November has been a turbulent month for American colleges. At campuses across the country, students have taken to the quads and administration buildings to protest “institutional racism” on the part of college leaders.
At the University of Missouri, student protesters decried a series of ugly incidents and, with the help of the football team (and an aggressive mass media professor), ousted the president of the university system and the chancellor of the flagship campus. At Claremont McKenna, a dean resigned after students protested her poorly-worded response to charges that the college marginalizes minority students. At Amherst, student activists demanded that the president punish those who had posted flyers about the importance of free speech. And at Yale, a seemingly innocuous email about Halloween costumes, “cultural appropriation,” and free speech led to highly-publicized campus protests.
In most cases, cowed college leaders have agreed to some student demands. Critics have bemoaned the whole spectacle as further evidence that freedom of speech no longer applies on college campuses, and that our next generation of leaders is being educated in a dissent-free “safe space.” Even President Obama warned that activists’ hostility toward different viewpoints is a “recipe for dogmatism.”
The consequences for civil society are important. But the aftermath has implications for college costs and postsecondary opportunity, as well.
College execs typically respond in the way they know best: by promising to layer new deans, services, and centers onto an already enormous administrative apparatus. Ironically, protests against the administration will almost certainly grow the ranks, power, and budget of administrators, and somebody will have to pay for the additional overhead. More often than not, students will be stuck with the bill; higher tuition prices, in turn, may further depress access for needy students.
To be clear, student activism isn’t what’s causing administrative bloat. Colleges need little excuse beyond the changing of the fiscal year to hire more non-teaching staff. Data from the Delta Cost Project show that the number of non-teaching professionals at public research universities rose from 53 per 1,000 students in 1990 to 73 in 2010. The ranks of full-time faculty barely budged, moving from 62 per 1,000 to 64. At private universities, the average number of professionals went from 72 per 1,000 students to 102 over that same period. After evaluating spending patterns at four-year colleges between 1987 and 2008, economist Robert Martin concluded that growth in administrative spending and staffing (as opposed to teaching faculty) was a major driver of increasing college costs.
But crises—bad press, student protests, competition from rival schools—provide a more immediate reason for colleges to gin up additional administrative positions. Whether an additional dean and some support staff will “solve” the problems on campus (they almost certainly will not), hiring them signals to campus activists and the media that leaders are doing something. (To be fair, protesters’ demands call for some of this growth; at Mizzou, students have called for more “funding, resources, and personnel” for “social justice centers” on campus.)
Hence, Yale’s response to protests includes doubling funding for cultural centers and the creation of a new multicultural center (in addition to an existing $50 million campaign to increase the diversity of the faculty). Brown has promised a $100 million diversity initiative. Claremont McKenna will create “new leadership positions on diversity and inclusion” in the offices of academic and student affairs. At Ithaca College, site of more November protests, leaders announced the creation of a “Chief Diversity Officer.”
Such positions are not rare in higher education. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has shown, the set of administrative jobs dedicated to diversity in the University of California system actually grew in recent years despite a steep decline in state appropriations (and equally steep increase in tuition). And additional executives often bring sizable staffs with them; Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion has seventeen staff members listed in the “immediate office.”
Now, activists will argue that not all of the new money will fund administrative positions, and that additional non-academic staff will help improve the rate at which minority and low-income students succeed. That may be true if spending goes toward productive ends like augmented student services. But it’s hard to see how simply adding a new administrative office will change longstanding incentives that lead colleges to exclude many qualified students in the first place.
It will, however, certainly introduce new fixed costs to a university’s balance sheet, increasing long-term spending. For a school like Yale, with a big endowment, the additional administrative expense may not affect tuition and financial aid much. But at institutions where resources are scarcer, additional administrative spending will likely be financed on the backs of students. Incoming students who manage to get in and pay the bill may find a more welcoming environment (though that’s far from certain), but others may find that there’s less financial aid money around to help them pay.
Obviously, student protests aren’t driving tuition increases, and that is not their intent. Colleges increase tuition just fine on their own. The point is that institutions’ standard response to strife does little to change the structural obstacles to opportunity that so upset activists, and it may even exacerbate some.
Protesters have every right to voice their concerns, so long as they respect others’ right to free expression. However, making college affordable and responsive to student needs has to be about more than adding middle managers with new titles. Activists would be wise to focus on changing the incentives that lead to scarcity of opportunity in the first place.
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