The real reasonf for rising education costs: a parasitic staffer/administrative class

From Washington Monthly, a exposition of why education costs have skyrocketed:

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

This represents a process we can see in parallel between USSR and USA: too much government gets involved, and institutes a parasitic class of do-nothing administrators for thriving industries. This chokes them, but keeps the government happy as it holds the keys to control through its ability to determine who gets hired/fired, and this quickly causes entropy and collapse.

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