NO WONDER I'M OVERTIRED. Perhaps it's the nature of professors, particularly the contrarian ones, to gripe about administrative bloat. Does Phi Beta Cons linking to The Newspaper of Record make it so?

The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements college face.

“A lot of it is definitely trying to keep up with the Joneses,” said Daniel Bennett, a labor economist and the author of the center’s report. “Universities and colleges are catering more to students, trying to make college a lifestyle, not just people getting an education. There’s more social programs, more athletics, more trainers, more sustainable environmental programs.”

On average, public colleges have about 8 employees per 100 students, and private colleges about 9, according to the report.

The center referenced is the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Critics will surely defend this increase with claims of a changing college missions that call for athletic dominance, environmental sustainability, diversity, and the like. Those are noble social goals, but the problem is that every college in the nation has been playing follow-the-leader, which has resulted in an explosion in labor costs, without consideration of the student's and public's ability to continue supporting these ambitions with tuition dollars and subsidies. This increase in the labor force to meet new (and discretionary) goals is at least partially responsible for the soaring tuition levels, which is leading to public discontent with the higher education establishment.

I've maintained a simpler explanation for that discontent, one, however, that is not inconsistent with turfing out the purveyors of crying towels, assessors of the obvious, and diversity hustlers.