American higher education faces many difficulties, not least soaring costs and the decline of academic freedom. Administrative bloat, subsidized by the federal government, makes both these problems worse, according to a commentary in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. A 2014 analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that from 1987 to 2012, the higher-education sector added more than half a million administrators. Their numbers have doubled relative to academic faculty. Financed in large part with federally subsidized tuition, this rise of administrators siphons money from the core functions of academic institutions. Colleges and universities have shifted teaching duties from full-time professors to part-time nontenured adjuncts who earn paltry wages. Congress can combat this transformation of the university by reforming student-loan programs. The U.S. government offers student loans without regard to the ratio of administrators to full-time tenured faculty at the school receiving the funds. When authorizing student loans, Congress should take into account the ratio of administrators to full-time tenured faculty. The amount of a student loan, and the interest rate payable on it, should come on a gently sliding scale dependent on the ratio of administrators to full-time tenured faculty at the institution that will benefit from the loan. At one end of this sliding scale, students attending a school with few administrators could get the largest loans at the lowest possible interest rate, and at the other end students attending an institution where administrators are relatively numerous could get only the smallest possible loans at the highest possible rate. Read more. (Subscription required.)
*The views expressed in this commentary are from the author/publication cited, are meant for informative purposes only, and are not an official position of ABI.
The issue of student loan debt and bankruptcy is the first problem addressed in the Final Report of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy. Click here to download your copy.
