Bureaucracies bloat because they gradually fill up with the sort of bureaucrats who seek foremost to expand their own dominion. From the individual perspective of such a bureaucrat, the more people they have working under them, the more important they are. From this individual selfish incentive, bureaucratic bloat becomes an emergent phenomenon.

Or put another way:

> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

OK but you also have to measure the services the university provides to students through the increase in administration. Things listed already in this thread articulate that students desire these services.

I think if you seriously looked at the difference in the level/sophistication of services over those 20 years, it explains the vast majority of the bloat.

Students are getting what they pay for, and ultimately they demand greater services.

> the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.

Implicit here is that there is or should be some sort of linear or sublinear relationship to admin and the student body. If the number of admin grows faster than the student body, is that strange, and is it bad?

1) is that strange?

It's not clear this is strange. First, Universities are highly modular organizations, so there's a lot of duplicated effort. Let's say it takes 5 faculty, and 3 admin to run a department that services 10 students. We open a new department and double our students, so we have 10 faculty, 6 admin, and 20 students. But now with all those students, we need two Teaching Assistants. Turns out that hiring an admin to manage the teaching assistants frees 2 faculty to do more research, so we hire another admin to do that. Student population stays the same. The students need a health center now because the local health facilities are insufficient, so now we need to open a whole health center and that requires 3 new staff with 2 admins. So admin has grown again with no new students.

You see how this can go? For a place line Yale or Stanford, which offer full hospitals, law schools, giant sport facilities, manages dozens of buildings, hundreds of programs and degrees, food services, safety services, IT services, library services... all of these things require coordination and management, and that can easily balloon without adding a single new student.

2) is that bad?

Now, the argument is usually that the students don't need all these things. Well first of all, the standards are much higher than they were even when I was in school in the 2000s. Back then research at an undergraduate level was optional, these days it's required or you are not competitive as a candidate. What does that mean? It means more undergrads in research, so we need more faculty support for undergraduate research experiences. That means freeing up faculty time with services like graders, research offices, legal offices, tutoring support, student services, and all the administrators that go with that. But it frees up faculty time to work 1:1 with students, which, was the goal.

However if you look at that from the outside, you see "administrative bloat". Take all that away without understanding the why, and you end up with fewer administrators, but the faculty have to do more work now chasing grant money and grading. If you don't want them to be doing that, we need to figure out as a society how to dole out research grants, but until then, it is what it is.

Secondly though, universities aren't just for students. My argument is in fact they are towns, and they are there for everyone there. Students, faculty, staff, admins, the general public, the cafeteria workers, the IT people, the librarians, police, the children at the campus daycare, program director at the arts center, the sports facility managers... everyone. A university is a livable, walkable, self-contained town where everyone is focused and oriented on the pursuit of higher education. What a great thing to have in our society, which by and large is oriented around the pursuit of profit.

I think the more our society becomes focused on profit, the more universities will be forced to grow their scope. If we want them to dial back, let's invest in our local communities.