Administrative Bloat and the Erosion of Academic Governance: When the University Becomes Its Own Bureaucracy

Tags: Faculty, Administrators, Policy Makers

In recent years, several universities have reported that administrative salaries now account for a larger share of their budgets than faculty salaries. This reversal of priorities is not an accounting oddity. It is a reflection of how deeply higher education has shifted from an academic to a managerial culture. The university, once organized around teaching and scholarship, now exists primarily to sustain its own administrative machinery. For PUIs, which exist to provide personalized, teaching-focused education, this trend is especially disheartening. When managerial costs begin to outweigh faculty investment in such settings, the institution loses its defining character as a place where students learn directly from engaged teachers rather than through layers of administrative programs.

Over the past three decades, the administrative sector of higher education has expanded with remarkable speed. Offices devoted to compliance, student success, assessment, marketing, and diversity have multiplied with each non-academic units creating its own directors, coordinators, and committees, further requiring new budgets and justifications. What once served as a support function has become a self-perpetuating system, consuming time, attention, and resources that once belonged to the classroom.

Faculty hiring has not kept pace with this growth. Many institutions now spend a quarter or more of their total operating budgets on administration with many increasingly spending more than half of it towards sustaining them. In some cases, the combined salaries of vice presidents, associate provosts, and program managers exceed what is paid to all full-time faculty combined. As administrative costs rise, universities compensate by reducing instructional spending or raising tuition, and often do both. Students pay more, yet a smaller share of their tuition reaches the faculty who actually teach them.

This imbalance carries a cost beyond finances. Universities governed primarily by non-teaching administrators tend to value compliance, image management, and risk avoidance over intellectual exploration. Layers of oversight slow down hiring, curriculum development, and research. Faculty who once shaped institutional direction are now managed through performance metrics and procedural checklists. The classroom, which should be the university’s intellectual center, is instead surrounded by forms, trainings, and reporting cycles that often add little to actual learning.

This shift is troubling everywhere, but it is especially disturbing in the context of PUIs. By design, PUIs are meant to embody a student-centered and community-oriented model of higher education. Their purpose is not to mimic the research bureaucracy of large universities but to foster close mentorship, small-group learning, and genuine engagement between faculty and students. At a PUI, faculty are expected to know their students personally, guide them through research and service projects, and prepare them to think critically and ethically about their place in the world.

Because of that mission, faculty salaries and instructional resources should form the core of a PUI’s budget. They represent the institution’s educational investment in its community. When a PUI begins to allocate a disproportionate share of its funds to administration, it strays not only from fiscal prudence but from its fundamental identity. A top-heavy structure at a large research university may be wasteful, but at a PUI it is a betrayal of purpose. Every dollar shifted from faculty to bureaucracy weakens the institution’s defining relationship between teacher and student.

Community-based institutions cannot afford to mimic the corporate hierarchies of larger universities. Their strength lies in intimacy and authenticity, not in bureaucracy. The health of a PUI should be measured not by the number of administrators it employs but by the quality of its faculty-student interactions, the accessibility of its mentors, and the intellectual curiosity it cultivates.

Reversing the top-heavy trend requires deliberate choice. Boards and presidents must recognize that faculty are not cost centers to be managed but the living foundation of institutional credibility. Faculty themselves must assert their rightful role in governance, ensuring that decisions reflect educational values rather than administrative convenience.

A PUI that allows bureaucracy to outweigh instruction loses not just money but meaning. To remain true to their mission, these institutions must invest where learning actually occurs: in the minds of students and the faculty who teach them. When that relationship is honored, a PUI fulfills its promise as a genuine community of learning rather than another office tower with classrooms attached.