Administrative bloat at American universities...

is responsible for the high costs of higher education.  Pull quote:

"Leading public universities were also already administrative-heavy in 1993, but the rate of growth in administrative employment was even higher than the growth in educators, leaving these institutions even more administrator heavy in 2007 (see Figure 6 and Table A1). Full-time employment in the instructional, research and service category grew by 9.8 percent between 1993 and 2007, but the number of full-time administrators grew at nearly four times that rate - 39.0 percent. It now takes 39.0 percent more full-time administrators to manage the same number of students than it did in 1993."

That certainly is the history at EWU during the last 20 years (although I can't say the percentage growth is the exactly the same as that reported in the article, but it is on par based on institutional data I examined several years ago.)