Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Associate Professor Elizabeth Fitch of Motlow State to the newsmaker line to discuss her findings of administrative bloat in higher learning institutions in Tennessee and around the country and what to do about it.
Leahy: We are joined now by a new friend, Elizabeth Fitch. She is an associate professor of biology at Motlow State Community College and a former dean of the Smyrna campus there.
And Professor Fitch says, hey, you want to know why college is so expensive? Look at high administrators’ salaries. Good morning, Professor Fitch. Thank you so much for joining us.
Fitch: Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Leahy: So I note that you’re an associate professor of biology currently at Motlow State and the former dean of the Smyrna campus. Did you kind of take a look at what the administrative roles are there and say, this is not for me?
Fitch: I have some small children, and I was working about 80 hours a week, so I had to pull back and take a break. But it’s been interesting kind of looking in, working on a PhD at Liberty University on higher education administration, and that’s where I’m finding out some of the information I’m writing about now.
Leahy: Now, you’re working on a PhD in education at Liberty right now?
Fitch: Yes.
Leahy: You know our good friend, the dean of the business school there, Dave Brat?
Fitch: Oh, really?
Leahy: Well, he’s a good guy, and I think he would be delighted to learn about what you’ve discovered there. Your argument is it’s the high administrator salaries that are making it hard. And what are some examples of that?
Fitch: If you look at the presidents of every university in the United States, most of them are making a minimum of $300,000 a year. Some of them more than a million, maybe $2 million a year, maybe in the millions. The research I’ve done looks mostly at taxpayer-funded universities by the state.
In private colleges, you’re going to see salaries that are even higher than that. But along with these presidents, you have vice presidents. Many of them have about 10 vice presidents now, and they’ll have at least that many assistant vice presidents.
Then, of course, you have associate vice presidents, deans, lots of layers of administration, and every single one of those people has at least one secretary. And so all of that together is termed administrative bloat.
And our higher education system is just chock full of positions like these and the high salaries associated with it. And along with that, tuition goes up every year because of all these added positions. And that’s falling on our students, and it’s falling on our taxpayers.
Leahy: Have you sort of documented the percentage of expenditures or expenses that are dedicated to administrative bloat in colleges over time?
Fitch: Yes, there’s been some research that’s done. If you look at the reports from 1976 all the way to 2018, collectively, there’s been a 452 percent increase in administrative positions at our nation’s colleges. If you compare that to students, there’s only been a 78 percent increase in student enrollment overall.
And then faculty, only a 92 percent enrollment, in comparison to administrative positions. So 452 percent increase in administrators is – I haven’t done the total cost, and that would take a lot of research to look at that that can be done, but it would be a lot of money.
Leahy: So what are all the administrators actually doing?
Fitch: You know, there’s a lot of questions in it, and I’m sure some of them have some meaningful things to do. You do need administration at a college, so I’m not saying we don’t need that, but it’s gotten out of control in the past couple of decades for sure.
It’s just kind of like a party with money. If somebody wants a secretary, add it. If somebody wants an assistant vice president, add it. And I think if we examine the roles of the different individuals at the colleges, we’d find out some of those positions, probably a lot of them aren’t needed. There’s a lot of time being spent in meetings and not a lot of action happening.
Leahy: Can I ask you, what is your recommendation to solve this problem?
Fitch: Well, we start at home. We start in the state of Tennessee. We’re already leading with things like Tennessee Promise, to help make college affordable for our students at the community college level.
But we need to look into the higher education institutions. We probably need to do an audit of how many administrative positions are there, how much money is being spent, and look at reducing that.
We probably also need to look at reducing salaries, and that’s not going to make anybody happy that’s in those positions. But if we’re looking at the ethical and the right thing to do, especially in light of Biden’s push for forgiving student loans – you don’t look at solving problems without looking at the source of the problem.
Why is the tuition so high? You don’t just forgive those loans and act like money is free. I mean, it does cost money to go to college, but why does it cost so much?
Leahy: The argument Professor Fitch made is that the ready availability of student loans has just led universities to say, hey, we’re going to get it. We can raise tuition because the students will just borrow the money.
And many argue that the student loan availability, combined with the administrative bloat, is what has led to the higher tuition rates in college. Your thoughts, Professor Fitch?
Fitch: I would agree with that. Student loans are readily available, and a lot of these students aren’t being counseled to the level that they need to be on how much should they borrow. And what I’ve seen, I’ve been in higher education for almost 20 years, and what I’ve seen is students overborrow.
They’ll borrow money to pay car payments and money to cover all of their expenses along with their tuition. And that’s why they end up with debt that’s so high by the time they graduate. They really can’t make the payments and balance that with life and the payments they have after college.
Leahy: Has anyone in the Tennessee General Assembly approached you and asked you to come and testify before the education committees of either the House or the state Senate?
Fitch: No, they haven’t. But I would be very happy to do that if anybody wanted me to. Because I don’t think our legislators, unless they work in higher ed, I don’t think they have an understanding of what’s happening in our higher education system, not only in Tennessee but nationally. This is not just a Tennessee problem. This is a national issue.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Elizabeth Fitch” by ResearchGate. Background Photo “College Students” by Stanley Morales.
Don’t forget that at the major university level a large percentage of the tenured (job for life) professor teach a class or two and spend the rest of their time on “research” while knocking down a good salary from the school.
You can’t fix stupid. That goes double for greed. Academic administration has no incentive to be fiscally
responsible. Rarely is there ever a meaningful audit, any effort to be more efficient is met with disdain. Legislators look for creative ways to dole out more taxpayer cash for fear that the education system would rally those armies of well funded lefty Vice Presidents to run them out of town. Cancel culture was created for and by these same people to ensure their longevity.
Tn BlLUE RINOs would need to be hard pressed to hold committee hearings on the bloat in education expenditures, because the next logical step are hearings on governmental bloat.
Even though the need for such hearings is obvious, once a hearing is held, voters with a functioning brain would demand immediate cost cutting action
And that would be consistently passed to summer study because of political donations from colleges and Ed unions