[maiar]

They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.

[musicale]

Why pay for more of those expensive, unruly, hard-to-fire professors when you can hire cheap adjuncts and postdocs to do teaching and research?

The administrative organization continues to expand, and it must be paid for somehow.

[KingMob]

Bureaucracy has gone up, sure, but not nearly as much as the number of people seeking PhDs.

That also used to be much less common back in the day.

[musicale]

Assuming I'm reading them correctly, these seem to be Yale's numbers:

2003: 2294 Arts & Sciences PhD students and 3500 administrators + managers

2021: 2895 Arts & Sciences PhD students and >5000 administrators + managers

So administrative growth seems to have outpaced PhD student growth by some margin over that time period.

Regardless, the secret to high research productivity (per dollar) at universities is cheap labor from grad students and postdocs.

Sources:

https://oir.yale.edu/data-browser/student-data/enrollments/g...

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-...

[KingMob]

I was thinking of a longer time frame, though. Also, Yale might not be representative overall.

According to the census, from 2000-2018, the percentage of the population holding PhDs doubled: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...

So Yale's PhD count grew a bit, but nowhere near as much as the rest of the country's.

----

But mostly, PhDs used to be way rarer in the back in the 50s (along with college degrees in general). If you look at Figure 1 in this NSF report (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/figure/1#), it shows the number of PhDs tripling in just 15 years from 1958 to 1973. After 1973 it slows down to merely doubling over the next 50 years.

Admin growth might be a factor, although I'd want to look at national data first. Your own article says "... Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges" so maybe it's an outlier.