This. Bureaucratic bloat, no accountability and terrible efficiency. Many Universities are the largest employers in their state.
Do our Universities exist to be Research and Educational institutions, or to employ armies of admin workers that push papers?
The size of IT infrastructure has grown immensely compared to 30 years back, so you need people to take care of that. My department has four IT support people, and they carry a full workload.
The amount of foreign students has grown, consequently you need people to keep track of immigration requirements that seem to get worse each passing year, and you also need cultural programs, you can't expect people from non-western countries to be thrown into an alien culture and succeed.
The number of non-traditional and first-generation college students has grown, if the student body consists only of middle-class and wealthy people you don't need support staff for the students who teach them how to study.
Then there is career services, these things are expected these days. Back when you knew the major employers, and they had a hiring pipeline at your university.
There is also this competition through facilities, gyms and really fancy dorms are the norm, and those things need looking after.
Anyone who proposes cutting back on administrative staff must give suggestions how to deal with all these issues.
The services you listed are great; I'm not saying gyms and career centers are bad at all. The problem is that everyone in the school is forced to pay for them. The bloat comes because they get more funding than they need.
Here's the deal: it's not about you, it's the university that runs the numbers and decides where the scarce funds will go. (Yes, the funds are scarce. The machinist in my old department will retire soon, and the fear is that there won't be a replacement. When he leaves it will be a disaster, there won't be custom-built instrumentation any longer.)
If the rec. center attracts more tuition than it costs to provide there will be a rec. center. If the center for remedial math will prevent an unprepared student from dropping out - if three years more in tuition provides more money than running the courses then there will be remedial math. That's how non-teaching staff are allocated.
They aren't necessary, they're nice to have.
When it comes to budgets, the nice to have things that aren't really necessary get cut.
It's not all that hard.
Um, most of the reason foreign student enrollment has grown is because foreign students pay cash. Adding bureaucracy to manage students who whom you admitted primarily because they carry cash is not something I particularly sympathize with.
If something else, can you link to a source describing this? I'd love to know more.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't be spending money on research, or that universities shouldn't be the ones to do it. But considering that government funding for research has been stagnating lately, I wonder if a less-explored factor in the situation hasn't been that we've slacked off on investing in research and are sticking our kids with the bill instead.
Where is the other 1/2?
Of the rest, the 5 next biggest things are financial aid at 12%, "enterprise operations" (which covers administration of everything from state labs to the student bookstore) at 8%, student services (including athletics) at 7%, academic support (administrators, libraries, etc.) at 6%, and physical plant at 6%.