Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine.

That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments.

And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).

That depends on how you define 'admin staff'. Do you classify Janitors, Chefs, Shuttle Drivers etc as 'admin staff'?

If so then based on how large the campus is, it could still make sense. But I doubt if those sort of jobs are covered in that term.

Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category, they are Administration.

Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.