There is a paradox at the center of American higher education that nobody in Sacramento has any incentive to name clearly.
Students are paying more than ever before, taking on debt that defines their economic future. The people doing the actual work, lecturers, researchers, library staff, are fighting for cost-of-living adjustments. Tuition is up. Faculty compensation is not.
If the customer is paying more, and the worker is getting paid the same, where is the money going?
It is going to the Administrator's Tax.
The Rise of the Deanlings
In the last few decades, the ratio of students to faculty has remained relatively stable. But the ratio of administrators to students has exploded.
We have built a massive, non-teaching middle management layer in our university systems. We have Vice Chancellors of Strategic Initiatives, Deans of Student Experience, Associate Provosts of Stakeholder Alignment, and armies of compliance officers.
These roles do not teach a single class. They do not grade a single paper. They do not conduct research.
Instead, they justify their salaries by creating work for everyone else. They invent new mandates that require new forms, which require new committees, which require new meetings. They turn the university from a center of learning into a center of compliance.
This is not a funding issue in the way the traditional Left frames it. You could double the state budget for the CSU system tomorrow, and I guarantee you tuition would not drop a dime. The bureaucracy would expand to absorb the surplus. It is a creature designed to consume resources, not distribute them.
The Cost of Compliance
This bloat does two things, both of them destructive.
First, it drives up the cost of access. Every six-figure salary for an administrator who does not teach is paid for by the student (through tuition) or the taxpayer. When we talk about "student debt relief," we are usually talking about subsidizing this administrative layer. We are asking plumbers and electricians to pay off loans that funded the salary of a Deputy Assistant Dean of Campus Life.
Second, it destroys academic freedom. When you have more managers than workers, the managers need to find things to manage. They encroach on the classroom. They enforce ideological mandates. They prioritize risk management over intellectual exploration. They treat students like liabilities to be managed instead of minds to be cultivated.
A Return to Basics
I am a student in this system. The Cognitive Sciences department at UC Irvine. I am the customer.
I do not want a shiny wellness center with a lazy river. I do not want a Student Success Coordinator to send me automated emails. I do not want to pay for a bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate itself.
I want a library. I want a laboratory. I want a professor who is paid enough to focus on their research and their teaching without worrying about rent.
Treat the university budget like a household budget. If we are spending money on things that do not directly contribute to education or research, we stop spending it.
The unions blame the lack of state funding. The state blames the lack of tuition revenue. They are both ignoring the same thing.
We do not need more money. We need fewer deans.