Mitch Daniels Battles the Campus Bureaucracy at Purdue

Those who have closely studied
soaring tuition rates at public universities know that
administrators’ ballooning salaries are the real culprit, not the
cost of instruction. While faculty employment levels have
generally remained flat in recent years, universities have
continued to hire more and more administrators. Purdue University,
for example, has grown the campus bureaucracy by 75 percent in the
last 13 years.

That fact comes from a recent
Wall Street Journal profile of former Indiana Republican
Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is now the president of Purdue. Since
taking the job last year, Daniels has been fighting the good fight
against bureaucratic bloat. His results are probably as good or
better than any other tuition-conscious university president,
though the structural barriers are massive:

Mr. Daniels cut millions from state higher education as
governor, but millions more pay for the administrative salaries
that have ballooned at Purdue, along with most universities around
the country. At Purdue, there are now 75% more administrators and
staff on the payroll than there were 13 years ago.

J. Paul Robinson, a former president of the faculty senate, said
Mr. Daniels’s worth as a leader will be tied to his ability to
prune that administrative bloat. “Let me put it this way,” Mr.
Robinson said: “A blind man on a galloping horse at midnight with
sunglasses on can see the problem. The question is, What can he do
about it?”

Mr. Daniels says he is consolidating administrative jobs where
prudent and leaving jobs unfilled where the duplication of effort
makes that possible. He has jettisoned 10 university cars,
consolidated hundreds of thousands of feet of off-campus rental
storage and introduced a higher-deductible health-care plan.

He has also frozen tuition rates:

And by freezing tuition, he is forcing his own school to
modernize its 19th-century business model with a combination of
systemic cuts, organizational realignments and cash incentives.

“This place was not built to be efficient,” Mr. Daniels said
when asked about the structural changes he was making at Purdue.
But “you’re not going to find many places where you just take a
cleaver and hack off a big piece of fat. Just like a cow, it’s
marbled through the whole enterprise.”

The bottom line is this: Universities can’t have it both ways.
They can’t provide an affordable education to middle class and
low-income families while also hiring a bajillion more residential
advisors, vice presidents of sustainability, diversity
coordinators, and other paper pushers who never set foot near a
classroom.

Many Democratic politicians who claim to sympathize with the
suffering students, such as President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, believe the best way keep college affordable is to loan
students a bunch of money on the taxpayer’s dime and then forgive
their debts —so long as they find their way into government
service. But that
doesn’t actually keep costs down; it merely tricks students
into thinking they can manage.

The best method for preventing tuition increases is actually
much simpler: University presidents and regents need to stop
raising tuition to cover non-educational nonsense. Kudos to Daniels
for understanding that, daunting though the challenge may be.