[gchallen]

I suspect headcount actually makes the situation look better than it actually is. A lot of administrators also get paid a pretty large amount—more than many faculty, sometimes a lot more. So administrative spend may be at ratios even higher than the 3:1 administrator-to-faculty ratio quoted in the article.

FWIW, if you're interested in doing some data analysis of salaries from a large public R1 institution, I've parsed and published publicly-available academic professional salary data for the University of Illinois going back 15 years: https://github.com/gchallen/graybooker