>If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.

Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades.

Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow.

It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.