Colleges chased students with perks and administrator jobs grew 60%
To win millennials shopping for the right fit, schools added perks, and every perk needed managers.
Wendover Productions · Why College is so ExpensiveCollege hiring took an odd turn in the 1990s and 2000s. Schools added comforts and services meant to win over applicants, and to run those extras they added managers. That link between courtship and management helps explain a lopsided hiring boom.
The backdrop was tighter public support. Enrollment kept climbing while funding per student fell, leaving students and families to cover more of the bill.
At the same time, schools were trying to appeal to a new kind of applicant. Americans born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, as described by researchers William Strauss and Neil Howe, grew up closely supervised, self assured, group minded, respectful of rules, pushed to perform, and told they were distinctive. In popular shorthand they were trophy kids, raised to aim high and expect a place that recognized what made them different. That outlook made the search for a campus that felt personally right especially important.
To answer that search, colleges layered on housing upgrades, food choices, and recreation meant to make one campus feel distinct from another. Running those operations took scheduling, staffing, marketing, and upkeep, and that need for oversight fed steady growth in nonteaching staff.
Federal education data count the result: administrator posts rose 60% between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured professors.
Questions people ask
Who counts as a college administrator?
Administrators are nonteaching managers and professional staff. They include admissions officers, financial aid counselors, deans of students, housing directors, career advisers, fundraisers, compliance officers, and the managers who oversee dining, recreation, health, and technology services.
What is a tenured professor, and why did that number grow so slowly?
Tenure is a lifetime job guarantee given to senior professors after years of review. Because tenured positions are expensive and hard to eliminate, colleges often add flexible administrative and support roles instead when they want to expand services quickly.
Do amenities actually change where students enroll?
Yes, research on enrollment generally finds that services, facilities, and campus life influence choices, especially when price differences are blurred by financial aid. Academics still matter, but for many families the deciding factor is how a campus feels day to day.