Nowadays mostly to pay for a huge class of administrators that mainly manage other administrators and monitor the violation of rules whose creation they themselves promote.
Nowadays mostly to pay for a huge class of administrators that mainly manage other administrators and monitor the violation of rules whose creation they themselves promote.
Administrators are filtering applications, organizing the events, marketing the brand, enabling recreation, looking for better food, etc.
I'm actually ok with a barebones education, but that's obviously not what people want to see when they're going on campus tours. They judge the value of schools directly by the work of its admin, rather than the teaching staff who they only meet on the first day of class.
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Oh yea, who else is going to create that "PDF" that only opens on MS running Adobe?
The amount of bloat I saw in US universities was unreal. Software that no one used apart from a couple of features, services that served no one in particular, classes that no one wants, and so on.
Of course, the infrastructure was markedly better. But I can't say that for quality. Most of my classes were taught by TAs, while my classes in my university back home were often taught by associate or even full professors, several of whom had PhDs from top US/UK universities.
And this was at a cheap public university. I can't imagine the kind of bloat a large private US school would have