Year after year, media note, and sometimes bemoan, the ballooning cost of higher education.

There is no doubt that the human costs of this rise are severe: Some 44 million Americans currently carry nearly $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, and the delinquency rate is 11 percent.

There are various reasons for surging costs, but the primary one is the remarkable expansion of university administration in recent decades. As Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote in the New York Times a few years ago:

"According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.