A Task Force We Can Back (Editorial)

Gov. Asa Hutchinson has named a variety of task forces to address a variety of issues: health care reform, criminal justice, Common Core. We have a suggestion for one more: the Task Force on Ways to Reduce the Administrative Bloat in Arkansas’ Public Colleges & Universities.

Prompting this suggestion is last week’s request by the University of Arkansas System for tuition increases at all of its four-year universities except for UALR. College is already ruinously expensive for many students, forcing them to graduate enslaved to debt, an average of $24,000 in Arkansas in 2014.

This burden prevents young people from marrying and buying houses and buying washing machines, refrigerators and furniture to fill those houses. Their failure to join the consuming class is a drag on the entire U.S. economy. College debt blights the futures of millions.

Last month, Paul F. Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of “Don’t Go to Law School (Unless),” wrote a column in The New York Times putting much of the blame for swelling college costs on “the constant expansion of university administration.”

“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,” Campos wrote.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported earlier this month that the number of annual salaries over $100,000 at Arkansas’ two-year and four-year colleges was up by 104 in fiscal 2015, increasing from 2,116 in fiscal 2014 to 2,220.

The highest salaries go to coaches and physicians who head departments at UAMS. That’s not likely to change. But how many vice presidents and vice chancellors pulling down $200,000 do Arkansas’ colleges and universities really need?