Staff Jobs on Campus Outpace Enrollment

As the study notes, a lot of the extra staff is there for good reasons, and not just bureaucracy for its own sake (that's not to say there isn't plenty of the latter, of course).

So, can some of the extra staff be trimmed without affecting the academic experience? Absolutely. But in many cases it would affect the social experience (if you cut res life/student activities people), the ability of some students to attend (if you cut financial aid people), and so forth. Some of these things scale pretty linearly with enrollment; some don't. Still others scale linearly, but over 20 years colleges have just been doing more (e.g. college was cheaper, so you needed less of an infrastructure to help students deal with loans).

The phrase "academic experience" is a bit of a misnomer, too - certainly having a good IT help desk can contribute to the academic experience (let's consider the non-HN population that can't build their own routers), but those people aren't counted as "academic staff".

All that said, there are obviously useless positions, and like all large organizations, colleges are susceptible to waste, mis- and over-management. Pointing out the unsustainability of the current rate of growth is fair game; but I'd be wary of a rush to purge non-academic staff as extraneous.

I really don't understand it. A good education is a good thing, but it's hardly necessary to succeed in today's workforce. There's also lots of alternatives to getting a college education. As the cost to get an education continues to increase and as the benefits from it continue to decrease there's going to be a point where the tide starts flowing the other way.

It's also increasingly likely that small/smaller businesses will be the companies of the future instead of the giant corporations we have now.

In spite of all of that, colleges continue to do business as usual. It's a really strange dynamic. It appears to me that colleges have lost their goals of teaching people necessary skills and have begun to exist simply for themselves.