Higher ed administrators have rebranded themselves as corporate executives, with salary increases and accelerated hiring of non-faculty assistants and managers to match:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/ivy-league...

http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-b...

The president of the university I went to is paid well over a million a year in total compensation, plus is given an extravagant mansion for free. Many of the highly ranked administrators were paid half a million, including the PR manager. Who knows what their army of lower ranked administrators were paid. Last I heard, the president would only approve the CS department to hire a single new full-time faculty member. In the meantime faculty/student ratios are plummeting and the school is starting to do sketchy things like breaking a single class into two "sections" (which are in fact the same) to game the stats.

Damn right. I choked on the "...as colleges attempt to rein in costs" bit. Last I heard, prices for private colleges are somewhere in the 60k range now (up from ~40k 10 years ago I believe?) and Jerry Brown is duking it out with the UC system over tuition increases.

Tenure for administration. It's easy to point fingers at presidents and regents, but really all the aids and advisors on up are are pretty much unfireable.

Administrative salaries, new buildings, fancier dorms.