DEI: making college unaffordable – American Thinker

I graduated from college in the 1980s. I took my bachelor’s degree in 2.5 years by taking overloads—up to 22 credits–every semester, and full loads every summer and interim session, as well as a number of correspondence courses from another university when I had to have a class that wasn’t offered when I needed it. At that state college, my education cost a bit less than $10,000. I was an adult, paying my own freight, and needed to get back into the workforce as quickly as possible. I took out no student loans.

Tuition then was a fraction of current college tuition. That was in part possible because the school had only the administrators it needed. There was one registrar, one President, and only necessary additional administrators. They all had full time jobs with at least eight hours of daily work. Deans were working professors, and virtually every English and music class—my disciplines–was taught by a full professor. Every teacher at that school taught a full class load. There was no such thing as DEI, CRT or wokeness in general.

That’s not the way of things now, as John Sexton at Hot Air explains:

Graphic: Wikimedia Commons.org, Life Happen Event at COD, CCA 20, Generic

The University of Virginia employs one full-time administrator for every three undergraduates at the school, according to an analysis conducted byThe College Fix…

During the 2013-14 school year, there were 291 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads, and in 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 318 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads.

Meanwhile, the number of full-time educators per 1,000 undergraduates has stayed roughly the same over the last 10 years, hovering at an average of 103 instructors per 1,000 students, according to the data.

And in case you’re wondering the school has 55 DEI positions at an annual cost of $5.8 million. What in the world do these administrators do all day?

One can expect “instructors” to include barely paid adjunct faculty with minimal salary, no tenure or hope of tenure and no benefits. That’s a national trend. One can also expect many classes to be taught by graduate students for slave labor wages.

Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students, a College Fix analysis found.

During the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent for which data are available, the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

The school has fewer than 7,000 undergrads. How can it possibly require 3,516 administrators to keep the place going? 

It can’t. Here’s a significant part of the problem:

The University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, with at least 241 paid employees now focused on DEI, and payroll costs exceeding $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.

The payroll costs are $23.24 million for salaries and $7.44 million for benefits, or $30.68 million, an amount that would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students.

The Heritage Foundation provides additional detail:

This Backgrounder presents information on DEI personnel at 65 universities representing 16 percent of all students in four-year institutions in the United States.

 After reviewing publicly accessible websites, these authors found that the average university they sampled listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals. DEI staff listed by universities totaled 4.2 times the number of staff who assist students with disabilities in receiving reasonable accommodations, as required by law. DEI staff levels were 1.4 times larger than the number of professors in these universities’ corresponding history departments. Moreover, the average university had 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.

It’s worse at some universities:

At Georgia Tech, there were 3.2 times as many DEI staff people as history professors. At the University of Louisville, the ratio of DEI personnel to history faculty was 2.9. The University of Virginia had 6.5 DEI staff for every 100 professors.

Most workplaces have a few people with no discernable job duties, people who work hard at appearing to work hard. What are all those DEI personnel doing, other than greatly increasing tuition rates to pay their exorbitant salaries?

Were DEI bureaucracies in place back in the 1400s when I went to college, I couldn’t have afforded it, and probably would have been expelled, being a white male and all. As we now know, males, and particularly the white variety, are largely foregoing the pleasures of college. They’ve already learned the primary lesson of the contemporary academy: stay the hell away.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.