Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/the_high_cost_of_college_admin.php
Essentially, you have easy access to loans allowing morons who have no business going to college to go to college, then you have the colleges willfully reducing the requirements to get good grades and graduate on some of their more popular programs, like marketing/business, then you have administration swelling just like any bureaucracy and spending more money on useless or redundant positions. The professors aren't the ones to blame, they are producers compared to the administration which are becoming the consumers. The reason Asians come here to study is because we have damn good professors for engineering and sciences. However, for some reason in American culture everyone chooses to be a business major because its easy and they expect that they will make a lot of money with it compared to the effort put in. As a consequence you have colleges flooded with business students and the administration is dumbing down the program so that its just like going to 4 years of common sense classes and re-learning shit you should have learned in high school. News flash for these people, spending 4 years partying and barely getting by for grades is a fucking waste of your time. Get a job. The bad thing is is that administration has an incentive to dumb down programs to fuel their revenue and to justify having redundant and useless positions. Having worked at 2 different universities in various departments, I can tell you first hand how much waste there is with people just screwing around or taking days off for no good reason, or spending countless hours in useless meetings that literally interrupt your work and don't yield any benefits as you just simply continue doing what you were already doing afterwards. Having a meeting about being more productive that lasts 4 hours and actually interrupts you from being productive is the type of shit they have. Granted, with as lazy as people are there they probably need it but they rarely listen. Instead its just a drain on the time of the people who are already productive thus reducing productivity overall. Other meetings include planning other meetings, planning useless events for students, or discussing the "direction" the dept. wants to go several times a week.
"Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers." -- Chip Salzenberg