[swiftcoder]

That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done.

Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.

[analog31]

This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.

I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.

[swiftcoder]

> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff

This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.