Would those same over paid administrators manage to right their ships if the fat disappeared?
This happened at my alma mater which is a private college in New York during the pandemic. They had a massive hole in revenue and their over paid president was essentially kicked out. The diversity hire they brought in struggled just as much and the school is still hemorrhaging money. The presidents salary was $350k for BFE new York.
We're a few years from the pandemic and now they're dealing with reduced enrollment thanks to excessive tuition costs and declining alumni donations.
Harvard and other big institutions have intertia and status to float by. A lot of these other schools? Not so much.
Trim the fat and higher Ed corrects itself by flushing the grifters out .
So you're annoyed that the highly paid professionals have lots of experience in doing the thing they are paid to do? I suppose if one starts from the premise that all higher ed admin are incompetent by nature, or that managing a unit within a university requires no skill, then I can understand your conclusion, but to be honest I think you're kind of begging the question. The simple fact is that these are massive institutions, and running them is complicated and expensive. Again, if you compare the salary of the president of Harvard to a private organization of similar scale and wealth it's like a 10x difference. It's not clear to me why a university being a non-profit suddenly downgrades the skill required to keep it running.