Reynolds: Fire administrators to fix higher ed Administrators increasingly outnumber faculty, and they're weighing down higher education.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

Is the air finally gushing out of the higher education bubble? Well, enrollment dropped last year, and even some pretty tony colleges have closed. Perhaps the most dramatic sign of all was spotted by New York Times' Frank Bruni: The new president of University of Texas-Austin has turned down the offered million dollar salary. Instead, he'll settle for a still-posh $750,000. But a new university president making 25% less is still news. The question is whether this trend will trickle down, as it must if higher education is to reform.

University presidents are a pretty well compensated bunch. As Bruni notes, Yale paid its former president Richard Levin an $8.5 million "additional retirement benefit." Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, gets $7 million a year. E. Gordon Gee of the Ohio State University got a $6 million retirement bonus after earning about $2 million a year as president.

It's especially jarring to see this generosity given that universities generally look down on the high pay and perks of the private sector. As Bruni writes:

How do you defend the transfer of teaching responsibilities to low-paid, part-time adjuncts when the president is sitting so pretty? How do you cut administrative costs, which indeed need cutting? How do you explain steep tuition increases, mammoth student debt and the failure to admit more children from poor families? How do you summon students back to the liberal arts and away from mercenary priorities?

How, indeed? (And let me note that Bruni's excellent new book on the fetishization of pricey colleges is worth your time.) But while the over-generous compensation of universities' CEOs is what gets the press attention, it's not the biggest problem. Rather, the drastic cost increases associated with higher education stem mostly from lower levels of administration. For every highly paid president, universities are afflicted with scores of lower-level administrators, often earning in the six figures, who get far less attention. And each of those administrators, of course, has a fiefdom stocked with lower-paid, but more numerous, administrators and secretaries.

How bad has it gotten? Well, we've reached the point at which many, probably most, universities have more administrators than they have teaching faculty.

At California Polytechnic University-Pomona, for instance, the number of administrators grew 221% from 1975 to 2008. Administrators in the California State University system now outnumber faculty 12,183 to 12,019. In 2010, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor employed 49% more full-time administrative and professional staff than full-time faculty. Nationwide, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at leading universities grew by 39% between 1993 and 2007, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service grew only 18%, according to the Goldwater Institute.

Even when schools plead poverty and reduce faculty payrolls, transferring teaching duties to low-paid part time adjuncts, they keep hiring administrators. As a study from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research discovered, over the past 25 years the ratio of non-academic to academic positions, at both public and private universities, has doubled. When asked, college presidents blamed funding cuts and talk about efforts to cut costs. But the "funding cut" story is a "fairy tale":

"In other words," according to one recent New York Times column, "far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education." Likewise, the cost-cutting is largely bogus: As economist Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity says, "I wouldn't buy a used car from a university president. They'll say, 'We're making moves to cut costs,' and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired."

With student debt becoming a hot topic for the 2016 elections — senators are even talking about putting colleges on the hook for student loan defaults — and with college enrollment actually shrinking as Millennials increasingly skip college for the workplace, the higher education field needs to make itself more affordable. Cutting salaries at the top is a start, but colleges really need to cut administrative deadwood all the way down.

, a law professor, is the author of The Education Apocalypse: How It Happened and How to Survive It.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.