It's not that hard to see parallels between economies with near-zero interest rates and academic institutions that have an equal almost-unlimited money supply with near-zero risk (one cannot get rid of student debt in bankruptcy court).

Unchecked growth for sure.

I think bloat like that just happens in successful organizations due to internal empire building. They aren't going to return that money to the investors, and aren't going to lower their prices, so that money is just there for the taking. Someone justifies it with whatever project they think helps them politically and voila.

> They hired a lot of admins because that’s how they make money?

That's nonsense.

They hired lots of admins, because they had lots of projects needing managing. They had lots of projects because they were building more buildings, bigger buildings, installing computer labs, high tech equipment, bootstrapping new schools, and a thousand other things. They had more groundskeepers, more janitors, new catering services (for all the other departments who were constantly doing things). On and on and on.

They were doing all these things to make the university look more attractive to students. Students who would choose another university, if theirs looked like the dumpy little hovel it was back in the early 1900s. Students who would take their tuition and fees with them to the other universities.

But in doing so, they were increasing the cost. But the students didn't care, someone else was paying for it, not the students themselves. Except then, the students were on the hook for it, because we slipped in student loans and took away the federal grants. (This, by the way, goes down in the history of the universe of the most evil grift ever... the students were paying for it, in the future that they were too short-sighted to see, with interest, and no bankruptcy protection.)

Yet it's still worse than this. Because those buildings and labs and fancy dorms that seem like resort hotels... those weren't paid for in cash. They were financed too. So the university is on the hook for decades to pay for this shit. And those buildings will require expensive maintenance for decades, so they're on the hook for the much-embiggened staff just to maintain them.

Not only did they bloat out the cost of education for each student that attends, they've done it in a way where they can't ever un-bloat it. For one, doing so means enrollment would drop (they're no longer the fanciest, glitziest university), but also that campus would literally fall apart and become unusable like some movie set for a post-apocalyptic thriller.

It was never greed. It was bad planning by people who think they're great at it.

Yes. These administrators are not teaching classes, they are not marking papers/exams. It's not unlike the Soviet Commissariat. They exist to enforce a political ideology, not do anything productive in reality.

Presumably they mean that universities now hire lots of 'Deans of Politically Correct Thing' whereas when I went to school 30 years ago we had basically 1 dean per college.