2023 academic year and the 2023-2024 academic year, Yale hired an additional 472 professional and managerial staff, bringing the total to 5,932.
Over the same period, Yale added a net 159 enrolled undergraduates, or one-third as many undergraduates as bureaucrats. The entire Yale student population — with all of its graduate schools accounted for — increased only by 275 students, growing just over half as fast as Yale’s middle managers.
This proliferation of staff didn’t translate into a surge in resources for Yale’s educational mission, either. The number of newly hired faculty trailed professional and managerial additions at just 240. During the 2023-2024 academic year, bureaucrats on staff outnumbered faculty 5,932 to 5,499. Yale University’s total staff of 11,590 is now more than double the size of the faculty.
The year-over-year growth tracks with a 2022 faculty report that found that between 2003 and 2021, the number of university vice presidents at Yale surged from five to 31, a 520 percent jump, while the number of tenured or tenure-track faculty grew from 610 to 675, only a 10 percent increase. In 2018, Yale was ranked second among large research universities for the number of full-time managers per 1,000 students. Among all four-year private institutions, Yale dropped only to fifth out of the 931 ranked.
Students who somehow make it through Yale’s admissions process can look forward to astronomical tuition bills. The heart-stopping sticker price of $80,700 for a Yale education in 2022-2023 jumped an additional $3,180 over the past year and is poised to surge past $90,000 in the coming years. It is no surprise then that just over half of Yale students receive financial aid in some form, according to the university, at an average of $64,924 per recipient. The bill for Yale is so onerous that there are students receiving north of $95,000 in aid just to get through one year at the school.
In its mission statement, Yale claims to be “committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice.” With the meager growth in the student body and the number of educators significantly lagging behind that of professional and managerial staff, Yale’s mission statement has become harder and harder to believe.
While Yale is a particularly egregious case, the problem of a growing bureaucracy stretches across America’s entire system of higher education. According to one report, between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty at America’s colleges and universities increased by 92 percent. Total student enrollment increased 78 percent during the same period. The number of full-time administrators, however, grew 164 percent, more than double the rate of the student population. College and university professional staff grew by an astounding 452 percent over those four decades.
Looking at budgets, between 2010 and 2021, instructional spending at both public and private universities dropped. Public institutions of higher education decreased outlays for non-instructional costs more they did spending on instructional needs over the period, but spending on teaching still outpaced academic support, student services, and institutional support in 2021. Private universities, however, pushed spending on these ancillary services ahead of educational efforts, decreasing the share spent on instruction by several percent while keeping the level of non-instructional spending roughly level. Additional data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that, from 2015 to 2020, growth in spending on institutional support has far outpaced spending on instructional support, even at America’s community colleges. At public bachelor’s-degree-granting colleges, instructional spending actually declined as institutional-support spending increased.
The decades-long decision to build up the bureaucracy rather than the classroom has made the core mission of the university — education — increasingly challenging for those few still hired to do it. One Yale professor commented that the added bureaucracy can make something as simple as changing a planned course an obstacle to fight through, adding that “the more administrators you have, the harder it is to get anything done and everything slows down.” Another pointed out that the increased bureaucracy has meant “all sorts of paperwork for the rest of us.” A former Harvard dean said the growth in bureaucracy at his own university wasn’t “great for the students,” noting that “I also don’t think it’s good for the faculty, either.”
To find out what an organization values, see how it allocates its resources. The growth in the higher-education bureaucracy demonstrates that education is no longer the focus of America’s colleges and universities. Rather than filling faculty lounges with professors or classrooms with students, American higher-education institutions have become ecosystems with a purpose entirely separate from teaching. Bureaucracy, not education, is their main concern.