Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing.
This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff.
Stanford has only 2,276 faculty.
I'm not sure I believe that's the whole story, but I kind of want to see a more detailed breakdown to be sure it's not just a matter of silly categories for reasonable jobs.
If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different.
I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.
8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number.
Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well.
But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class.
Edit: University College London has 7700 academic staff and 5375 non-academic staff. (it's a bit annoying but the data is there) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he...
For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.
These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20.
Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.