I’ve spent much of my career working as a college administrator. I’ve held senior roles, carried expansive portfolios, and had titles that critics of higher education increasingly cite as evidence of “administrative bloat.” I understand why those titles and the organizational charts behind them can feel alienating to faculty. They can reinforce an unhealthy sense of “us versus them” on campus.
But after years inside those roles, I’ve come to believe that title inflation is not the core problem it’s often made out to be. It’s visible. It’s frustrating. And it’s easy to blame. However, focusing solely on titles risks mistaking a symptom for the disease, and in the process, leaving the real cause of administrative overload unexamined.
That’s why Austin Sarat’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay asking, “How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?” resonated with me, even as I think it ultimately misdiagnoses the challenge. Sarat is right to be uneasy about what he calls the “vice presidentialization” of higher education. Titles matter. Hierarchies matter. And the proliferation of vice presidents deserves scrutiny.
But the growth of administrative titles is not what is hollowing out institutional capacity or widening the divide between faculty and administrators. It is what happens when leadership repeatedly avoids the more challenging work of setting priorities and enforcing limits.
Criticism of administrative growth in higher education is not new, and it is not entirely unfounded. Colleges and universities have undeniably expanded their administrative functions over time. But the ideas behind many of those roles are sound and, in many cases, essential. Retention matters. Financial aid matters. Student support, compliance and data matter. Investing in these functions improves student success. The problem begins with what happens after those roles are created.
Over time, administrators are assigned work that is only loosely connected or not connected at all to the responsibilities their titles suggest. Priorities proliferate. New initiatives emerge. New reporting requirements arrive from accreditors, legislators, donors and boards. Crises, real and perceived, demand immediate attention. Almost nothing is ever taken away. Each new priority is layered on top of existing work, often without clarity about duration, ownership or trade-offs. Vice presidents effectively become executives’ administrative assistants.
To understand an institution’s true priorities, don’t start with the strategic plan. Look instead at how administrators are actually spending their time. What you’ll often find is that people hired to do one essential job are doing five or six others instead. Much of that work is not merely peripheral; it is squarely outside the scope of the role. This is not a failure of individual administrators. It is a failure of organizational discipline.
I know many of the people filling these roles. I have been one of them. They are not avoiding faculty or students. They would love to spend some time in a classroom. They are not ignoring phone calls and emails out of indifference. Most of them are in it for the right reasons: the students and the national imperative of postsecondary attainment. If they are rarely in their offices at all, it is because they are being pulled into meetings, task forces and crisis response for issues far removed from their core responsibilities. Many work nights and weekends, skip vacations and still fall behind, not because they lack commitment but because the system virtually guarantees overload.
This is where Sarat’s critique falls short. It’s not that administrators take their titles too seriously. It’s that institutions take on too many priorities without making corresponding choices about what not to do. And while many of those initiatives might be “good,” too many of them fall outside the core scope of educating students. The result is not just administrative strain, but less institutional attention devoted to teaching and learning itself.
Our colleges and universities are under greater and more varied pressure than ever. They are being squeezed from every direction: demographic decline, rising costs, declining public investment, growing accountability demands and increasingly diverse student needs have made it impossible to continue operating as if capacity were unlimited. Yet too often, institutional “strategy” still amounts to adding priorities rather than choosing among them. What this moment demands instead is institutional redesign, a deliberate rethinking of structures, roles and work so that colleges and universities can focus on what matters most for today’s students.
Real strategy is not about what initiatives institutions adopt, but what they deliberately decide not to do. In a moment when today’s students need clearer pathways, stronger support and better outcomes, institutions do not have the luxury of letting work continue to creep in unchecked, or of trying to be all things to all people. When leaders avoid making those choices, the pressure doesn’t disappear. They push it downward and outward until adding people and titles becomes the default way to cope.
Eventually, something must give. When a vice president reaches the limit of what one person can reasonably manage, institutions rarely narrow the role or clarify boundaries. Instead, they add another layer: an associate vice president, an assistant vice president. Titles proliferate not because administrators crave status, but because institutions use people and titles as workarounds for unresolved leadership failures.
Ironically, this is precisely what deepens the divide Sarat worries about. When administrators are stretched impossibly thin, they become less present, less responsive and less connected to academic life. Faculty experience this as indifference or bureaucratic arrogance. In truth, it is structural misalignment. The distance is real, but it is produced by overload, not hierarchy.
Which is why the solution cannot simply be fewer vice presidents or humbler titles. It must start with presidents, boards and faculty leaders willing to exercise real leadership discipline. That means distinguishing between core academic work and aspirational initiatives. It means abandoning programs and committees as readily as launching them. And it means acknowledging an essential truth that higher education often avoids: Adding priorities without subtracting others is not strategic ambition—it is organizational debt.
The best administration is often invisible, not because it lacks value, but because it is doing its job so well that teaching and learning can take center stage. Centering students and their education should mean fewer symbolic fights over titles and more honest conversations about priorities, capacity and trade-offs.
Sarat is right to warn against importing corporate hierarchy into higher education. However, to address administrative bloat seriously, we must look beyond the organizational chart. The real question is not how many vice presidents a college needs. It is the number of priorities an institution is willing to abandon to serve its academic mission effectively. This is a test of leadership and discipline. We need to do a better job ensuring that our institutions are designed around teaching our students rather than running an ever-expanding business enterprise.
PJ Woolston is director of strategic insights for Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all.
