Two stories came to my attention in the past few days and they’re so closely related they deserve a single post. The first is that Yale has far more administrators than faculty members. The second is that someone finally looked at how minorities fared in schools that bought into the whole “diversity, equity, and inclusion” shtick and the news isn’t good.

I read several years ago that, at the average American university, the ratio of faculty members to students is much the same as it was when I attended college forty-odd years ago. What had increased dramatically was the administrative staff. The theory was that it was this increase, along with free money from the government in the form of almost unlimited students loans, that had seen college costs increase so much. When I attended UC Berkeley, I could work 20 hours a week (and summers, of course), and pay most of my tuition. Now, that’s impossible.

However, that story (which I cannot find), is already passé. The news out of Yale bespeaks an administration so bloated that it’s surprising the campus doesn’t topple over (as Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., once thought Guam would do from over-population). Apparently, Yale now has more administrators than it has students:

The number of administrators at Yale University has increased drastically faster than its undergraduate population, with the Ivy nearing an abysmal ratio of 1:1 before the pandemic due to its more than 5,000 administrators and managers and fewer than 6,000 undergraduates, according to financial reports from the 2002-2003 and 2020-2021 school years. Now the numbers are even worse, with more than one administrator per undergraduate student.

As evidenced by the financial report from 2002-2003, Yale employed 3,500 administrators and managers while there were 5,307 undergraduate students enrolled at the university. Less than two decades later in 2019, before the pandemic affected enrollment, Yale employed more than 1,500 additional administrators while the undergraduate population had only risen by 600 students. Now undergraduate enrollment has dipped to 4,703, with more than 5,000 “managerial and professional staff.”

And you just know, at a visceral level, that a large part of that administrative growth is related to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) movement. I was unsuccessful in finding an article about this growth (admittedly, I didn’t invest too much time in the search) but I did discover that, if you type “Diversity Equity Inclusion College” in your search engine, you’ll discover that every college, large and small, well-known or unknown, in every corner of America, now has a DEI department.

Image: Office doors by Domingo Alvarez E; Chair from FreeIconsPng (edited in befunky). Unsplash license.

Also, as we’ve seen for the last year and more, DEI, which is a variation of Critical Race Theory, has been incorporated into most primary and secondary schools across America. The assumption on the left is that the whole DEI and CRT shtick will improve academics for minorities because it will validate them while invalidating the awful Whites and Asians who are stealing all the good grades with their racist habits of ambition, punctuality, reliability, hard work, etc. (And no, that’s not a joke. It’s a publication from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.)

However, an article at Power Line Blog made me aware that, when the Heritage Foundation finally did an empirical study to see what happened to minority students in K-12 schools with a “Chief Diversity Officer,” the outcomes were bad...for minorities. According to Jay Greene and James Paul:

The analyses presented here suggest that the existence of CDOs in school districts may actually exacerbate achievement gaps. In other words, CDOs may be implementing counterproductive educational interventions.

A simple comparison of achievement gaps in districts with and without CDOs shows that gaps are larger in districts that employ CDOs. In districts without a CDO, the average black student is 1.9 grade levels behind the average white student on standardized test results. In districts with CDOs, the achievement gap is half a grade level larger, with the average black student being 2.4 grade levels behind the average white student.

Moreover, further analysis revealed that this wasn’t simply a case of CDOs being put into poorly performing districts. No matter the district, CDOs are bad news for students.

Incidentally, regarding those allegedly “White” and “Asian” virtues, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks & White Liberals. In it, he makes the case that the irresponsible culture that characterizes so many inner-city Blacks is not authentically Black culture. Instead, it is the authentically Scots-Irish culture that gave parts of the South a bad name from America’s first colonists up until after WWII, when Southerners, embarrassed by the Civil Rights movement, deliberately abandoned it and began to economically thrive.

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