Bureaucratic Bloat Pricing Middle Class Out of Schools Like Exeter

Phillips Exeter

I've written in the past about the bureaucratic bloat that is destroying American higher ed. A mere three years ago, Yale made news when its number of administrators first exceeded its number of professors. More recently, they made news again when the admin head count surpassed the number of students.

These spiraling numbers are the main reason tuition costs are rising so fast. Yale, with its $42 billion war chest, corrects for this by making tuition free for lower income students.

Reasonable, right? The rich pay full freight and those in need pay nothing.

Not so fast. What about the middle class? They are the big losers. But they are not who Yale's interested in anyway.

Another issue is that the admin bloat is part and parcel of the academy's descent into insane wokeness. The huge portion of these bureaucrats are part of either DEI or Title IX initiatives. (If you're unclear on the horrors of the latter, I suggest you read Campusland or Laura Kipnis's excellent book, Unwanted Advances.)

So the growth of the admin monster is bad for colleges on two levels: expense and ideology.

If only all the bad ideas that spring from universities stayed in universities. Once upon a time, they did, mostly. 

No longer.

Phillips Exeter, if you're not familiar, is a school that sits at or near the reputational pinnacle of American scholastic education. 

At least it did. It's hard to say now. Schools like Exeter are following universities' leads, buying into the progressive whims of the woke class, ideas very popular on Twitter, but not so much with the average American, and then adding bloated staffs to mete out the ideology. But Exeter, like Yale, isn't catering to the average American, is it?

This is what one Exeter grad wrote to me recently:

Here is what all this waste really means – Exeter has become unaffordable for most because the cost is increasing faster than inflation. 

Why? Because they keep adding unnecessary labor to the equation. 

Stephen G. Kurtz, headmaster at Exeter when I graduated in the 80s was famous for saying that the cost of an Exeter education has always been roughly the same as the cost of an average new American car. I checked, and he was right. However, today the average American car price is $47,070. Exeter’s tuition with room and board? $61,121.  

In 1981, Exeter had 200 teachers and roughly a thousand students, a 5:1 ratio which we would often brag about. Guess what the ratio is today? 5:1. Same number of students, same number of teachers. 

Then what gives?  

Staff. 

Staff to run things like these stupid programs. In 1981 the school had 100 staff. So, 300 total employees. Today, 400 staff. Now 600 employees. So, featherbedding. The result of all of this is reflected in the soaring costs to go to the school. 

But, you say, we are “need blind." Not true. What the school now has is a barbell situation where the poor and the rich can go, but those of more average means cannot. This is a very sad situation caused by profligate spending on the part of these schools. I bet if you look at Andover you will see the exact same situation.

Or anywhere, honestly, including public education. In addition to this being an ideologically driven phenomenon, don't think there isn't a lot of self-interest happening here.