It was in the quiet of the summer when a new president at Louisiana State University said the school would lay off 25 administrators, including several who were high in the campus hierarchy, and shift the savings to faculty hiring and research.
“Transformational change,” the president, Wade Rousse, called it. He was “streamlining operations and finding efficiencies so the university can focus on” its faculty.
The move got limited attention outside Baton Rouge. But similar layoffs have been happening at universities and colleges nationwide in what may be a little-noticed tipping point in U.S. higher education.
A decades-long increase in the number of employees on campuses who don’t actually teach — disparaged by critics as “administrative bloat” — is starting to reverse, new data suggests.
The number of noninstructional employees at U.S. universities and colleges — the many people on campuses who don’t actually teach — fell last year more than it has at any time in at least the last decade, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR.
And while the newly reported CUPA-HR figures cover only through the end of 2025, universities and colleges have continued to lay off noninstructional employees since then.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Another source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, now projects “limited employment growth” for postsecondary administrators, which it says will be slower than for other occupations.
There are several caveats to these clues.
The CUPA-HR survey is limited to the roughly 1,000 public and nonprofit universities and colleges that agreed to participate, for instance. The association cautioned against generalizing across the large variety of higher education institutions; noted that past downturns in staffing often have been followed by increases; and said it might be too early to draw conclusions about trends.
But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that universities are resorting to layoffs across their workforces as they try to lower spending in the face of domestic and international student enrollment declines and federal funding cuts, said Kevin McClure, professor of higher education and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
“Institutions are shrinking. Some are closing. Some simply have fewer students, so are having to contract,” McClure said. “Those types of situations are often where layoffs are experienced or reorganizations happen.”
Related: Is your college in trouble? Use Hechinger’s College Financial Health Tracker to find out
Since it’s typically harder to eliminate faculty than staff because of tenure and student demand for particular majors, he said, the newest layoffs are most likely to affect “employees and staff who aren’t as protected.”
Among administrators laid off at Louisiana State were the chief financial officer; a vice president who handled discrimination complaints; and 16 writers, video producers and photographers in the marketing and communications office.
The University of Utah has announced it will eliminate as many as 855 noninstructional positions over the next year. The University of Minnesota cut 230 noninstructional jobs through layoffs and attrition. The University of Maryland laid off 84 staffers, eliminated vacant jobs and froze hiring.
Private, nonprofit universities and colleges of all sizes also have been trimming their administrative ranks. Johns Hopkins University laid off 110 workers and imposed a hiring freeze. The New School in New York City shed 68 noninstructional employees. At Baker University in Kansas, 21 staff positions were eliminated, 27 others were frozen and the president and other administrators took pay cuts. Emerson College in Boston laid off 12 administrators.
Related: As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices
Even Harvard University eliminated 165 noninstructional jobs, including the director of its writing center.
In most of these cases, the numbers represent small fractions of the noninstructional workforce, which accounts for more than half of all employees on campuses. But “it’s encouraging that there are any cuts at all,” said Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, which has been critical of administrative bloat and of diversity, equity and inclusion offices, many of which are among those now being stripped of staff.
There have been decades of increases in the numbers of noninstructional employees, attracting criticism at the highest levels and on social media accounts devoted entirely to making fun of higher education’s middle managers.
“Colleges began to see themselves as providing this very broad suite of services, all of which were personnel-intensive,” Wood said — athletics, housing, dining, security, transportation, mental health counseling, disability support, antidiscrimination efforts, information technology, data collection, fundraising, sustainability.
Some of these functions were expanded as students showed up who were not prepared for college-level work and needed more help. Some were in response to real or perceived demands from consumers for amenities that required additional staff, or were driven by intensifying competition and the race to rise up the college rankings. Institutions also contend that their ever-growing workforces were required to comply with government red tape, though that has proven not to be as big a factor as they’ve said.
The administrative workforce “just grew and grew” — often, Wood said, at the expense of academic functions.
In the process, administrative bloat became “one of those rare issues that unites critics of higher education with faculty members,” said Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has studied it.
Related: Business, government and education leaders try to reinvent college from scratch
A faculty committee convened at Yale University to consider why higher education has lost so much public trust cited administrative bloat as one of the reasons. It said that even determining how many administrators there were at Yale “proved remarkably difficult.” That in itself was a finding, the committee said in its report, released in April. The university “should be able to answer a straightforward question: What share of its resources is devoted to its core academic functions, and what share is not?”
Universities and colleges have “layers of bloated administration” for which “students and taxpayers are forced to foot the bill,” U.S. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent told a White House roundtable last year. “Students, families and taxpayers are being asked to pay more and more each year to support rising institutional and administrative expenditures that often have little to do with actual learning.”
The number of noninstructional employees on campuses is hard to definitively connect with what students pay. Another analysis of federal data, by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, however, shows that administrative costs per student at public universities have generally been falling since their last peak, which came just before the Covid-19 pandemic. That analysis covers the period through 2024, the most recent for which the figure is available.
“This seems really like a very stark correction,” said Armand Alacbay, ACTA’s chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy.
Gallup surveys find that fewer than 4 in 10 Americans have confidence in higher education, down from nearly 6 in 10 in 2015; cost edges out perceived political agendas as the top reason, Alacbay noted.
Related: Once globally preeminent, U.S. universities are sliding into decline
“That’s what’s really animating this whole discussion of administrative bloat, is the price of the product reaching an unsustainable level,” he said.
The number of full-time administrators per 100 students at the top 200 universities that award doctoral degrees increased 39 percent from 1993 to 2007 — more than twice as much as the number of students or faculty — according to one widely cited 2010 report by the conservative Goldwater Institute.
Another study picked up the trail in 2012 and looked at 1,529 public and private four-year colleges and universities. It found that administrative staffing continued to grow faster than instructional staffing through at least 2018, even after colleges and universities responded to the 2008 recession by promising to cut costs, and during a period when enrollment was declining.
Universities say their nonfaculty staff include employees in such areas as fundraising and sustainability, meaning they presumably raise or save money. Many others are in student services or provide technology support.
There are indications that some schools are cutting employees who provide those functions, too, potentially resulting in fewer support services for students.
The University of Southern California has laid off academic advisers. The University of California, Los Angeles, cut 27 information technology workers. Indiana University Bloomington laid off 13 IT staffers.
Higher education should be thoughtful about where it’s making cuts, said McClure, the University of North Carolina professor.
Criticism of administrators “paints things in broad brush strokes,” he said. “Let’s be specific. What positions are we actually talking about that we need or don’t need? We should have that conversation.”
Universities and colleges “are in a different era now,” McClure said. “And it’s going to require a different kind of staffing.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about administrative bloat was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
Read More
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
