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To the liberal administrators and Democratic politicians who try to blame skyrocketing college costs on decreases in government support, rather than administrative waste and government loans, I hate to say I told you so. But I absolutely told you so.

My first op-ed ever professionally published was in the Boston Globe, titled, Students pay the price for a culture of waste at UMass. A student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time, I took campus officials to task after yet another tuition hike, decrying the fact that only about half the school's $1.2 billion 2016 budget was spent on education or financial aid, much of the rest lost due to profligate waste and in the whirlwind of rent-seeking and cronyism known as higher education administration.

I also pointed out how administrative salaries at UMass had skyrocketed in recent years, growing far faster than the student population.

The response? Campus leadership called me a liar and threatened to sue the newspaper. This, of course, might have something to do with the fact that UMass Amhersts chancellor, Kumble Subbaswamy, earns almost $600,000 a year and that 97 out of 100 of the state of Massachusettss highest-paid employees worked for the university system. The vitriolic backlash and denial of all responsibility is par for the course.

Despite documented evidence and ample research showing the effect administrative bloat and subsidized government loans have had on the skyrocketing tuition rates, many liberals deny it all and insist that pouring more taxpayer dollars into the university system, or socializing it altogether, is the only solution. Yet new research reveals this argument for the bunk narrative it always was.

In the book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America, economist Richard Vedder reports, If the ratio of campus bureaucrats to faculty had held steady since 1976, there would be 537,317 fewer administrators, saving universities $30.5 billion per year and allowing student tuition to decrease by 20%. Per Max Edens recent review, Vedder's work also finds "colleges have bloated up on bureaucrats and spend an ever-decreasing share now about one third of their expenditures on instruction. This makes it perfectly clear once and for all that if campuses didnt waste so much on administration, higher education would be much more accessible and affordable than it is now.

Dont expect the liberal narrative to adjust in any meaningful way, though.

A sensible path to making college more affordable has always been offered up by some conservative and libertarian intellectuals, and it has even been put into practice in a few real-world examples, such as Mitch Daniels's reforms at Purdue University. Through a combination of cutting back administrative bloat, ending wasteful spending, and scaling back federal loans that cause tuition price inflation, we know how we can make college reasonably affordable again.

See the article here:
New data proves what's actually causing the spike in college tuition rates - Washington Examiner