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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I have a super liberal (politically, not in the classical sense) sister as a professor at a small school (non Ivy League). She talks all the time about the hyper bloated administration that literally does nothing except make things less efficient and collect a paycheck. It would seem that whether you're on the political left OR right (or somewhere in the middle), that we can all agree that there is a ton of bloat in these institutions and that teaching and research has taken a backseat to sports, never ending growth of campus facilities, and milking students of every last dollar.

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I was under the impression that sports were always a huge deal, are you saying that's increased even more? The growth of administrative roles has been crazy, and behind the majority of the increased costs from what I've seen.

Sports are MUCH bigger now. Apparently some small private schools make nearly all their money from kids that are obsessed with sports, but too terrible to get a scholarship at a real school. So they have basketball teams with 100 players and kids pay through the nose to continue being part of a team even though they never even play. You can't make this stuff up.

I can also confirm this is true. Costs are sky high, there's accreditation corruption, and research is minimal if not fabricated.

The solution is to pull out gov funding and ban education loans across the board as predatory practices. New things can only begin when the old dies, and we are continually trying to life support a system that is so obviously dead.

Has any university manage to buck this trend?

Where would the market fit be for a university to buck the trend? Those who want to fund research will hire the researchers themselves in order to retain ownership and control. Those who want to learn for the sake of learning turn to the internet. There is no money to be made here.

The money is in selling sports and status. The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status. An efficiently run university doesn't reflect well. It's the glitz and glamour that gets people's attention (especially employer attention).

Cal Tech comes to mind. Probably the only org left in the US doing this.

> The students want to be milked as a care-free willingness to be milked is what establishes the status.

You're misrepresenting why people attend university. Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping. Not all of us are gifted. And not all upper class jobs can be filled by gifted people. Some of us just want a way to enter a class that they would otherwise have no way of entering.

At least it's like this in my part of the world, then again most of my countries universities aren't for profit.

> Academia is first and foremost a network and a means to gatekeeping

Yes, exactly. The gatekeeping and networking are facilitated by it being absurdly expensive hobby. Nobody wants to network with some random nobody from the slums. They want to connect with people who come from wealth. The bloat works to keep the risk high, pushing away those who aren't in the right class.

Research institutes like Rockefeller, Allen Institute, Scripps.

I wouldn’t count those as universities.

They are places of scholarship and they grant degrees. What is missing from them that makes them not universities?

They sometimes fire a lot of administrators towards the end when on life support, but that's only after cutting back all the programs to where the university is pretty much dead anyway.

The increase in the number of administrators has also infected US healthcare and government agencies.

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